Modern Nature: The Rise of the Biological Perspective in Germany

Modern Nature

Modern Nature The Rise of the Biological Perspective in Germany

ly n n k . n y h a r t the universit y of chicago press

chicago and london

lynn k. nyhart is professor of the history of science at the University of Wisconsin– Madison and the author of Biology Takes Form: Animal Morphology and the German Universities, 1800–1900, published by the University of Chicago Press. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2009 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2009 Printed in the United States of America 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 1 2 3 4 5 isbn-13: 978-0-226-61089-4 (cloth) isbn-10: 0-226-61089-6 (cloth) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nyhart, Lynn K. Modern nature : the rise of the biological perspective in Germany / Lynn K. Nyhart. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-226-61089-4 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-226-61089-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Ecology—Germany—History—19th century. 2. Ecology—Germany— History—20th century. 3. Philosophy of nature—Germany—History—19th century. 4. Philosophy of nature—Germany—History—20th century. 5. Natural history— Social aspects. 6. Biotic communities—Social aspects. I. Title. qh540.83.g3n94 2009 304.20943'09034—dc22 2008026875 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1992.

for tim and laur a

Contents Acknowledgments xi chapter 1. Introducton: The Biological Perspective and the Problem of a Modern Nature 1 Identity, Mobility, and Place 8 Popular Science and Populist Natural History 15 The Biological Perspective and the History of Biology 20 Ghosts and Shadows 25 Tracing the Biological Perspective 31 chapter 2. Bringing Life to Natural History 35 Practical and Popular Natural History 35 The Taxidermic Life 38 Against the “Terrorism of System”: Martin on Taxidermic Displays 50 Stuttgart: Representing Nature for the Fatherland 56 Commercial Displays: Nature as Spectacle 61 Bringing Nature’s Past to Life 67 Public/Private, Science/Art, Elite/Popular: Natural History Institutions and Values 74 chapter 3. The World in Miniature: Practical Natural History and the Zoo Movement 79 The Zoo as a Cultural Institution 83 Designing a World in Miniature 92

Caring for Animals: From Daily Life to Nature Protection 107 The Circulation of People and Ideas 117 Conclusion 123 chapter 4. From Practice to Theory: Karl Möbius and the Lebensgemeinschaft 125 Karl Möbius: Upwardly Striving Youth 127 Natural History in Hamburg 130 Natural History Activist 132 The Fauna of the Kiel Fjord 138 From Hamburg to Kiel 145 The Oyster and Oyster-Culture 152 Conclusion: Social Mobility and Ecological Theory 158 chapter 5. The “Living Community” in the Classroom

161

Natural History and School Reform 165 Friedrich Junge and The Village Pond 173 The Spread of the Village Pond Gospel 181 The Village Pond Curriculum as Heimatkunde Conclusion 195

192

chapter 6. Reforming the Natural History Museum, 1880–1900 198 The Emergence of the Professional Curator 203 The Institutional Landscape 214 Dual Arrangement 223 The Museum as a Center for Biological Knowledge Conclusion 246

240

chapter 7. Biological Groups, Nature, and Culture in the Museum 251 The Kunde Projects 253 The Museum für Natur-, Völker-, und Handelskunde in Bremen (1896) 257 The Altona City Museum (1901) and Heimatkunde 268 The Museum für Meereskunde (1906) 278 Biological Groups, Modernity, and the Representation of Nature 289 chapter 8. From Biology to Ecology 293 Biologie and Secondary School Reform 295 Biologie as Popular Natural History 307 From Biology to Ecology 314 Pedagogical, Popular, and Professional Ecology 320 chapter 9. Museum Research and the Rise of Ecological Animal Geography 323 Exploring Life in the Ocean 325 Making Animal Geography Ecological 333 Ecological versus Historical Zoogeography 344 Ecological Animal Geography and the German Natural History Museum 352 chapter 10. Modern Nature Bibliography 369 Index 413

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Acknowledgments

T

he work of the historian often feels like a solitary process. In contrast to modern scientists, who work in lab groups and publish in teams, we work alone: in the archives deciphering the crabbed script of past writers, and at our computers seeking to re-create a vanished world. And yet even doing history is a social process, and the “acknowledgments” allow us to recognize that we do not in fact produce our work alone, but through a rich and rewarding web of social interactions. With support from the National Science Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Howard Foundation, I was able to spend the academic year 1997–98 conducting research in Germany. In Berlin, where I was based, I had the warm and friendly support of the staff at the Museum für Naturkunde. In particular, the archivists Hannelore Landsberg and Sabine Hackethal at the Historische Arbeitststelle, and Frau Heidi Muggelberg, then in charge of the systematics library, made me feel at home every day and offered their wisdom and help in countless ways. I treasure the chances I had to speak with and learn from the great and warm-hearted historian of biology Ilse Jahn (who, then in her midseventies and hosting the ninety-three-yearold Ernst Mayr at the inauguration of a lecture series in his honor, commented that she hoped to be like him when she grew old). I also had the good fortune to meet a number of scientists at the museum who were refreshingly interested in the work of an historian. In particular, I wish to thank Professor Dr. Ulrich Zeller, then director of the museum, and Matthias Glaubrecht, head of the mollusk collection. Berlin also afforded the chance to meet other scholars, many of whom were attached to the Max-Planck-Institute for History of Science, where Lorraine Daston and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger welcomed my par-

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ticipation in their stimulating workshops (sporadic though this participation had to be, given the demands of my research and small children). I learned much from Anke Te Heesen, as I edged toward thinking about aesthetics and about how to integrate visual analyses into my work. Susanne Köstering generously shared her enthusiasm for the intricacies of the natural history museum world (as well as many photocopies) as she researched and wrote her marvelous dissertation with me dogging her heels in the archives. One of the great pleasures of this project was meeting and working with the scientists, archivists, librarians, and administrators who had charge of the materials I examined, and who knowledgeably helped me fi nd what I was looking for. In Stuttgart I was hosted and much helped by Manfred Warth at the Stuttgart natural history museum. In Kiel, the director of the university’s zoological museum, Dr. Wolfgang Dreyer, generously offered copies of all the museum’s correspondence during Karl Möbius’s directorship as well as the typescripts of his diaries and building plans; my overnight stay in the museum’s attic guest quarters was a memorable experience. Hans-Henning Freitag at the Kiel city archives was helpful above and beyond the call of duty. Eric Engstrom and his colleagues on the Emil Kraepelin papers project in Munich gave me insights into the family circumstances of Emil’s brother Karl. The curator of Hamburg’s zoology museum, Dr. Heironymus Dastych, made me welcome there and introduced me to Karl Kraepelin’s popular writings. In Altona, I was especially helped by Frau Meike Annuss and Frau Gabriela Baumer. I further wish to thank Jörg Schmalfuß, director of the archives at the Deutsches Technisches Museum Berlin, which houses what remains of the Museum für Meereskunde, and his colleagues; and staff at the Berlin Staatsbibliothek, the archives of the Humboldt-Universität, the Prussian state archives in Dahlem, the Munich city archives, and the Bavarian state archives in Munich. As I began to write up the work, grants from the University of Wisconsin Graduate School enabled me to return for follow-up visits. During one of these, I spent a memorable Sunday afternoon outside Kiel with several great-grandchildren of Karl Möbius and their spouses, who generously shared their family lore and allowed me to look at a number of original documents still in family hands. Brigitte and Michael Schirren were warm hosts, and Liane and Karl Hinrich Peters and Carl-Volkhart Schirren contributed to the storytelling. Maria-Antonie Singer and her husband Friedemann shared the results of their family history research

Acknowledgments

xiii

and, later, their ongoing commitment to nature protection; and Elisabeth Claussen sent me a copy of her version of the Möbius diary typescript. Herta Möbius, who has more than held up her end of a warm and continuing E-mail conversation, elaborated on the history of the different typescripts and lent me Karl Möbius’s own annotated copy of the oyster monograph. Coming to know her and her cousins has been one of the incalculable gifts of this project. In writing the various pieces of the book and knitting them together into a manuscript, I have been fortunate to have many insightful readers and conversation partners. Gerry Geison fi rst urged me to publish the Möbius story; I still miss hearing his advice. Glenn Penny kept me in touch with what was going on in German ethnographic museums in the nineteenth century and German cultural history in the twentieth (and twenty-fi rst!), and offered valuable suggestions on the entire manuscript when I fi rst thought it was fi nished. Jane Camerini offered her wisdom, friendship, and deep knowledge of the history of biogeography as I worked to gain control over the commitments of animal geographers around the beginning of the twentieth century. Judy Johns Schloegel, my “writing buddy” during a crucial year of moving along on the manuscript, gently called my attention to important blind spots; Gregg Mitman helped me to elevate the argument out of its details. Nick Hopwood’s incisive comments on the manuscript made it much sharper, if still not the one he would have written. With Rob Kohler, who fi rst thought a book on German zoos would be a good idea (and a quick one!), I have been in a long, spirited conversation for the past decade or so over the nature of natural history and the place of museums in its history. He gave me great advice right up to the very end of producing this book. For their comments on chapters in different stages of development, I thank Hauke Bietz, John Carson, Jonathan Harwood, Hans-Henrik Hjermitslev, Oliver Hochadel, William Leach, David C. Lindberg, Suzanne Marchand, and Kathryn Olesko. Of course, any errors that remain in the book are mine alone. I am grateful for the privilege of working in a large and lively history of science department, which supports many ongoing conversations about our field. My colleague Ron Numbers helped to spark this project with a comment on an early presentation in which he noted that the engagement of a broad swathe of teachers, popularizers, nature protectionists, and others in natural history was not at all unusual in America; why should we think it was in Germany? This brought me up short and made me aware of a certain historiographic tunnel vision; I am happy

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Acknowledgments

to have thrown off the blinders. I am grateful for the unflagging support of Dave Lindberg, as well as for the lively discussions with graduate students who helped me think through aspects of my work inside and outside graduate seminars, especially Jocelyn Bosley, Judith Kaplan, Christina Matta, Erika Milam, Megan Raby, and Lynnette Regouby. I have benefited from the research assistance of Daniel Thurs and Daniel Hamlin, and the excellent computer skills (and complete unflappability) of Joshua Kundert. The University of Chicago Press editors have shown great patience and professionalism as I inched forward on this project. In particular, I wish to thank Alan Thomas, who shepherded me and my ideas along after the untimely death of Susan Abrams. Catherine Rice and now Karen Merikangas Darling have continued to help me keep my eye on the fi nish line. I was much encouraged by the reading given to the manuscript for the Press by Chip Burkhardt. Most recently, Erik Carlson has been everything one could wish for in a copy editor: able, meticulous, and evincing a dry wit most welcome in the fi nal stages of writing. Although the book as a whole is a new creation, parts of it have seen published form before. Parts of chapter 3 were published in French (Nyhart 2007). Earlier versions of chapters 4 and 5 (Nyhart 1998, 2002) were improved by the comments of anonymous readers for Isis and Osiris, respectively, and have been substantially reorganized for the book. An earlier version of chapter 7, published in German (Nyhart 2006), was aided by the translating and editing efforts of Manfred Laubichler and Michael Hagner, whose streamlining I have carried back into English. My family has lived with this project nearly as closely as I have. My mother, Nina Nyhart, has been an unfailing source of support, comfort, and good advice about writing; my father, Dan Nyhart, has been proud of me in a way that only a dad can be. Tom Broman has been my most helpful sounding board, involved at every level, from discussing the most inchoate of my ideas to suggesting vital changes to a nearly fi nished manuscript. Even more important, he has shared in all our partnered juggling of family and work, helping me carve out time to write when I needed it and reminding me of when I needed to be doing something else. He knows how much this book owes to him. During the course of this project our children, Tim and Laura Broman, have grown from preschoolers into well-formed individuals who know unusual things about German zoos, museums, and schooling, and about the passion for the past that a historian-mom can evince. This book is dedicated to them.

chapter one

Introduction: The Biological Perspective and the Problem of a Modern Nature

I

n January 1881, the aspiring social theorist Ferdinand Tönnies was holed up in the town of Husum, on the North Sea coast of SchleswigHolstein, agonizing over how to frame a new scholarly project. To a close friend, he wrote that he was thinking of calling it Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, to denote two fundamentally different kinds of society. Their differences were characterized, he wrote, by the contrast between “order and freedom” or between “relations based on obligation,” on one side (Gemeinschaft, or community), and those based on “exchange,” on the other (Gesellschaft, or society).1 The monograph Tönnies eventually developed from these musings would become one of the founding documents of modern sociology. As his famous rubrics came to be understood, Gemeinschaft would refer to a traditional kind of community based on personal relations and largely fi xed social roles, while Gesellschaft would signify a modern society, with both the freedoms offered by the impersonality of social roles based purely on exchange and not invested with personal history and the alienation attendant upon such impersonality. In 1881, however, Tönnies’s terms Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft had not yet attained the status of opposites, but were still rough syn1. Ferdinand Tönnies to Friedrich Paulsen, 9 January 1881, in Tönnies and Paulsen, Ferdinand Tönnies [und] Friedrich Paulsen: Briefwechsel (1961), 101–2.

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onyms. Over at the University of Kiel, where Tönnies would soon attain his teaching credentials, 2 the zoology professor Karl August Möbius had offered a public lecture course for the preceding few years called “Biologische Gesellschaft” (Biological society), in which he introduced his listeners to his novel theoretical concept, the Lebensgemeinschaft, or living community. These biological societies, or communities, or even “parishes” (Gemeinden), as he called them interchangeably, were characterized by the dependence of their members on one another and on their physical conditions of existence. Möbius’s theory of the biological community, which he fi rst published in 1877, would become one of the founding ideas of German ecology and, by the 1920s, one of the most familiar scientific concepts in Germany. Although the biological community concept has undergone considerable development since Möbius invented it, it has remained an enduring staple of the science of ecology. 3 In its early days, though, Möbius’s community concept was a central element of a more broadly held approach to nature, which viewed the organism as a living being embedded in nature, whose survival depended on its ability to interact successfully with both its physical environment and the other organisms around it. Commentators in the early twentieth century called this view the “biological perspective.” 4 There is no evidence that Tönnies and Möbius knew or influenced each other, though both were connected with the University of Kiel. However, their intense concern with the nature of community at exactly the same time, in the different realms of the social and the natural sciences, points to the analytical heart of this book: the relationship of the emergence of modern society to the construction of a modern vision of nature. During the nineteenth century, German society underwent a profound reorganization. Its starkest social and economic characteristics were urbanization and industrialization, which were accompanied by a dramatic increase in urban poverty and working-class consciousness. These developments were already underway in the second and third 2. Tönnies qualified as a Privatdozent, or private lecturer, in 1881, based on his essays on Thomas Hobbes. Alwast, “Tönnies, Ferdinand Julius” (1982). 3. Reise, “Hundert Jahre Biocönose” (1980). On Möbius’s courses, see Schriften der Universität Kiel (1856–81), for 1879 and 1881, pt. III: Index scholarum per semestere hibernum habendarum. 4. The phrase “biologische Betrachtung” may be found, for example, in Hesse, Der Tierkörper als selbständiger Organismus (1910), vii. “Biologische Betrachtungsweise” was also used: Waibel, “Physiologische Tiergeographie” (1912), 164.

Introduction

3

quarters of the century, even as the bourgeoisie was successfully consolidating its social and cultural power in the growing cities, expressed particularly in new cultural institutions of the public sphere, such as museums, libraries, and civic botanical and zoological gardens. By the late nineteenth century, although unified politically into a single country since 1871, German society was deeply fragmented along class lines. Mobility exacerbated the sense of the unmoored quality of modern life: geographically mobile work seekers moved from the countryside and from city to city to fi nd jobs, occupationally mobile children became increasingly unhooked from the occupations of their parents, and socially mobile young men held new aspirations for moving into the managerial and educational posts opened up by industrialization and the expansion of the state bureaucracy. 5 These various and often confl icting trends drew acute attention to the role of social relationships and physical environments in rendering and keeping a society whole, functional, and healthy. If “the social question” so prominent in this period most directly concerned the abject, crowded, and unsanitary living conditions of the urban working poor, it was simultaneously a question of how to restore modern urban society to wholeness. Many aspects of the numerous reform movements that gained momentum in the last two decades of the century—including life reform, clothing reform, nudism, the garden city movement, and the back-tonature movement—may be understood as seeking individual and collective restoration in the face of the perceived unhealthy, unnatural influences of urban life.6 Such efforts at cultural restoration ran parallel to (and sometimes in concert with) efforts toward political unity: even after the unification of the German empire, boosters of German nationhood continued to work to knit together the states that made up the nation to produce a consciousness of common citizenship. How did these features of German society at the end of the nineteenth century relate to the way people living in it viewed nature? There are surely multiple answers to this question. This book examines a set of responses that coalesced into the biological perspective. This perspective developed alongside an awareness of the environmental degradation that accompanied urbanization and industrialization, but I see

5. Kocka, Industrial Culture (1999); Kaelble, Soziale Mobilität und Chancengleichheit (1983), esp. chapter 2; Berg and Herrmann, “Einleitung” (1991). 6. Kerbs and Reulecke, Handbuch der deutschen Reformbewegungen (1998).

4

Chapter One

it more particularly as a naturalized response to other features of late nineteenth-century German modernity, especially the clash between old and new and the problems of fragmentation, mobility, and the threatened loss of a sense of place.7 The very destabilization that caused so much anxiety also opened up possibilities for socially and geographically mobile men, including nature lovers, who developed new institutions, audiences, and modes of communication for advocating their perspective. The biological perspective, I argue, thus embodied both the challenges and the opportunities presented by modern German society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as seen through its understanding of nature. The following pages unfurl this claim through four intertwined arguments. The fi rst offers an intellectual history of the biological perspective as an approach to nature. The biological perspective drew together several different aspects of the lives of organisms (especially animals): their relations to their physical environment and to other organisms; their geographic distribution; the relationship between form and function within the organism (also called “functional morphology”); the degree of an organism’s adaptation to its external conditions of existence; and, often, the obligation of humans not to disturb nature’s harmony, or to restore it if already disturbed. This view, I argue, emerged from aesthetic and practical roots in the 1850s and 1860s to gain scientific standing in the late 1870s and early 1880s, in good part through Möbius’s community concept. Over the next few decades, it diffused through German society, while gaining moral resonance. While a number of its facets would cohere into the science of animal ecology, the biological perspective itself was looser and more capacious, functioning as a discourse though which nature and society could be discussed. The second argument is social and institutional: the primary locus where the biological perspective developed was not the elite realm of university science but the civic realm of museums, schools, zoos, and other 7. Environmental historians are beginning to reconstruct the changes in Germany’s landscapes caused by urbanization, the intensification of the railway network, and the rise of industrial and agricultural pollution. See esp. Lekan and Zeller, Germany’s Nature (2005); Mauch, Nature in German History (2004); Jakubowski-Tiessen and Lorenzen-Schmidt, Dünger und Dynamit (1999). Environmental history is growing in Europe, as marked by the establishment of the biennial meetings of the European Society for Environmental History in 2001. The German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., has launched an environmental history initiative that is increasing German attention to the subject. See http://www.ghi_dc.org/environ.html.

Introduction

5

public enterprises. The most articulate spokesmen for this view tended not to be from socially privileged backgrounds but rather from petit bourgeois or even less well off backgrounds, men who took advantage of the possibilities for advancement through education that German society allowed, and who sought to further broaden and democratize natural history (though gender equality was not among their goals, and women are extremely scarce in this story). These men often found the limits for social advancement at the boundary between elite and popular science, in positions often marginal or subordinate to the university-based scientific community.8 As workers at museums, zoos, and public schools, they made their mark by helping to invent or reform civic institutions that were more open to a broader social spectrum than the high echelons of academia. They thus contributed significantly to a late nineteenthcentury expansion and refashioning of public institutions that integrated nature appreciation and study into the heart of civic consciousness. These men developed the biological perspective and propelled it into German society via a series of overlapping reform movements. The fi rst appeared in the 1850s and 1860s, among a group I call the “practical naturalists,” who sought to enliven taxidermic representation and display of mounted animals, largely for aesthetic rather than scientific reasons, out of a commitment to rendering the preserved and mounted animal more lifelike. Several of these men also became engaged in the zoo movement and the nascent environmental protection movement of the 1860s and 1870s. Then, beginning in the 1880s and continuing into the second decade of the twentieth century, reformers in German museums and schools gave new attention to the organism’s ecological and geographic relations, via the “new museum” movement and the movement to reform natural history pedagogy in the schools. Last but not least, research in both academic and civic museums on geographic distribution and “biology,” understood as the organism’s relation to its environment, resulted by the 1920s in a significant new emphasis on ecology within animal geography. These movements were tied together through the circulation of key individuals who brought their ideas and values with them 8. In many ways, these men resemble the museum-based ethnologists discussed by Glenn Penny in Objects of Culture (2002), on ethnographic museums in imperial Germany. Ethnologists, too, were “new men,” and ethnographic museums were new scientific institutions developed outside the structures of university disciplines, supported (like natural history museums and zoos as well) by local boosters with an eye toward competing with other cities, and even cities in other countries.

6

Chapter One

from one arena to the next, even as the different settings in which they operated allowed new clusters of ideas and values to form around the biological perspective. Just as important, the men who spearheaded these reforms were themselves able to do so because of shifts and openings in the society of which they were a part.9 The third argument concerns the conception of nature developed by these men: it always included humans. A central commitment of those adopting the biological perspective was that humans and nature had to live in harmony, and that nature and human culture were components of a larger whole. This connected German nature enthusiasts as well as German ecologists to diverse, sometimes confl icting, cultural commitments. To be good stewards of nature, they believed, humans needed to counter the effects of agricultural and industrial intensification. Emerging ecological theory sought to take into account the interventions of humans, while, simultaneously, advocates of the biological perspective argued that sound economic practice, whether engaging fi sheries, forestry, or agriculture, needed to attend to questions of ecological balance. Environmental influences, most believed, played a large role in shaping human culture as well. And fi nally, the ecological laws of nature provided a model—perhaps an inescapable one—for human society. A “virgin” nature untainted by human touch was not part of this conceptual scheme. The fourth argument combines features of the fi rst three, as I show that this biological perspective provided the conceptual foundation for the German version of animal ecology that developed in the early twentieth century—a science whose conceptual roots in Germany have hitherto been hidden because its social and institutional roots outside the university, in the civic realm of museums and schools, have been ignored. Viewing the deep prehistory of scientific ecology as a broad social production growing out of specifically German concerns and institutional developments allows us to see why German ecology, especially animal ecology, differed from some other versions of ecology (especially in the United States) in not treating nature as something separate from

9. Some readers will be familiar with the term I introduced earlier for this grouping of interests among those employed in the civic realm—“civic zoology” (Nyhart, “Civic and Economic Zoology” [1998]). I have not developed this term further in this book because it did not end up doing much useful work, and I have introduced enough other new terms— “practical naturalist,” “the biological perspective,” “Biologie,” “the living community,” not to mention a host of German terms—to make avoiding yet another new one seem a worthy ambition.

Introduction

7

humanity. It thus offers a broader understanding of the foundations of ecology and an alternative to the Anglo-American orientation that has dominated English-language histories of ecology. The biological perspective was by no means the only discourse of the late nineteenth century to place biology at its center, nor the only one that spoke directly to questions of modernity. In fact, several other discourses involving biology operated simultaneously, like the biological perspective, at the boundaries of the scientific and lay communities. Popularizers of evolution, for example (many of them, like the practical naturalists, upwardly aspiring men at the outer fringes of the scientific community), promoted a forward-looking vision of evolution in which progress—away from unwanted roots?—was a dominant theme.10 The tropes of the cell state, the state as an organism, and the body politic, which could be found both within the scientific community and beyond it, had also kept biological metaphors in broad circulation since the midnineteenth century, as biologists seeking to establish the nature of the organism and politicians seeking to establish justifications for the nature of the modern state often borrowed rhetoric from one another.11 Thus, I do not claim that the strands of interest that I have gathered together under the rubric of the biological perspective represent all the possible realms of popular biological discourse in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany. I do believe, however, that they represent a widespread orientation that has been overlooked before now. With these arguments, I seek to contribute to several ongoing conversations among historians of science. The fi rst section below discusses my approach to this material and its consequences for the shape of the story, especially its geographic locations, and its relation to ongoing historiographical questions about science and social structure, both in German history and in the history of science. The succeeding section addresses how this story fits into the history of popular science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and its relation to elite science. The third addresses its relation to the history of the word “biology” and the 10. Kelly, The Descent of Darwin (1981); Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung (1998). 11. Weindling, “Theories of the Cell State” (1981); Mazzolini, Politische-biologische Analogien (1988); Reynolds, “The Theory of the Cell State” (2007); Reynolds, “Ernst Haeckel and the Theory of the Cell-State” (2008); Nyhart, “Animal Individuality and Biological Politics” (1996); Nyhart, “The Problem of the Organic Individual” (1989). Of course, some of these metaphors were much older; the history of the “body politic,” for example, stretches back to the classical period.

8

Chapter One

professional life science disciplines; the following section points to some of the omissions and topics cast into shadow by telling the story this way. Finally, I offer a brief chapter outline.

Identity, Mobility, and Place In developing this account of the biological perspective, I have concentrated on a relatively small number of men who developed its ideas most prominently and who carried it across different settings. I have examined especially closely the life and work of the practical naturalist Philipp Leopold Martin, who brought forth his ideas in the realms of taxidermy, museum exhibit design, and the care of living animals; Karl August Möbius, who moved from practical natural history to economic zoology and thence to ecological theory and museum reform; the schoolteacher Friedrich Junge, who turned Möbius’s community concept into a widely resonating, if controversial, program for school natural history reform; and the museum man and biological theorist Friedrich Dahl, who developed Möbius’s ecological ideas (originally worked out mainly in connection with marine ecology) into a broad, land-based ecological animal biogeography. The Hamburg museum director and educational reformer Karl Kraepelin and the academic zoologist Richard Hesse also receive close attention, though in less depth than the other actors. Focusing on these individuals allows me to show directly and concretely the continuities among the different natural history reform movements (some of them unexpected) while examining how the different concerns and interests of the movements shaped the biological perspective itself in different directions. At the same time, I have sought to place these individuals with clusters of others in similar situations—practical naturalists, popularizers, museum men, schoolteachers, zoologists—and so to tell a story larger than one simply about a handful of individuals. In addition, to illuminate the choices these men were able to make (as well as those foreclosed to them) requires understanding something larger about the social structure of the movements and professions of which they were a part, and so I have sought to provide this more substantial frame as well. This multileveled approach reflects my belief that individuals do make a difference to history, and even a profound one, but that understanding the differences they are able to make requires understanding their situations structurally as well as individually.

Introduction

9

This approach has had several consequences for the shape of the book and its argument. For one thing, it has meant that although I am deeply interested in the spread of ideas, I have treated them here mainly from the perspective of those who sought to diffuse them rather than the larger population who might have taken them up. The historical record of what museum visitors or schoolchildren thought about the exhibits and classrooms where they spent time is notoriously difficult to get at, and therefore I have worked outward from those who actively promoted the biological perspective. The narrower story I tell is also one of taking up ideas and modifying them as well as “inventing” them, and I have tried to show how the settings in which the historical actors worked, including their understanding of their audiences’ needs and interests, shaped their own agendas. But it is the agendas themselves that I have sought primarily to identify and elucidate here. A second consequence of my approach has been geographic. One might have expected Berlin to feature prominently, as an intellectual and cultural center of science, and perhaps Hamburg’s prominence is not surprising, given its importance as a commercial, cosmopolitan city with a history of strong civic cultural participation. But who would have thought that the biological perspective—or indeed, any particularly influential approach to nature—would have had key nodes in the southwestern city of Stuttgart or the northwestern city of Kiel? Stuttgart and northwest Germany are unusually prominent (compared to their place in most accounts of either the history of science or broader cultural history) because so much of the travel of ideas took place through personal networks that were local, regional, or professional, and these locations happened to be particularly important nodes for my central actors. Martin moved from the Berlin natural history museum to Stuttgart because Stuttgart had long been a center for taxidermic and exhibit innovation, centered around the Württemberg royal natural history cabinet. Möbius studied in Berlin (overlapping briefly with Martin at the museum as a student worker), then got a teaching job in Hamburg on the recommendation of his Berlin professor, a Hamburg native who was consulted when a post came available at the secondary school there. From Hamburg, Möbius went to a professorship at Kiel made possible by Prussia’s acquisition of the province of Schleswig-Holstein and his own connections to patrons in Kiel as well as recommenders back in Berlin. Möbius’s evening course for schoolteachers inspired the Kiel headmaster Friedrich Junge to develop his teacher’s community concept into

10

Chapter One

a curricular program, which then spread across Germany through the well-developed network of teachers’ meetings and periodicals reporting on them. Dahl was a student of Möbius in Kiel who later gained a curatorship at the Berlin natural history museum after Möbius became its director. Dahl’s ecological approach to biogeography was part of a broader movement among reforming schoolteachers and museum men who communicated through periodicals and meetings, forging a geographically dispersed community of professional public educators. Such networks—personal, communicative, and professional—had multiple nodes, and they reached far across Germany. There was no dominant center, a situation that parallels the polycentric picture Glenn Penny has drawn for ethnographic museums in the same period.12 (Indeed, this story could have included more prominently other cities that served as local centers of civic engagement with natural history, such as Frankfurt am Main or Leipzig, about both of which other historians have written.)13 Yet such networks were most intense where professional and personal ones overlapped, and these particular ones did so more in the north than elsewhere. The consequence was a thickening of activity and innovation around institutions of civic education in the north, especially around museums. If the geographic emphases here derive in good measure from the paths taken by individuals and their networks, Germany’s northwest— the Prussian province of Schleswig-Holstein, as well as Hamburg and Bremen (city-state islands in the neighboring province of Hanover)— where much of the action in this book takes place—turns out to be an excellent place to study the relations among the social changes contributing to late nineteenth-century modernity and concepts of nature. Not only were the networks around natural history reform dense there, but the economic, social, and political changes of the modernizing German nation that were so important to the biological perspective were apparent in the very landscape of the northwest, offering visual evidence for that confrontation of old and new, that “sense of living in two worlds simultaneously,” that Marshall Berman has characterized as the essence of the consciousness of modernity in late nineteenth-century Europe

12. Penny, Objects of Culture (2002). 13. On Frankfurt, see Sakurai, “Science, Identity, and Urban Reinvention” (2006). On Leipzig, see Köstering, Natur zum Anschauen (2003), passim.

Introduction

11

(and that Tönnies characterized in his own way in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft).14 Let us imagine a train trip in the early 1880s across Schleswig-Holstein from Husum on the North Sea coast, to Kiel, on the Baltic shore of the peninsula—a trip that would have been made by Tönnies from his home and writing retreat in Husum to fulfi ll his university obligations, or by Möbius returning to Kiel after visiting the dwindling North Sea oyster beds that provided the material foundation for his ecological community model. What would they have seen? Along the North Sea coast, many fishermen still eked out a traditional existence harvesting oysters and mussels from the mudflats or fishing for flatfish and crabs in the nearby waters. The coastal economy was changing, however, as the same rail network carrying Möbius or Tönnies to Kiel also brought increasing numbers of tourists in the opposite direction for bathing vacations. Crossing Schleswig-Holstein, the traveler would have passed a rural landscape dominated by dairy farming and small villages. Yet a careful observer would have noticed changes even in this rural countryside. The advent of artificial fertilizers and steam threshers after midcentury boosted the production of grain, which in turn substantially increased milk production. As the railroads allowed dairy farmers to supply larger regional markets, cheese and milk-processing businesses expanded dramatically. Thus, rural life was changing as well, and the symbols of the old ways—the traditional dress, the old farmhouses that enclosed living quarters for humans and animals under one broad, thatched roof—were coming to be seen as relics of an era about to be lost. Husum established Germany’s fi rst open-air museum in 1899 in one such farmhouse, by that time considered “historic.” 15 Arriving in Kiel, a traveler stepping off the train would witness urban growth run amok. By the early 1880s, the city had doubled in size from 14. Berman, All That Is Solid (1988), 17. The question of what constitutes “modernity” can quickly run the historian into a conceptual morass, which I seek to avoid through specificity. See esp. Cooper, Colonialism in Question (2001), chapter 5, “Modernity.” Susan Stanford Friedman’s eloquent critical analysis of the different associations of the “modern” in contemporary literary studies and social science is also extremely helpful: Friedman, “Defi nitional Excursions” (2001). 15. Blackbourn, The Long Nineteenth Century (1998), 200; Witt and Vosgerau, Schleswig-Holstein (2002), 304–6; Museumsverbund Nordfriesland, “Das Freilichtmuseum Ostenfelder Bauernhaus,” http://www.museumsverbund-nordfriesland.de/ostenfelderbauernhaus/52-0-Das-Museum.html, accessed 6 June 2008.

12

Chapter One

the 24,000 inhabitants it had had in 1867, and it would balloon to almost 108,000 by 1900. Cities all over Germany were expanding at a similar rate in the late nineteenth century, as part of the general trend of industrialization, but each story of urban growth had its own peculiarities. Kiel’s growth was a consequence of its forcible transfer from Danish control to Prussia in 1864, the 1871 unification of Germany under Prussian domination, and the decision to make it the headquarters of the new imperial navy and naval shipbuilding industry. As in other cities, the population boom was fueled by migrants seeking jobs, and although the workingclass population was disproportionately male, many workers brought families as well, placing intense demands on the city’s infrastructure. To give just one example particularly relevant to the biological perspective: whereas in 1873 the city supported just two basic elementary schools (Volksschulen), one for girls and one for boys, over the next three and a half decades that number climbed to two dozen. As these schools were being built, the number of children in a single classroom typically ran above fi fty and could reach into the seventies. Striking though these statistics are, they actually underrepresent the amount of change and dislocation in Kiel. Its immigrants came and went at a rapid rate, so that the turnover in population was far greater than these numbers indicate.16 In the late nineteenth century, then, Kiel epitomized the anonymous, contractual qualities of social relations that Tönnies characterized as modern. In the latter third of the nineteenth century, the other cities especially important to this study—Berlin, Hamburg, and Stuttgart— experienced a similarly disorienting rate of expansion and change no less disturbing to the old ways, even if they did not share quite the same exponential growth rate. The situation in Kiel, then, while particular in its causes, resonated with social issues found elsewhere. This was the context for the underlying problem that the biological perspective transferred onto nature: how to understand the “natural” order of society in a world in which people were constantly on the move, in which an old, estate-based order was gone and the recent bourgeois or16. Witt and Vosgerau, Scheswig-Holstein (2002), 303; Wulf, “Kiel wird Grosstadt” (1991), 208–9; Mohr and Konarske, Die Volksschule in Kiel (1992), 60–64. The latter shows class sizes averaging in the fi fties; archival records from the 1880s show girls’ school classes of up to seventy-seven. Annual school inspector’s reports, in Stadtarchiv Kiel, Mittel- u. Volksschulen, 5, Akten betr. Jahresberichte über die Volks- u. Mittelschulen, 1886–1894 (15398). The classrooms may not have been as full as the numbers indicate, since many children stayed away from school to work. Mohr and Konarske, Die Volksschule in Kiel (1992), 73.

Introduction

13

der was itself in a continuous state of change and challenge, especially from the emerging power of the working-class movement in the second half of the century. As Junge put it when explaining why schoolchildren should learn about biological communities, the study of these communities would help children approach their own deepest existential question: What is my place in society? Where do I fit in? 17 An education organized around biotic communities would focus on functional relations among organisms and between organisms and their environments—the very sorts of relation of most concern to a society where an individual’s social status and geographic home might not be fi xed at birth. Few drew the parallel as explicitly and self-consciously as Junge, but I believe that the resonances with the central problem of late nineteenth-century German society—how to regulate the new social relations of modern society—provided an important reason why the biological perspective, with its functional approach to biology, proved so appealing. Functional questions not only about relations among people (or organisms) but also about relations of people (or organisms) to their geographic locations were relevant, as mobility raised the question of the ways in which identity was or was not tied to environment and to place. Such issues were central to the complex and ambiguous concept of Heimat that rose to prominence between the 1880s and the First World War. Heimat, or “homeland,” conveyed simultaneously a sense of geographic location, whether local or regional, and a nostalgic connection, the feeling of home, typically represented by a sense of tradition as exhibited in locally based folklore, clothing, food, and architecture. When expanded upward in scale to encompass the nation, the Heimat concept served the further purpose of acknowledging citizens’ local or regional identity while asserting and strengthening their connection to the German nation as a whole. Historians Celia Applegate and Alon Confi no have shown how Heimat and Heimatkunde (homeland studies) operated at these multiple levels, and they have acknowledged the important place held by nature in these concepts. German environmental historians, too, have recently stressed the ways in which the late nineteenth-century landscape and nature preservation movements were tied up with questions of national identity.18 Yet the role of nature in delivering and medi17. Junge, Dorfteich (1891), viii. See chapter 5 below. 18. See chapter 5; chapter 7, “The Altona City Museum (1901) and Heimatkunde”; and also Applegate, A Nation of Provincials (1990); Confi no, The Nation as a Local Metaphor (1997); and Lekan, Imagining the Nation (2004), esp. introduction and chapter 1,

14

Chapter One

ating the sense of Heimat still deserves further detailed attention. While Heimat associations included beautification and nature preservation in their purview, Heimatkunde in the classroom offered teachers and students alike the chance to learn about and identify themselves with local nature, while placing it into a larger geographic and political perspective. The biological perspective and especially Möbius’s community concept, I argue, offered teachers a way both to structure the knowledge of Heimat nature and to naturalize its function in creating a sense of identity, even as the question Where do I fit into this larger whole? might remain open. It thereby served a mediating function, via nature, between the indeterminate nature of modern society and the nostalgic desire for stability. This aspect of my argument thus feeds directly into long-standing discussions among German historians about the nature of social identity and the development of models of citizenship in Germany before and after its unification in 1871.19 At the same time, it offers to historians of science a different take on an old question once at the forefront of the history and sociology of science, namely, the relationships among scientists’ social standing and the content of their ideas. Historians and sociologists of science have long since turned away from any crude claim that a scientist’s social position alone could determine his scientific ideas; the predominant path that they have taken has turned inward to the social structure of the scientific community itself in the production of knowledge, and the problem of how value-free, universal science is produced from the messy materials of the real world. 20 This trend has tended to leave aside questions of broader social history, while scholarship focusing on questions of the broader social relations of science have tended to and sources cited therein. Although nature was also an essential component of the Heimat idea, most of the literature on Heimat and Heimatkunde has focused on the cultivation of local and regional memory and history (history, monuments, folkways, architecture, and aesthetics). See, for example, Christiansen, “Die Heimat” (1980), who, after acknowledging the importance of nature in the movement, concentrated his analysis on Heimatkunde practitioners and their work on local history and folklore. 19. For social and cultural perspectives on social identity and citizenship, see in addition to works on Heimat mentioned above Green, Fatherlands (2001); and Hagen, Preservation, Tourism and Nationalism (2006). For a recent political historian’s perspective on citizenship, see Nathans, The Politics of Citizenship (2004). 20. Iconic of the early version of the social construction of science is Barnes and Shapin, Natural Order (1979). A key force in shaping modern sociological trends in the history of science has been Bruno Latour. See esp. Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life (1979); Latour, The Pasteurization of France (1988); and Latour, Reassembling the Social (2005).

Introduction

15

sideline its intellectual content. 21 It is my hope to bring these areas of inquiry back into play with one another, and in this way to draw the history of scientific ideas back into conversation with both its institutional history and a social history of science more broadly conceived. In doing so, I hope both to enlarge the history of popular natural history and to integrate it with the more traditional history of biology understood as a professional scientific discipline.

Popular Science and Populist Natural History A key aim of this book is to illuminate the history of popular natural history in Germany by situating it in relation to the elite ideas understood to constitute “science” and the relations among the communities that produced both popular and elite knowledge of nature. Over the past fi fteen years, the history of popular science has become a growth industry, especially with respect to anglophone historical contexts. Both through careful historical studies and through new ways of conceptualizing the public understanding of science, historians of science, literary and cultural historians, and sociologists have amended the older idea of popularization as a trickle-down version of elite science, which saw popularization as merely translating or watering down difficult scientific ideas for a lay audience. Instead, they have come to see popularizing science as an autonomous communicative activity. 22 James Secord, Bernard Lightman, and others have pushed further, to argue that some writers of popular science sought to maintain a broad conception of science that protested against the narrowing of science to exclude religious and metaphysical issues—the very subjects that most people cared about and that made science relevant to their lives. Indeed, Secord’s analysis of the varied modes of engaging with science in mid-nineteenth-century Britain suggests that at least into the 1850s it was still possible for writers who wrote about nature in general periodicals to consider what they were doing a constitutive part of “doing science,” and even of “being a scientist.” Only 21. Significant exceptions lie in the work of Anne Secord and Robert E. Kohler; see esp. A. Secord, “Science in the Pub” (1994); A. Secord, “La connaissance de l’un” (2007); and Kohler, All Creatures (2006). 22. For early contributions to the theory on this matter, see esp. Whitley, “Knowledge Producers” (1985); Hilgartner, “The Dominant View” (1990); and Shapin, “Science and the Public” (1990).

16

Chapter One

following considerable struggle did the proponents of original research shorn of metaphysical pronouncements win out, casting such research as the primary criterion for status as a man of science. Popular writing and other forms of public presentation would defi nitively come to be seen as a side occupation for a professional scientist or a primary occupation for a new breed of “lesser” scientific men (in the view of those few able to stake their reputations on their research), as well as many women excluded from other forms of participation in science.23 But popular science is not coextensive with the popularization of elite science. Another burgeoning area of historical and sociological examination has looked at how non-elites or amateurs studied nature, and how their ways of doing so related to those of elite producers of scientific knowledge. This research stream reaches back at least to Sally Gregory Kohlstedt’s pioneering work on the Boston Society of Natural History, one of the fi rst studies to show how women participated in science. More recently, Anne Secord’s innovative analyses of Lancashire workingmen’s botany have provided a model of how to think about amateur science as a practice with its own rules and procedures, even as she has explored the social relations between these people and more elite men of science. Mark Barrow has examined the important role of amateur birders in the development of ornithology, following the tensions that mounted as the field professionalized in America and examining how professionals managed their relationships with amateurs. And many other historians have studied the ways in which various different kinds of technicians, scientific subalterns, or other practitioners with special knowledge or skills who lacked the status of “scientist” contributed to the production of scientific knowledge. 24 My project, focusing on Germany, offers a new story and a new analysis. We might expect from the outset that the German situation would 23. J. Secord, Victorian Sensation (2000), esp. chapters 12–14. See also Lightman’s more recent analysis of the situation, especially his extensive and insightful historiographic introduction: Lightman, Victorian Popularizers (2007), 1–38; and Fyfe and Lightman, Science in the Marketplace (2007). A similar tension between broad and narrow conceptions of natural history had already been enacted earlier in France, during and after the Revolution; see Corsi, The Age of Lamarck (1989), chapter 1. On women and popular science, see esp. Shteir and Lightman, Figuring It Out (2006). 24. Kohlstedt, “The Nineteenth-Century Amateur Tradition” (1976); A. Secord, “Science in the Pub” (1994); A. Secord, “Corresponding Interests” (1994); Barrow, A Passion for Birds (1998). For a recent international collection of historical and present-day case studies, see Charvolin, Micoud, and Nyhart, Des sciences citoyennes? (2007); Shapin, “The Invisible Technician” (1989); and Camerini, “Wallace in the Field” (1996).

Introduction

17

differ from that of Britain or America, for in Germany the man of science was established earlier, in connection with the rise of the research university. Indeed, the historiography of nineteenth-century German science has been dominated by university-based sciences until quite recently, and with good reason: the German universities provided the model of the “research imperative” that would be imitated by others around the world. The drive for new knowledge as a foundational value of the modern university system was immensely productive, and much of modern science grew out of the ferments it generated. It long made sense, then, for historians of German science to attend closely to the knowledge produced there, and to the relationship between knowledge making and the institutional structures and communities they supported. 25 In recent years, however, the interest in popular science that has animated much of the Anglo-American history of science community has also found a corresponding trend among historians of German science, who have shown that German natural history outside the universities shares many features with the more familiar British and American scenes. We now know that the German lands sustained a lively interest in popular natural history in the nineteenth century, organized through such institutions as museums, zoos, scientific and other voluntary associations, and popular science publishing, and we know much more than we did a decade ago (when this project was just getting under way) about the character of these institutions and their major players. In particular, Andreas Daum’s breakthrough book of 1998, Wissenschaftspopularisierung im 19. Jahrhundert, organized for the fi rst time the broad expanse of popular science in the German-speaking lands of the nineteenth century, concentrating especially on voluntary associations and the structure of the literary market for popular science. This book offers an essential framework for understanding what it meant to “do” popular science in nineteenth-century Germany and how it became possible (just barely) to make a living at it—an interest that is very much my own as well. 26 Other works, such as the excellent analysis of the German zoo movement produced by Lothar Dittrich and Annelore Rieke-Müller and Ayako Sakurai’s case study of natural science institutions in Frankfurt 25. Turner, “The Growth of Professorial Research” (1971); Jungnickel and McCormmach, Intellectual Mastery of Nature (1986); Eulner, Die Entwicklung der medizinischen Spezialfächer (1970); and Nyhart, Biology Takes Form (1995), and sources cited therein. 26. Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung (1998). I refer to the sizable case study literature on popular science in Germany as it is relevant later on in this book.

18

Chapter One

am Main, have deepened our understanding of German popular interest in nature. 27 But I am after something a bit different. I am interested in understanding a view of nature—a set of ideas—and in tracing how these developed and were propagated through Germany. The biological perspective, I argue, emerged initially from populist impulses at both the intellectual and social levels: reformers sought both to broaden what constituted the “scientific” approach to natural history and to expand social access to doing it. Starting from these populist impulses, the overall trajectory of the story I tell here might be called a trickle-up one, or perhaps an outside-in one, in which an approach to nature that originally carried a heavy burden of opposition to elite science, and which was developed fi rst most fully outside the universities, eventually gained sanction in the most elite academic realms. This is highly unusual for the history of scientific ideas, especially in German science, which has typically been understood as being about university-based elites producing knowledge for themselves (and everyone else). The story told here thus offers an unexpected direction for the creation and flow of knowledge on its way to becoming “scientific.” 28 In developing this account, I pay some careful attention to how populists sought to use zoos and schools to spread the biological perspective, but I focus especially on museums. The museum was a liminal site, a critical border zone that embraced both elite and amateur communities for natural history. Although taxidermists played an initial, key role in making the biological perspective visually accessible to visitors through displays, it was the acceptance and boosting of this perspective by museum curators that effectively helped to spread it, not only through exhibits, but also through lectures, museum-based courses, research, and writing. Curators, as I show, were simultaneously making new knowledge and popularizing it, with scientific elites, neophytes (including 27. Rieke-Müller and Dittrich, Der Löwe brüllt (1998); Sakurai, “Science, Identity, and Urban Reinvention” (2006). 28. Of course, historians of science know many stories about maverick or “outsider” scientists’ ideas fi nally getting accepted, such as the rediscovery of Mendel’s laws, or Einstein’s work at the Bern patent office; here I am talking about something more like the incorporation of lay “local knowledge” into science. In this case, I am not talking about the (often unacknowledged) appropriation of such knowledge by scientists but rather about an effort to push outsider knowledge and perspectives into the scientific community. In this respect, my story is somewhat like that of AIDS activists seeking to have their perspectives on the disease accepted by doctors. See Epstein, Impure Science (1996).

Introduction

19

schoolchildren), and amateurs as their target audiences. They had access to everyone. This is a critical part of my argument, and it offers a somewhat different take on museums and their import from those we have seen in recent museum history. As cultural historians and historians of science have come to see the museum as a significant site for exploring the cultural meanings of science, they have almost invariably concentrated on public displays. Much excellent work has come out of this new focus, 29 and as the following chapters demonstrate, I share a strong interest in the history of the production and meanings of museum displays. For my project, the most important analysis has been Susanne Köstering’s excellent Natur zum Anschauen (Nature on view), which offers a thorough and satisfying account of natural history museum displays in the German empire of 1871 to 1914, and which anticipates a number of the arguments I make here. 30 Köstering traces the dramatic evolution of display types in the late nineteenth century from a taxonomic orientation to a “biological” one, including ecological displays that represented biological communities. She provides compelling and detailed accounts of the rise of artistic taxidermy, the market for preproduced mounts (including the school market), and the audiences for natural history museums. In addition to the wealth of detail she has unearthed, which makes accessible a tremendous amount of archival and otherwise obscure information on German natural history displays, her insights into the multivalent meanings and importance of “characteristic animals” and her symbolic reading of the family group in the context of Germany’s changing society represent significant and novel contributions to the history of museum display. As fi ne as this analysis is, and as much as our interpretations of the biological turn are closely aligned, I seek in this book to push beyond an 29. The literature on museums is large and ever growing. See Donna Haraway’s pathbreaking chapter “Teddy Bear Patriarchy,” in Haraway, Primate Visions (1989), 26–58; Wonders, Habitat Dioramas (1993); Yanni, Nature’s Museums (1999); Bennett, Birth of the Museum (1995); Cain, “Nature under Glass” (2006); and Andrei, “Nature’s Mirror” (2006). Of the even larger museum history literature not exclusively devoted to natural history, I have found especially inspirational Penny, Objects of Culture (2002); Schwartz, Spectacular Realities (1998); Sandberg, Living Pictures (2003); and Preziosi, Brain of the Earth’s Body (2003). 30. Köstering, Natur zum Anschauen (2003). Although in the late 1990s we independently reached the same conclusions concerning the importance of what she felicitously calls the “biological turn” in German museum display, my book has been much longer in the making. A reader of footnotes will see how much our interpretations agree.

20

Chapter One

analysis of exhibit productions and meanings, for these were only part of the mission of museums, which also were important sites for research and education. Relatively little attention has been paid recently to what museum workers were doing by way of research in the late nineteenth century, or how the museum setting shaped the research they undertook. 31 In the parts of this book devoted to museums, I aim to show how research, display, and public education interacted in the development of the biological perspective, and how this in turn shaped the emergence of ecology and ecological animal geography by the 1920s. It is my hope that this work may stimulate more investigation into the history of museumbased research—a significant site of employment and innovation in the natural history sciences. The biological perspective represented more than the work of museum men, however, and more even than a populist approach to nature around the beginning of the twentieth century. It was also the milieu from which the science of animal ecology would emerge in Germany. Given the somewhat tortured history of the term “biology” and the many changes that the life sciences underwent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is worth considering the biological perspective in relation to the history of the life science disciplines and their intellectual commitments more generally.

The Biological Perspective and the History of Biology In 1910 the zoologist Richard Hesse remarked in the opening of his new book on functional morphology that the “biological perspective on the living world is now widespread.” 32 At fi rst glance, this seems a very peculiar turn of phrase, especially given that the book was mainly directed at zoologists. How else would any biologist look at the living world, other than from a “biological perspective”? The answer takes us right to the heart of the meanings of “biology” and the biological perspective in the decades around 1900, and the relationship of the biological perspective to the disciplines that made up biology. The term “biology” was coined around 1800 to mean a general sci31. But see Winsor, Reading the Shape of Nature (1991); Rainger, An Agenda for Antiquity (1991); Rupke, Richard Owen (1994), esp. chapter 2; and Milam, “The Experimental Animal” (forthcoming). 32. Hesse, Der Tierkörper als selbständiger Organismus (1910), vii.

Introduction

21

ence of living things that would unite the study of botany and zoology over against the study of nonliving nature. However, it was never clear just what sorts of research would provide the key to understanding the ultimate nature of life. A prime candidate was the study of the complex relationships among an organism’s form, its ways of carrying out the functions that allowed it to live, and its environment. This functionalist approach to biology, which goes back to Aristotle, gained considerable momentum in the early nineteenth century, both in the program of the leading French zoologist Georges Cuvier and in the natural theological approach in Britain exemplified by William Paley’s natural theology and the Bridgewater Treatises. Interest in these relations intensified further in the wake of Darwin’s theory, which rendered the dynamics of the functional relations surrounding adaptation essential to understanding evolution. 33 Functional morphology of this kind was not the only claimant to the mantle of “biology,” but in late nineteenth-century Germany, it was— briefly—the most successful one. Germans sometimes called this “biology in the narrower sense,” to distinguish it from “biology in the general sense,” the science of life. By the 1880s, teachers were using the term as a matter of course, though still defi ning it. Their uses reflect both its plasticity and its basic elements. Thus, a review in the 1886 opening issue of the Annual Report of the Higher School System, a pedagogical literature review journal, discussed an article that argued that “the consideration of the connection between structure and function of the organs—in short, biology—must be the main element of thought” in natural history teaching, and the reviewer himself argued that the main thing that should be emphasized in natural history instruction was “the relationship between the form of an organ and its biological activity or between where an animal lives and its mode of nutrition.” The same reviewer referred to the curriculum of the reformer Friedrich Junge as starting out from “a group of animals that stand in biological connection to one another”— that is, organisms of different species that interacted, as, for example, food sources or symbionts. In the usage of this single reviewer, then, “biology” referred to relations between structure and function within the animal body, relations between an organism’s anatomical structure and its environment, and ecological relations among animals. The emphasis on ecological interactions was especially prominent among a small but 33. Russell, Form and Function (1982); Bowler, Evolution (2003).

22

Chapter One

important group of specialists in the biology of flowering plants, most of whom worked as secondary school teachers, which emphasized the coadaptations between flowering plants and the insects that pollinated them. In all of these cases, it was the functional relationships that rendered them “biological.” 34 The “biological perspective” referred to by Hesse in the beginning of this section was the perspective that privileged this collection of functional relationships, and it is from this usage that I borrow the term. This multiple usage of “biology” as representing both a particular approach to studying life and the general study of life is confusing to us now, but would have been less so circa 1900. As a term, “biology” “in the general sense” was somewhat out of fashion until the very end of the nineteenth century, probably because of the strength of the independent disciplines of botany and zoology. Mostly when Germans wrote about the “biological” study of an organism, they would know it referred to the narrower sense of the term. Moreover, it was clear to German naturalists what a “biological” analysis would be contrasted to: the project of systematics, which had been the main emphasis of natural history since the mid-eighteenth century. That project, made famous by the Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné (Linnaeus), sought to understand the “system of nature” as a system of affi nities and resemblances of form. Evolutionary theorists in the nineteenth century transformed the meaning of those affi nities from one resting on ideal types to one resting on evolutionary relationships of descent. Nevertheless, even in the revised project of systematics under evolution, what still counted were family relationships of closeness and distance, marked by similarities and differences of form. That is, to understand an organism’s “place in nature” was to set it into a framework of morphological similarities, differences, and degrees of relatedness. This was the dominant approach to studying nature among zoologists in the German universities for most of the late nineteenth century. 35 The biological perspective was different. Here the primary relation34. Loew, “Beschreibende Naturwissenschaften” (1886), 267, 276, 277. The most important of the “flower biologists” was the secondary school teacher Hermann Müller; Ernst Loew (occasionally spelled Löw) was also a significant contributor to the area. On Müller’s work, see Junker, Darwinismus und Botanik (1989); on Loew, see E. Roth, “Löw, Ernst,” in Deutsches Biographisches Archiv, N.F., fiche 825, frames 337–39. 35. Nyhart, Biology Takes Form (1995). For a more focused discussion of the shifting relationships among morphology, systematics, and biological questions, see Nyhart, “Natural History” (1996).

Introduction

23

ships were not those of relatedness or similarity but rather of function, emphasizing relationships among organisms, their physical environment, and their geographic and ecological place in the world. In the biological perspective, an organism’s place in nature was established in good part by its geographic or physical “place,” as well as its location in a web of functional and physical relationships. And to understand these sorts of relationships required attention to the living organism in its natural setting. The contrast to the systematic approach is crucial for understanding the development of the biological perspective, for “biology” was repeatedly set up in opposition to “systematics,” though with different overtones in different settings. In the context of artistic taxidermy, lively poses of organisms caught, as it were, in action contrasted to the desire of systematists to have their specimens all posed in the same arrangement for ease of comparison. Among pedagogical reformers, the biological perspective (sometimes also called the “biocentric” approach in this community)36 was set in opposition to a systematics characterized by its Latin names and the need to memorize taxonomic names and relationships, which was caricatured as combining two of the deadliest aspects of natural history teaching and learning: meaningless words and rote memorization. And among museum reformers, “biological” group displays offered a lively, attention-getting alternative to an endless parade of forms that left lay visitors bored and overwhelmed. Despite the intensity of their opposition to the dominance of traditional systematics, proponents of the biological perspective never succeeded in overthrowing systematics as the primary organizing principle for natural history in schools and museums. Instead, the two found an uneasy coexistence in museum displays, schoolbooks and curricula, and research publications. Increasingly around the turn of the century, it was said that the two approaches complemented each other—or even, from an evolutionary perspective, required each other (as the next section discusses in more detail). Thus, the adaptation of different varieties to slightly different conditions of existence was understood to be a crucial factor in speciation: investigation of an organism’s “biology” would contribute fundamentally to establishing its classificatory relationships, and conversely, if two related species were clearly morphologically dis36. See, e.g., Loew, “Naturwissenschaft” (1887), B231; Loew, “Naturwissenschaft” (1888), B304.

24

Chapter One

tinct, close attention to biological factors might explain how they came to divide from a common ancestor. Yet the sense that the classificatory approach of systematics and the biological approach stood in opposition was difficult to overcome, as they implied fundamentally different ways of presenting and organizing information about nature. Texts and collections organized according to systematics grouped organisms by type and similarity—birds, mammals, insects; those organized “biologically” were more likely to group them by setting—desert, steppe, forest, field. Just as the biological perspective was not the only form of biological discourse in the public realm, it was not unique within the life sciences as a claimant to treating the most central aspect of life, or as a self- consciously modern approach. Indeed, at the turn of the century, “biology in the narrower sense” vied with a number of other claimants to modernity in the academic life sciences, with experimental embryologists, students of cells and tissues, and researchers on inheritance among the most insistent that their research area provided a new key to the nature of life. Some of these also staked claims to the term “biology,” as did Oskar Hertwig, who retitled his textbook on cells and tissues Allgemeine Biologie (General biology) in its second edition. 37 This research stream would win out in its claims to generality, and therefore its claim to the term “biology,” and as chapter 8 discusses, around 1910 advocates of the biological perspective would drop the term “biology” to use the term “ecology” for their field of interest. For historians of biology, the present story serves as a corrective to a picture of late nineteenth-century German biology (or more properly, zoology) dominated by the rise of university-based, laboratory-oriented professors and their students. By temporarily displacing this undeniably important community and its values from the center of our picture, and focusing instead on a vision of biology that flourished outside the universities, especially in public museums and schools, we gain a broader picture of the dynamics of the development of biological knowledge. In these civic settings, the axis of tension lay not between morphology and physiology, between historical and mechanical causation, or between natural history and experiment, but between “biology” and systematics. 38

37. Hertwig, Allgemeine Biologie (1906). 38. For more standard pictures of the tensions of late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury biology, see Kohler, Landscapes and Labscapes (2002); G. Allen, Life Science in

Introduction

25

This story thus both expands the canvas of our picture of biology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and adds another layer of complexity to it.

Ghosts and Shadows Three historical figures hover over this story: Charles Darwin, Alexander von Humboldt, and Rudolf Leuckart. Each bears a different relationship to the rise of the biological perspective, but all three have in common two properties: they played a formative role in the development of the conditions for this story, and they are nevertheless not central to the story itself. I therefore consider them ghostlike presences (though all three lived for at least part of the period covered by my tale), and it is worth addressing the relationship of each to the argument advanced here. A fourth spectral shadow, cast not by a person but by a field, plant ecology, also merits attention here. Darwin, and the theory associated with his name, is the least present of the three, yet we might expect him to be the most central. How is it possible to write a book about German zoology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and not have evolution be a central feature? There is no question that Germans were well aware of Darwinian evolution and especially its popularizations by Ernst Haeckel and Wilhelm Bölsche (to name only the most prominent among a host of popularizers), or that it was deeply controversial, especially among the religious majority. Haeckel’s 1877 proposal to replace religious instruction in Prussia’s elementary schools with his version of evolutionary monism was greeted with shock and outrage—it seemed to bear out the deep fears of conservatives who had recently objected to the introduction of evolutionary ideas in a high school as undermining the moral foundations of German culture. These explosive controversies contributed to the decision by the Prussian education administration in 1882 to remove the subject of biology from the upper years of the university preparatory schools, the Gymnasien, with manifold consequences for the content of biological teaching inside schools and in other settings. As a numthe Twentieth Century (1978); Maienschein, Rainger, and Benson, “Special Section” (1981); Nyhart, Biology Takes Form (1995); and Nyhart, “Learning from History” (2002).

26

Chapter One

ber of historians have argued, museums and popular writers strove to fi ll the vacuum created by the absence of formal biology teaching. 39 In the schools, the biological perspective, I suggest, could be used to avoid the problems associated with evolutionism by concentrating on the facts of an organism’s adaptation to and interactions with its surroundings and sidestepping discussion of causes. This silence with respect to evolution may, in fact, have been one of the most powerful appeals of the biological perspective, especially in the 1870s and 1880s: it could be placed in the service of radically different, even opposed, accounts of ultimate causation while focusing on the law-bound character of relationships in nature and on immediate functional relationships. Darwin’s evolutionary mechanism of natural selection remained a subject of controversy among zoologists throughout the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but nearly all biologists accepted the idea of evolution (advocated by earlier writers both within Germany and without). By the 1890s and early 1900s, the fact that it was still not being taught in college preparatory schools was deeply disturbing to both museum scientists and university scientists. Even as museum scientists such as the Hamburg natural history museum director Karl Kraepelin worked actively to return biology teaching to the schools (in the process forging strong alliances with university professors and reformist secondary school teachers), they saw it as their role to present evolution to a broad public through the new public exhibits and to conduct research related to the history of life. In the turn-of-the-century museum context, then, the biological perspective in the museum took on a more evolutionary cast. Exhibits on such topics as symbiosis, mimicry, and the adaptation of an animal’s coat color to its surroundings all represented topics explainable in evolutionary terms. This adaptationist orientation toward evolution has not been attended to by historians of German science, who have tended to represent German understanding of evolution as dominated exclusively by the morphological program of Ernst Haeckel. Yet it stood—if often silently—at the center of modern museum biology in the early twentieth century. The ghost of Alexander von Humboldt casts a different kind of shadow over this book. Historians of ecology and biogeography alike point to Humboldt as a founding figure, one who fi rst established the idea of zo39. See esp. Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung (1998); and Köstering, Natur zum Anschauen (2003).

Introduction

27

nation when he associated particular types of vegetation with particular relationships of latitude and altitude, who thought in large-scale terms of correlating geographic and physical patterns, and who called attention to the destruction of the balance of nature by humans.40 This book does not treat the larger intellectual history of biogeography before the late 1880s and therefore does not trace the continuities in German thought from Humboldt’s own time to the “new” biogeography of the decades around the turn of the century—continuities that may have existed but remain obscure for the topic of animal geography. Instead, I focus in the early chapters on the movement for a popular and practical natural history, which is much more visible in German culture, and in which Humboldt played a different role. Among the practical naturalists we do not fi nd much continuity with Humboldt’s specific ideas of zonation or the global correlations he proposed between living forms and physical features of the environment. Rather, we fi nd a general appeal to the more romantic aspects of his worldview (especially as expressed in his Cosmos): his view that all of nature is a unified whole and must be treated as such; his joining of aesthetic appreciation of nature with scientific analysis; and his prodemocratic stance that seemed to indicate that all people could have access to the study of nature. Certainly this was the leading appeal of Humboldt’s writings for the aspiring practical naturalist Karl Möbius in the 1840s and 1850s, who emulated his hero in his journal-keeping and poetry-writing as well as in his vacation treks through the German forests to observe nature. As Andreas Daum has shown, the Cosmos (1848–62) made Humboldt an icon of popular natural history. After his death in 1858, his status as a hero peaked over the next two decades, as popular natural history clubs and magazines were founded in his honor.41 For proponents of the biological perspective, Humboldt’s lofty image reinforced their ambition to retain an integrated view of nature appreciation and study. The third ghost is Rudolf Leuckart (1822–98). Much less well known to history than either Darwin or Humboldt, he casts his shadow over this story in quite a different way, a shadow that prevents the claim that the rise of the biological perspective occurred entirely independently of uni40. On Humboldt, see esp. Nicolson, “Alexander von Humboldt” (1987); Nicolson, “Humboldtian Plant Geography” (1996); Bowler, Norton History of the Environmental Sciences (1992), 205–8, 272–73; and Hermand, Grüne Utopien (1991),41–42, 46–47. 41. Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung (1998), 138–67, 269–86.

28

Chapter One

versity science. Leuckart, who fi rst taught at the University of Giessen and then at the University of Leipzig from 1869 until his death in 1898, was Germany’s leading functional morphologist, who practiced and promoted the study of the ways in which an organism’s form and physiology fitted together and reflected in turn the relation of the organism to its environment. In 1852, with Carl Bergmann, he coauthored a pathbreaking textbook, Anatomical-Physiological Overview of the Animal Kingdom (Anatomisch-physiologische Übersicht des Thierreichs), which interpreted animal form strictly in terms of physiological function and claimed the field of functional morphology for zoologists. This would remain a minority approach in university-based zoology, a discipline dominated in the late nineteenth century by the study of animal form and its evolutionary and developmental histories. Indeed, in 1910 the zoologist Richard Hesse could complain that many current younger scholars had never even heard of Bergmann and Leuckart’s book.42 Yet over the course of Leuckart’s long career, a large number of professional zoologists studied at his institute. A few of these would become university professors of zoology, such as August Weismann and Carl Chun. But more, including the Hamburg museum director Karl Kraepelin, were players in the world of civic zoology.43 Leuckart was undeniably significant as a professor who preached a functionalist perspective over more than fi fty years (a fact insufficiently appreciated by historians of biology). It would even be possible to tell the story of the rise of biological perspective as stemming from Leuckart and his school and then diffusing out into a broader realm. This would fit well with the older trickledown model of science, but it would be a mistake, because it would miss much of the crucial outsider dynamic. It would not invite examination of why museum and zoo boards wanted their directors to be university educated, when that had not always been an expectation (see chapter 6). 42. Hesse, Der Tierkörper als selbständiger Organismus (1910), vii. 43. Among Leuckart’s students were Otto Zur Strassen (Senckenberg Museum, Frankfurt, later also professor of zoology at the newly established University of Frankfurt) and Arnold Jacobi (Dresden museums for zoology and ethnology); the zoo directors Ludwig Wunderlich (Cologne), Ludwig Heck (Berlin), and Gustav Brandes (Halle, Dresden); the director of the biological institute in Helgoland, Friedrich Heincke; the editor of the Deutsche illustrirte Bienen-Zeitung [German Illustrated Bee Magazine], Oskar Paul Krancher; Moritz Eduard Pechuel-Lösche, later a geographer who would edit a highly successful revised version of the popular natural history encyclopedia Brehms Tierleben [Brehm’s Life of Animals]; and numerous reformist high school teachers. Wunderlich, Rudolf Leuckart (1978).

Introduction

29

It would privilege university education over other experiences shaping a civic zoologist’s career, such as the specific local demands on his time and expectations among patrons and audiences who might have different interests from those of the universities. And it would completely omit some of the most interesting players in this story (especially in its early decades), who had nothing to do with Leuckart or who were not university educated at all. It is more appropriate, then, to view Leuckart as articulating a vocabulary for understanding the organism that found a certain resonance in the university setting but that found still more powerful possibilities for articulation in civic settings outside the university. As we focus largely on these nonuniversity communities, Leuckart’s ghost reminds us of the persistence of a small stream of functionalist research and teaching in the universities, which provided a trickle of likeminded people who flowed into those civic communities and lent them significant support. Overlapping the shadows cast by the ghosts of Humboldt and Leuckart, a different shadow maybe discerned—that cast by the history of ecology, especially German plant ecology, which makes its only major appearance in this story in chapter 8. The idea of an “economy of nature,” which may be traced at least back to Linnaeus in the eighteenth century, is functionalist to its core, and was supported on the Continent by physico-theological traditions and in Britain by natural theology. Indeed, both the traditions identified by historian of ecology Donald Worster as rooted in the eighteenth century—the “arcadian” (holistic and religious) and the “imperial” (mechanistic and practical) type—called attention to the functional dependencies of organisms on one another in nature, whether they attributed these to God or to a godless nature.44 In the history of German ecological thought, we can locate these attitudes in various places in the fi rst half of the nineteenth century, especially in Humboldtian and post-Humboldtian plant geography and in the community of foresters as it developed into a major arena of environmental management, and perhaps also in the popular nature writings of German physico-theologians (which remain underexamined).45 Although this functionalist, protoecological approach to nature can thus certainly be found among pockets of people interested in nature before 1850, I would

44. Worster, Nature’s Economy (1985). 45. However, see Nicolson, “Humboldtian Plant Geography” (1996); Jansen, Schädlinge (2003); and Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung (1998).

30

Chapter One

argue that only with its spread through popular writings, schools, and public museums beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century (and especially in its latter two decades) did it become a major strand of German thought about nature. Indeed, as Eugene Cittadino has shown, despite a patchy tradition of plant biogeography dating back to Humboldt, plant ecology emerged as a coherent body of scientific theory only in the 1880s and 1890s, as a handful of plant physiologists took the laboratory methods they had earlier developed for plant physiology, along with their commitment to Darwinian adaptation, out into the field, to study plants adaptation in nature. Cittadino argues that the rise of German colonialism was crucial to this move, providing as it did expanded access to the tropics, where the life of plants was rich and abundant. The laboratory and the colonial movement are thus critical features of the early history of German plant ecology.46 The prehistory of animal ecology pursued in the present volume is rather different, coming neither primarily from the lab into the field nor from physiology as defi ned by animal physiologists. Nor does German colonialism play a prominent role in the story (though it certainly facilitated the global collecting of specimens from the mid-1880s to 1914). The historical path taken by animal ecology was grounded in museums and schools, not laboratories, and reflected a populist approach that privileged the emotional and aesthetic connections made to nature in the field over the analytical, reductionist stance favored by animal physiologists, who in any case in Germany were a distinct disciplinary group from university zoologists. This situation contrasts sharply with university botany, which after midcentury was almost synonymous with plant physiology. The differences in the early histories of animal and plant ecology thus reflect the rather different disciplinary histories of zoology and botany.47 These differences also help explain why the stories of plant and animal ecology converge only in the 1890s, when animal ecologists began to lean heavily on the syntheses then coming out in plant ecology (see chapter 8). It may also be that the intensification of German attention to plant ecology in the 1880s and 1890s reflects not only the upswing 46. Cittadino, Nature as the Laboratory (1990). 47. On the institutional and disciplinary history of the zoological sciences in Germany, see Nyhart, Biology Takes Form (1995). No similarly comprehensive study of the history of the plant sciences in Germany has been written, but see Eisnerova, “Botanische Disziplinen” (2000).

Introduction

31

of colonialism to which Cittadino points but also the deeper questions of functionalism that were percolating to the surface of German society in those decades, and that are visible in the early history of animal ecology that I describe here. In any case, we must recognize that German animal ecology had a distinctive early history quite separate from that of plant ecology, and that the shadow of plant ecology cast here is rather pale.

Tracing the Biological Perspective The contours of the biological perspective differed in the different reform movements in which it appeared, and they changed over time. Throughout the book, I seek to elucidate the connections between the form and development of this discourse and the social and institutional situations in which it developed. The different manifestations of the biological perspective will unfold in detail over the course of this book in connection with its different settings, but a summary view will be useful here. The story begins with Philipp Leopold Martin, a taxidermist, museum reformer, would-be zoo entrepreneur, and nature protectionist who articulated a program for natural history reform that stressed the importance of viewing and representing animals as living beings in nature and also the importance of hands-on engagement with animals. Framing his program as “practical natural history,” Martin sought to improve the quality of practical work in zoology—including killing animals in the wild, caring for them in captivity, and creating mounted displays of preserved animals that captured their natural attitudes of life. In calling for higher standards for these activities, Martin sought both to raise the status of “praxis” in natural history, vis-à-vis theory, and simultaneously to take natural history out of the exclusive hands of scholars and return it to “the people,” who, Martin said, rightly owned it. Moving outward from Martin, chapters 2 and 3 consider how men allied with his program negotiated the possibilities for doing practical natural history, how they sought to modify museum practices and invent a new form of natural history in the zoos, and where their reforms met their limits. Chapter 2 concentrates on taxidermy and museum collections, whereas chapter 3 examines the zoo movement and introduces connections between practical natural history and nature protection—a theme that cropped up repeatedly among proponents of the biological

32

Chapter One

perspective. Because reformers in the 1850s and 1860s circulated among both kinds of animal collections, these two chapters should be viewed as a unit, divided for convenience and clarity. In chapter 4 I turn to a different figure whose ideas and career were central to the rise of the biological perspective: Karl Möbius. Möbius’s life and career play a pivotal role in this book, for he carried the concerns of the practical naturalists over into the scholarly realm, transforming them into something that was much more recognizably scientific, while also developing them in the new direction of economic zoology. At the same time, he maintained his populist attitudes during his rise up the social scale from elementary school teacher to high school teacher and natural history activist in Hamburg, and thence to the university level, where he served as professor of zoology and reformist director of academic natural history museums, fi rst in Kiel and then in Berlin. Throughout his career, he was a leading proponent of the biological perspective, which took its most prominent form in his theory of the Biocönose, or Lebensgemeinschaft—the biotic community. His reflections in his diaries also allow us to see suggestive parallels between his extraordinary social mobility and his functionalist view of nature. Chapters 5–9 trace the different manifestations and fortunes of the biological perspective as it developed from the early 1880s to the 1920s in the school and museum settings. Here again, Möbius played a central role, as the chief advocate of the biotic community concept and also as a proponent of naturalistic museum displays, which he called “biological groups.” As these two instantiations of the biological perspective developed in the educational and museum communities, they moved beyond his control, taking on new connotations and new roles that reflected the interests of those communities. Chapter 5 examines the transfer of the community concept into the setting of school reform via the curriculum proposed by Friedrich Junge and its reception within the communities of primary and middle school teachers; this analysis shows how the biological community concept shaded over easily into lessons about human community, Heimat, and expectations for good citizenship in the new German nation. Chapters 6 and 7 turn again to the museum setting, examining innovations in natural history display beginning in the late 1880s in the movement organized around the New Museum Idea, which sought to redirect museums as institutions toward a mass public. Led by Möbius in Berlin and Karl Kraepelin in Hamburg, reformist curators oversaw the

Introduction

33

creation of special exhibit collections for the mass public, removing the vast majority of specimens used for scientific research from public view. Chapter 6 lays out the changes in the social infrastructure of the natural history museum, highlighting the importance of the professionalization of the curator and showing how curators used their newfound authority to infuse the museum with a broad range of “biological” exhibits. Chapter 7 focuses in on a particular kind of biological exhibit called the “biological group,” which posed animals together in lifelike positions. The most attention-getting of all the new exhibits, these attracted particular interest among innovators at museums with coverage that went beyond natural history and that were aimed much more exclusively at the general public than at a combination of lay and scientific publics. Focusing on three museums, I examine where biological groups fitted into the larger conceptual schemes of each, with respect to both the presentation of nature and the projected role of the lay visitor within the museum. While the most visible aspects of the biological perspective came in the form of museum displays, its intellectual content was also developing in what would soon be called ecology and ecological animal geography. Chapter 8 examines the development of a canon of animal “biology” (soon to be called ecology)—with particular topics under its purview and their structuring into a coherent body of scholarship. It shows how the canon was formed through the synthesizing, popular work of secondary school teachers and museum men. Chapter 9 examines research in biogeography and ecology conducted by museum men in the 1890s and after, with special attention to Möbius’s student Friedrich Dahl, who was instrumental in applying the community concept to land organisms and in bringing it to bear on evolutionary problems. Growing out of this work, Richard Hesse’s 1924 landmark Ecological Basis of Animal Geography created new foundations for ecology as an academically sanctioned science. His synthesis drew unmistakably from the research of museum workers over the previous forty years. In their various efforts to reform natural history in museums, zoos, and schools, Germans shared in international trends of which they were acutely aware. Although no historian has yet identified exactly a “biological perspective” elsewhere, its signs are unmistakable. The concluding chapter thus suggests what my story has to contribute to the broader histories of biology and of science more generally. Throughout this book, I seek to elucidate two parallel themes: the spread of a particular set of ideas about nature and the ways in which

34

Chapter One

they were enabled and constrained by the social structures in which they developed. In this way, this account contributes both to the history of science and to the history of German culture in the decades around 1900. In doing so, it presents a particular picture of the relations of these two, one in which attitudes toward nature served as the underlying basis for the science. The roots of German animal ecology, in particular, cannot be found in the world of the universities that for so long preoccupied historians of German science. They must be sought in the combination of attitudes, ideas, and institutions that emerged in the civic realm in the second half of the nineteenth century.

chapter two

Bringing Life to Natural History

Practical and Popular Natural History

I

n the 1850s and 1860s, a loose network of men who engaged in hands-on natural history for a living sought to reform natural history by raising the general level of appreciation for living animals in their natural environments. These men observed, hunted, killed, and artistically reconstructed animals for museum collections; cared for living exotic animals on their voyages from their native country to their new homes in European zoos and menageries; agitated for nature protection; and disseminated these practices to a wider audience through speeches, articles, and popular books. The taxidermist, natural history reformer, and self-appointed spokesman for this group, Philipp Leopold Martin (1815–86), dubbed this collection of activities “practical natural history,” and I adopt his term to encapsulate both the work and the attitudes characterizing this community.1 It is within this group of practical natural1. The use of the adjective “practical” to denote hands-on naturalists may be found earlier in England, though in a less programmatic sense, as in a “practical botanist” to arrange herbarium specimens: William Hooker, quoted by A. Secord, “Science in the Pub” (1994), 290. David E. Allen notes that “ ‘practical’ was a vogue word” among naturalists of the early nineteenth century: D. Allen, The Botanists (1986), 11. My thanks to Anne Secord for calling my attention to these references. In the 1870s, largely thanks to T. H. Huxley’s teaching reforms, “practical” biology came to mean working with microscopes—still a hands-on task, but a practice that was closely associated with his laboratory-based vision

36

Chapter two

ists, I argue, that we fi rst see most clearly the growing edge of the sensibility about nature that by the early twentieth century would be called the biological perspective. In mid-nineteenth-century Germany, practical natural history did not describe simply a set of practices but also a program for engaging with nature—one that celebrated the observation of living animals in their natural surroundings, the most fundamental attribute of the biological perspective. The program went further, aiming to broaden participation in natural history, as a counter to the perceived domination of the field by university and museum scientists. Practical natural history went beyond promoting the passive enjoyment of nature that appealed to readers of magazines and casual zoogoers to proclaim the value of practical, hands-on knowledge of animals as equal to scholarly knowledge organized around zoological classification. The most thorough exposition of this program appeared in Martin’s three-volume Praxis of Natural History, published between 1869 and 1882. 2 The ostensible object of the handbook was to help craftsmen develop greater skill in practical natural history, by teaching the proper way to preserve, mount, and display dead animals for the museum (volumes 1 and 2) and to care for living animals in captivity (volume 3). Underlying these hands-on instructions, Martin’s aim was to raise the profi le of practice within natural history and simultaneously to make living nature more accessible, whether in the form of live animals or “lifelike” displays. To restore life to natural history meant simultaneously to liberate it from the deadening science of systematics and to bring nature to the people. The animal collector, sometime zoo director, and popular writer Alfred E. Brehm articulated similar goals in his much-loved Tierleben (Anof biology. Similarly, in America a hands-on collector might occasionally be described as a “practical” naturalist before the mid-1870s, but after Huxley and Martin’s introduction to “practical” biology was published (and used widely) in the United States, the adjective seems to have been restricted almost exclusively to laboratory manuals in botany and zoology. Huxley and Martin, A Course of Practical Instruction (1875); Caron, “ ‘Biology’ in the Life Sciences” (1988); Gooday, “ ‘Nature’ in the Laboratory” (1991). For an example of an American collector-taxidermist being referred to as “practical,” see “Notes,” American Naturalist 6 (1872): 127. After this date, the term “practical” does not arise in this connection any more in the American Naturalist, whereas it appears in many titles of laboratory manuals (but no field manuals). 2. See P. Martin, Praxis (1869–82). The different volumes underwent separate multiple editions: vol. 1, Taxidermie, 1st ed., 1869; 2nd ed., 1876; 3rd ed., 1886; vol. 2, Dermoplastik und Museologie, 1st ed., 1870; 2nd ed., 1880; vol. 3: Naturstudien, pt. 1, 1878; pt. 2, 1882.

Bringing Life to Natural History

37

imal life; 1st ed., 1864–69), a best-selling illustrated encyclopedia of animal life directed at a broad, middle-class audience. Like Martin, Brehm sought to restore to natural history an emphasis on the “life and activity of animals,” a project that required observing them via “a life of hunting and wandering.” Criticizing museum scientists in the opening of his encyclopedia, he wrote: “Indeed, at times one has the impression that it is considered incompatible with science to devote more time and space to the life and activity of animals than is strictly necessary to prove that the object in question is a living thing—that is, not only a being that feels and is capable of movement, but one that takes actions and acts to effect an end.” 3 Museum-based scientists, with their love of “dissection and attention to system,” Brehm wrote, neglected this essential aspect of natural history. Like Martin, Brehm viewed systematic zoology as bloodless, boring, and one sided, obsessed with problems of similarity and difference to the exclusion of the far more interesting task of understanding living animals in their natural conditions of existence. It is worth examining in some detail the lives and forms of work undertaken by practical naturalists such as Martin and Brehm, to uncover the social and economic conditions under which natural history operated in mid-nineteenth-century Germany, and to analyze how these conditions shaped the perceived need for reform and the possibilities for producing it. While some excellent broad-scale studies of popular natural history in Germany have been published, including Andreas Daum’s essential work on science popularization and Susanne Köstering’s excellent study of museum displays, we are still only beginning to understand the social history of natural history in Germany. A few outstanding local studies exist, including especially Ayako Sakurai’s close study of natural history institutions in Frankfurt and Denise Phillips’s examination of Dresden’s society for natural science, the Isis Society; these help us understand the intersections of social and cultural history of natural history in specific detail.4 The analysis of practical natural history in this chapter and the next expands this picture by using the careers of a handful of prominent practical naturalists—especially Martin, but also Brehm, Hermann Ploucquet, Franz Leven, and Gustav 3. Brehm, Illustriertes Thierleben (1864), vii. Although the official title of the book included the word “illustrated” (and this was a significant aspect of its appeal), it was commonly known as “Brehm’s Tierleben.” 4. Sakurai, “Science, Identity, and Urban Reinvention” (2006); Phillips, “Friends of Nature” (2003).

38

Chapter two

Jaeger—to illuminate the broader social and institutional structures of natural history in Germany at midcentury. These structures formed the baseline from which the reforms discussed in subsequent chapters would proceed. The variety of ways of making a living as a practical naturalist in this period reflected the social and institutional diversity of natural history itself. Although most practical naturalists were prevented by their humble origins from obtaining the education that would allow them to rise to the highest ranks in the natural history community, they participated in a range of projects that shows how diverse and open ended the patronage structure for natural history was at midcentury. Setting aside practical naturalists’ work with living animals until chapter 3, here I concentrate on taxidermy. Employment opportunities for taxidermists ranged from the closely controlled, state-run natural history cabinets through looser private arrangements to autonomous businesses in “artistic” taxidermy, which might include running a private museum for profit. These different sponsorship arrangements, I argue, tended to sort into parallel aesthetic regimes surrounding what a “lively” display should look like, and how such displays related to nature’s truths. Both artistic taxidermists and museum scientists tended to view displays of animals in action and in naturalistic settings as oppositional to scientific displays organized for classificatory purposes. The consequence was that by about 1880, group displays were often considered unscientific and associated with private, for-profit taxidermy rather than with science—a situation that a later generation of museum reformers would have to overcome.

The Taxidermic Life Taxidermy was a pivotal occupation of the practical naturalists. It would become a key vehicle for reform through the rise of artistic taxidermy, which sought to depict animals in active, lifelike poses. Sometimes taxidermists could draw on their own experience in creating such poses, for not only were taxidermists responsible for conserving animal skins and bodies—a necessity for pursuing traditional collection-based natural history—they often were also involved in the hunt for animals and thus had contact with them in their natural settings before killing them. Taxidermists thus often had direct field experience with animals in nature that gave them expertise in representing living nature and lent author-

Bringing Life to Natural History

39

figure 2.1. Philipp Leopold Martin. Photographic portrait. From Martin, Taxidermie, 3rd ed. (1886), frontispiece.

ity to their cause. Working outward from Martin’s career as a taxidermist, and comparing it with the career of Alfred Brehm, we can begin to sketch a picture of the political economy of natural history in the German states at midcentury (figure 2.1). As Martin’s life shows, there were several ways to make a living as a taxidermist in mid-nineteenth-century Germany, most of them not very secure. He was born the son of a baker in 1815 in the Silesian village of Gnadenberg; we lack information about his education there, and the origins of his interests in taxidermy remain murky. He began his career

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as a taxidermist in the nearby town of Bunzlau, 5 where he advertised himself as a “private conservator,” that is, a taxidermist who supplied his services to individuals. This most likely meant preserving creatures hunted locally, including deer, wild boar, wolves, and especially birds, though it may have included pets as well.6 It was a hard living, and, judging by the scarce evidence from this period of his life, not a lucrative one. In 1842 he wrote the Berlin zoologist Martin Hinrich Lichtenstein, who was in charge of the Prussian state’s zoology collection in Berlin, to inquire about a more secure living, but nothing came of it. In 1848 he wrote again to offer his services to the Berlin zoology museum. This time he sent along two samples of his art—“young foxes with their prey and a female owl bringing a field mouse to its young” 7—which show him already having developed an aesthetic of portraying local animals in their activities of life consistent with the genres of painting and sculpture of the hunt supported by courtly and wealthy landowning art patrons.8 Lichtenstein could not offer him a position, but Martin found another way out of Bunzlau. The landscape painter, botanist, and soon-to-be explorer Carl Ferdinand Appun, the son of a publisher in Bunzlau, was organizing a trip to South America and chose Martin to accompany him as 5. Information on Bunzlau and Gnadenberg come from E. Dewitz, Geschichte des Kreises Bunzlau (1885), 40–46, 92–105. 6. The wild animals are mentioned prominently in Praxis, vol. 1. In addition, Martin refers to a wolf he had stuffed in the winter of 1843–44 in P. Martin, “Wie zahme Gänze begierige Fleischfresser wurden” (1854), 179–80. He refers to wood grouses he had preserved before 1850, in P. Martin, “Das Abändern der Luftfröhre” (1870). A contemporary of Martin, Hermann Ploucquet, preserved pets for his clients in Stuttgart as a young man. See below. 7. I. Jahn, “Zum Gedächtnis an Karl Kaestner” (1995), 54. 8. Among painters, scenes of animals killing one another, thereby displaying the depravity of the bestial world, reach back at least to the late seventeenth century and are sometimes hard to distinguish from hunting scenes in which hunting dogs drag down trophy animals such as bears, wolves, and deer—see, e.g., Carl Borromaeus Andreas Ruthart’s late seventeenth-century Bärenhetze—reproduced as plate 34 in Seifert and Winkler, Tiere der Wildnis (1978). These themes would be carried over into sculpture especially by the French school of animaliers beginning with Antoine-Louis Barye, with such works as Tiger Devouring a Crocodile (1831) and Lion and Snake (1833). The genre of hunting paintings was popular throughout the nineteenth century as well, represented in paintings of both the European hunt and big-game hunting in exotic locales associated with the spread of empire. See MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature (1988), esp. on Edward Landseer, 27–34, 46–47; and Ludwig, “Joseph Wolf in Darmstadt” (2000), 87–95. Sculpture of the hunt was not unheard-of either: in the early 1850s, King Wilhelm I of Württemberg decorated the terraced garden behind one of his castles with a trio of hunting sculptures by Albert Güldenstein, with the descriptive titles Wolves Tear at a Stag (1852), Sow Hunt with Three Dogs (1853), and Bear Hunt (1853). T. Jahn, Die königliche Gärten (2000), 85.

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his preparator. The aging patron saint of German natural history, Alexander von Humboldt, lent his moral support to the expedition, which was fi nanced largely through the sale of shares in the venture, for which Martin’s obligations included not only preparing specimens but also making daguerrotypes of Indians for the shareholders.9 Financing such a trip through the sale of shares was just becoming a viable way of supporting natural history in the German-speaking states in the mid-nineteenth century. In contrast to Britain, where the imperial and naval bureaucracies provided opportunities for natural-historyrelated travel (well beyond the most famous case of Darwin’s voyage on H.M.S. Beagle),10 most of the German states had more modest resources and aspirations. To be sure, some royal and princely families staged expeditions with diplomatic or military import—most notable here is the Austrian crown, which acted as a patron for a number of expeditions in a tradition stretching back to the eighteenth century. Austria, too, was unique among the German states in mobilizing its military apparatus for natural history.11 By contrast, the Prussian government expected its museum (which was also the museum of the university in Berlin) to fi nance the expansion of its collections through the sale of duplicate specimens—a strategy that meant that the Berlin museum was constantly underfunded and unable to send out its own expeditions.12 And the many smaller principalities often had even less to spare for natural history adventures. Thus, natural history travel by Germans tended not to be fi nanced directly by the state or the crown, but in other ways: by wealthy individuals, often from the nobility; by the regional scientific societies that were becoming a more prominent feature of the social landscape by the 1840s; by subscription or joint-stock organizations in which the shareholders expected something in return (as in the case of the Appun-Martin expedition); by selling living and preserved animals acquired during the expedition to cover its costs; or by some combination of these. If an expedition involved a wealthy person or group, it very often included as well 9. Appun, Unter den Tropen (1871), vi; I. Jahn, “Zum Gedächtnis an Karl Kaestner” (1995), 55. 10. Among the many works that attend to this situation, see esp. Camerini, “Remains of the Day” (1990); Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China (2004); and Larsen, “Not since Noah” (1993). 11. Riedl-Dorn, “Tiere auf weiter Fahrt” (2002). 12. I. Jahn, “Zur Vertretung der Zoologie” (1985), 265–66.

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a man or two of practical knowledge educated enough to serve as a companion on the hunt but who could also take the lead in the dirtier kind of work associated with preserving animals, alive or dead. Bourgeois naturalist-travelers were more likely to have to do this work themselves.13 In the absence of a systematic overview of the fi nancing of German natural history expeditions, we may consider the variety of expeditions undertaken by Martin’s younger contemporary Alfred Brehm (1829–84) as indicative of the possible combinations. The son of a minister and prominent ornithologist (from whom he evidently learned to prepare and preserve birds), Brehm came from a family at the educated end of the spectrum of practical naturalists. Brehm, who would make his name as a popular travel writer and zoo director before gaining enduring fame in Germany for his Animal Life, undertook his many natural history adventures under a variety of auspices. Having fi nished his schooling in his native village of Unterrenthendorf in Thüringen, he fi rst apprenticed to a bricklayer and then studied architecture for a year at the art academy in Dresden. Eager for adventure, in 1847 the eighteen-year-old Brehm leapt at the chance to accompany the Württemberg baron John Wilhelm von Müller to northern Africa—an expedition his father reluctantly allowed because it would expand his own ornithological collections.14 Although von Müller initially supported Brehm, he ran out of money and returned home to raise more cash, in part by selling the living and preserved animals Brehm had collected in the early part of the expedition. Brehm stayed behind in Africa to prepare for further travel, but the baron never returned, and he sent only part of the needed funds. The five years Brehm spent in the regions of the Nile during this adventure were supported by friends, to some of whom he went into serious debt. He recouped his fi nancial obligations through the sale of the ornithological and zoological collections he brought back with him in 1852, which included over 1,400 bird skins and a small menagerie of living animals.15 13. Records are sparse on who actually did the skinning and preserving of animals shot on big-game hunts and on natural history expeditions. While it seems very possible that men of high social status engaged in such activities as part of a masculine ethos of hunting, the very presence of skilled practical naturalists on larger hunts suggests that they were in charge of such work. 14. Müller would later become director of the zoos in Brussels (1852) and Marseilles (1854). [W.] Stricker, “Baron Joh. W. von Müller” (1866), 476. On Brehm, see Museumsführer der Brehm-Gedenkstätte Renthendorf. 15. Museumsführer der Brehm-Gedenkstätte Renthendorf, 9–10.

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Further fi nancial troubles truncated Brehm’s university education in Jena, where his father’s influence had overcome his lack of a humanistic high school education and made way for his admission. After just two years of study, he received a Ph.D. based not on a formal academic dissertation but on a collection of contributions to the Journal für Ornithologie and excerpts from his forthcoming book on his north African expedition.16 Despite his fi nancial woes, his next expedition, to the Iberian Peninsula (1856–57), appears also to have been largely undertaken on borrowed funds, repaid after the fact through the sale of the ornithological collection he and his brother Reinhold built during the expedition. His trip to Norway and Lapland in 1860 would be backed by Ernst Keil, editor of the popular family magazine Die Gartenlaube, to which Brehm was a frequent contributor.17 In 1876 the restless traveler would once again make a major expedition—this time to western Siberia with the Bremen ornithologist Otto Finsch; this trip was fi nanced by a combination of monies from the Association for the German North-Pole Expedition (Verein für die Deutsche Nordpolarfahrt) in Bremen, subscription contributions from the people of Bremen, the city-state itself, the Prussian Academy of Sciences, a wealthy Russian investor, and sales of plant and animal specimens (collectively known in the trade as “naturalia”) and ethnographic artifacts collected during the expedition.18 Thus, in financing his expeditions Brehm took full advantage of the rising popularity of vicarious natural history adventuring among middle-class Germans, which found expression in the family magazines that devoted much space to bringing the larger world into the German parlor; voluntary associations devoted to natural history, geography, and ethnography; and public and private natural history collections, which grew rapidly through the efforts of both overseas travelers and backyard enthusiasts. But the bourgeoisie had not completely taken over. Natural history travel also persisted as a noble and courtly hobby, especially in conjunction with the hunt, and Brehm continued to make occasional use of noble pockets. In 1862 he accompanied the duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (brother to the British royal consort Prince Albert) to Egypt and Abyssinia as part of a sizable entourage.19 Beyond bagging exotic animal tro16. Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung (1998), 392. 17. Museumsführer der Brehm-Gedenkstätte Renthendorf. 18. Finsch, Reise nach Siberien (1879), xvii–xxiii. 19. The party included not only Brehm but also three friends from the nobility, the duke’s personal physician, a number of their wives (including Brehm’s), an artist, another

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figure 2.2. Frontispiece from Sachsen-Coburg-Gotha, Reise des Herzogs Ernst von SachsenCoburg-Gotha nach Aegypten (1864). Chromolithograph by Robert Kretschmer. (Courtesy of Memorial Library, Department of Special Collections, University of Wisconsin.)

phies, the expedition also resulted in a sumptuous publication, the size of a medium tabletop, containing a large-print memoir by the duke and the duchess, along with twenty chromolithographs, four photographs, and two maps by the artist, Robert Kretschmer, who would later supervise the illustrations for Brehm’s Animal Life (figure 2.2). In contrast to this gift book, clearly meant for the duke’s friends, Brehm published his own memoir in octavo form, without illustrations and evidently priced for middle-class pockets, thereby conveying the experience of the noble safari (and the novel scenery and fauna it encountered) to a broader audience through words only. 20 Later, Brehm would become friendly with

naturalist, a cook, a handmaid, two gunsmiths, two “lackeys,” and three other servants. See Sachsen-Coburg-Gotha, Reise des Herzogs (1864), iv. 20. Ibid.; Brehm, Ergebnisse einer Reise nach Habesch (1863).

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Austria’s crown prince Rudolf, whom he would accompany to the middle Danube region for two weeks in 1878 and to Spain and Portugal in the spring of 1879. 21 Brehm’s natural history travels reveal the resources that could be mustered by a relatively impecunious but socially well-connected collector-naturalist, as well as the variety of social and monetary obligations entailed in these different forms of travel. Returning to Philipp Leopold Martin, we see a different side of the adventurous life of the collector. Martin’s one major expedition, to Venezuela in 1849 (fi nanced by subscriptions), reveals the hazards of such adventuring. Collecting in the South American jungle was more dangerous and less romantic than he had expected. The tone of his advice, decades later, to traveling naturalists, to leave the collecting of naturalia high up in trees to “natives practiced in climbing,” conveys his distaste for jungle realities. Such collecting, Martin wrote, “is dangerous in the highest degree. . . . The danger looms every second that out of the thousandfold crannies and clefts of this web a tree snake, massive ants, scorpions, or the disgusting millipede, etc., will fall, which can easily frighten the European.” 22 The difficulties of collecting were hardly the greatest of Martin’s troubles, though. The subscribers’ shares did not cover the unexpectedly high costs of the voyage, the threat of war with Denmark made it difficult to arrange return shipping for the specimens, and war and disease in South America made life dangerous, even outside the jungle. Martin’s wife Ida, whom he had married in 1840 in Bunzlau and who had accompanied him on the trip, died in Venezuela in the fall of 1849.23 Ill, poor, and depressed, Martin returned to Germany. He took piecework preparation jobs at the university in Halle, then spent a few months stuffi ng birds at the private ornithological museum of the landholder Ferdinand Heine in Halberstadt, one of the largest such collections in Germany at the time.24 These short-term contracts meant a continued hand-to-mouth existence, and Martin considered emigrating to Amer21. Museumsführer der Brehm-Gedenkstätte Renthendorf. 22. P. Martin, Praxis (1869–82), vol. 1 (3rd ed.), 105. 23. Information about Martin’s early career derives from I. Jahn, “Zum Gedächtnis an Karl Kaestner” (1995). Specifics about his fi rst wife, Ida, come from Noell, Paul Martin (1987), 7. 24. On Ferdinand Heine and his collection, see Nicolai, Neuhaus, and Holz, Museum Heineanum (1994), 4–13.

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ica. Instead, he obtained a position working for the Polish count Casimir Wodzicki in Galicia, an avid hunter and ornithologist with whom he found himself spending far more time hunting than working on the artistic preparation of the hunt’s yield. 25 Release from these frustrating circumstances came in late 1851, when Lichtenstein offered him a position as second “technical assistant” at the Berlin zoology museum, at the very modest salary of four hundred taler per year. 26 At thirty-six, Martin fi nally had a stable job. The Berlin zoology museum was a setting radically different from any in which Martin had worked before. The museum was part of the university, which had been established in 1810, and by midcentury, when Martin arrived, the museum’s collections took up the entire upper (second) story of the university building on Unter den Linden. As the chief natural history museum for the Prussian state, it served not only university scholars and students but a broader public as well. It was also home to the natural history collections formerly belonging to the Berlin Academy of Sciences, which had given them up to the university upon its founding; and the usual repository for naturalia received by the Prussian crown. 27 The museum was thus simultaneously an academic collection, a public institution, and a natural history repository for the Prussian crown: a state institution par excellence. With Martin’s move from private services to the Prussian bureau-

25. I. Jahn, “Zum Gedächtnis an Karl Kaestner” (1995). Although Jahn does not explicitly say that the Halberstadt museum is Heine’s, according to the museum (personal communication, December 2004), there was no other such museum in Halberstadt at the time. Wodzicki’s hunting interests were combined with a keen eye for the natural history of the birds he shot. This resulted in publications such as Wodzicki, “Ornithologischen Miscellen” (1856), and his numerous reports to the Deutsche Ornithologen-Gesellschaft. The Galicia referred to here is the province of Austria-Hungary, not the Spanish region. 26. His position in Berlin began in 1852. MfN d. HUB, HBSB, Personalia II: Littr. M: Acta betr. den zweiten technischen Gehülfen Leopold Martin (hereafter Berlin Personalakte Martin), vol. 1: bis 1857. 27. In this way, the natural history museum was unlike other royal collections such as the collections of paintings, sculpture, ethnography, and archaeology, which remained exclusively the property of the crown and were administered separately from the university. Historians have not addressed this administrative difference but rather have treated the various collections separately. On the history of the ethnology collection, see Penny, Objects of Culture (2002). On the art and archaeology collections at the “Museum Island,” see Bernau, “Von der Kunstkammer zum Musenarchipel” (1995). On the early history of the Berlin natural history museum, see Lichtenstein, Das Zoologische Museum (1816); I. Jahn, “Zur Vertretung der Zoologie” (1985); H. Landsberg, “Das erste Zootier des Museums” (1994); and Mauersberger, “Der Gründer des Berliner Zoologischen Gartens” (1994).

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cracy came explicit obligations and privileges, spelled out in a formal set of job specifications signed by the cultural minister Karl Otto von Raumer. In addition to preparing the specimens required by the museum, Martin was charged with guarding them, watching over the keys and over visitors during the hours the museum was open to the public. He was to keep the books on the traffic of specimens on loan. He was to be in the building six days a week from nine to one o’clock and three to six o’clock (or, in winter, until darkness prevented further work), and longer when necessary. However—perhaps because Lichtenstein was conscious of the extreme modesty of Martin’s salary—he was specifically allowed to use the museum premises to prepare specimens for personal gain, not only after hours but also during the day. 28 Thus, although he was merely a low-ranking “technical assistant” within the state bureaucracy, he had remarkable leeway to conduct his own private work on the job. During his five years working under Lichtenstein, Martin flourished. Taking full advantage of his privileges, he set up a workroom in a loft under the roof for his private work and ran a lively taxidermic business out of the museum. Nor did he spend all day in his workroom—he would later warmly recall spending many hours with Lichtenstein at the Berlin zoo (which Lichtenstein also ran), and he attributed to Lichtenstein a view that he himself shared, “that natural history can correctly and persuasively be taught not in the museum but only in living nature itself.” 29 His circumstances at the museum also evidently helped him muster the courage to commit some of his own natural history observations to print: during his time in Berlin, Martin published eleven short notes in the Journal für Ornithologie, the journal of the Berlin-based German Ornithological Society (Deutsche Ornithologen-Gesellschaft), edited by Jean Cabanis, curator of birds at the museum and Martin’s close contemporary. 30 This happy state would not continue, however. Lichtenstein, his liberal and ever-supportive boss, died suddenly while on vacation, in early 28. “Instruction für den zweiten technischen Gehülfen bei der zoologischen Samlung hierselbst, Berlin,” 3 April 1852, fol. 2, in MfN d. HUB, HBSB, Berlin Personalakte Martin. The conjecture about Lichtenstein’s being concerned about Martin’s salary was fi rst made by Peters, “Philipp Leopold Martin” (1957–58), 29–35. 29. P. Martin, Praxis (1869–82), vol. 3, pt. 1:30 (quotation), 32. 30. Cabanis was also the author of the four-part catalog of Ferdinand Heine’s ornithological collection in Halberstadt and may have gotten to know Martin there in 1850–51. Cabanis, Verzeichniss der ornithologischen Sammlung (1850–51).

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September 1857. Lichtenstein’s successor, Wilhelm Karl Hartwig Peters, had no sympathy for Martin’s freewheeling approach to his job. As second in command at the zoology museum since the end of 1856, he had had ample opportunity to observe Martin in action. He thought Martin had abused his privileges, “to the great disadvantage of the museum.” He abruptly forbade Martin to pursue his private naturalia business, allowing only that if there were occasional requests for his services from individuals outside the museum, Martin might request permission “in every single case” to pursue those artistic projects. 31 The relationship between the two deteriorated from there. The situation came to a head in August 1858, when Peters complained to the cultural minister about the effort required to get Martin to focus on his work for the museum and about his unauthorized use of a separate workroom, which made it difficult to keep an eye on Martin’s activities. He further expressed offense at Martin’s having gone over his head to the cultural minister to request vacation time to devote to his private business. Martin, for his part, surely felt the bite of Peters’s new constraints on his atelier operation, and he was frustrated by Peters’s demand that he mount all his specimens in identical poses, in contrast to the more lifelike mountings Lichtenstein had encouraged. 32 Fortunately, a reprieve came just a month later. At the end of September 1858, Martin received an invitation to move to Stuttgart, to succeed the famous taxidermist Hermann Ploucquet at the royal natural history cabinet of the kingdom of Württemberg. Ploucquet, who had decided to go into business for himself, had recently visited Berlin for several weeks, where he had seen Martin’s work; apparently this was where the impetus to hire Martin came from. He received a strong recommendation from the curator of malacology at the Berlin museum, Eduard von Martens, who argued for the “solidity” of Martin’s character, praised the vivid artistry of his work, and suggested that Martin was not the only person to chafe under Peters’s newfound authority. 33 Martin jumped at the chance to move, willing even, in the face of bureaucratic obstacles, to 31. “Erinnerung für den 2ten technischen Gehülfe der K. zoologischen Sammlung, Leopold Martin” (Berlin, 4. Nov. 1857), fol. 4, in Berlin Personalakte Martin. 32. Peters’s report on Martin, 30 August 1858, in Berlin Personalakte Martin; P. Martin, Praxis (1869–82), vol. 3, pt. 1:32. For parallel tensions, see Hopwood, “Artist versus Anatomist” (2007). 33. I. Jahn, “Zum Gedächtnis an Karl Kaestner” (1995), 56–57.

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forego his initial request to transfer his citizenship from Prussia to Württemberg and thus become eligible for a state pension there. 34 He left Berlin without a backward glance. Martin’s journey from private taxidermist to stuffer in the private service of wealthy naturalists and hunters, and from there to the Berlin natural history museum, shows a relentlessly striving man, an ambitious lover of nature who lacked the formal education to become a scientist but made a career out of the possibilities open to him in taxidermy. His early story, together with that of Brehm on his travels, also offers a window onto the complex infrastructure of German natural history in the 1840s and 1850s. The practices of natural history travel and collecting show natural history to have been a diverse enterprise, not yet dominated by the state and public collections that would grow so rapidly over the second half of the century. States and princely collections played a role, to be sure, but so did wealthy nobles and international entrepreneurs. Middle-class individuals participated in natural history as well, by making their own private collections, joining voluntary associations for natural history collecting, buying shares in joint-stock ventures that supported travelers, and purchasing the family magazines whose pages contained stories of natural history travel. Poorer individuals were not excluded from natural history but had less opportunity to undertake it as a hobby—working as a gardener, a forester, a taxidermist, or an animal collector was a more likely way to make a living connected with nature. All in all, from the perspective of the practical naturalist, the public museum and the scientific study of systematic zoology that depended on large collections represented the most scholarly and limited end of a spectrum of natural history activities—even if it offered the most stable job opportunities. As we will see, there were still other possibilities. In the 1860s and 1870s, Martin would work to make his own future, fi rst as a zoo entrepreneur and then by establishing his own private museum. To understand why he sought out these new options, we need to know more about Martin’s drive to reinfuse life into natural history and the means available at the time for carrying it out. 34. Leopold Martin to “Herr Professor” [probably Krauss], 4 October, 14 October, 20 October, 7 November 1858, letters A.1, A.2, A.3, A.5 in Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde in Stuttgart, Archiv, Personalakte P. L. Martin 1858–1874 (hereafter Stuttgart Personalakte Martin).

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Against the “Terrorism of System”: Martin on Taxidermic Displays A central theme of Martin’s Praxis, and of his work from the mid-1850s on, was a reformist impulse to reconstruct dead animals in a way that was both “natural” and “lively.” But what did this mean? Martin expressed one version in his critiques of taxidermy and museum display, which stretch from 1856 up into the early 1880s. In the same period, however, Martin’s professional orbit included at least three other models of “naturalness” and “liveliness.” One was supported by the two closely joined leading natural history institutions in Stuttgart, the Württemberg royal cabinet (where Martin worked from January 1859 until 1874) and the Association for the Study of Nature of the Fatherland (Verein für vaterländische Naturkunde). This model combined the requirements of a scientific collection with attention to the aesthetic interests of a broader public, resulting in an emphasis on “biological group” displays unique among public institutions in Germany at the time. A second version of lively display was that undertaken in their private collections by artistic taxidermists, some of whom created museums open to the public for a fee. These exhibits presented nature as a dramatic spectacle, often tipping over into explicit anthropomorphism. A third version came, again, from Martin, when he took the project of enlivening dead nature in a different direction, not by reconstructing recently killed animals but by representing prehistoric creatures. As we will see, this work would be pushed to the private, commercial side of a growing divide that allied public collections of naturalia with empirically secure science and private ones with imagination, art, and even crass entertainment. Martin fi rst committed to print his own vision for how to restore life to natural history in a little tract in the pages of the ornithological journal Naumannia in September 1856, while he was still working under Lichtenstein. 35 Here he decried the dead uniformity of animals taxidermically prepared for museums, noting in passing his surprise that he lacked predecessors in this written critique, given the widespread complaints about it among the public. In part he attributed the problem to the “cabinet systematists” who, he claimed, rarely viewed the living animal; in part he attributed it to the lack of professional training available to preparators, each of whom had to invent for himself the techniques 35. P. Martin, “Ueber zweckmässiges Sammeln” (1856).

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for rendering an animal in a lively fashion (as Martin himself apparently had done). Moreover, learned travelers, instead of concentrating on the scientific work they were qualified to carry out, too often tried to save money by doing their own initial conservation work instead of hiring a competent preparator to accompany them on their travels (again, Martin drew on experience). The results, all too frequently, were damages that could never be fully repaired—especially when the work was undertaken in tropical regions, where the animal skins putrefied rapidly. Another source of the lifelessness of conserved museum animals lay in scientists’ views of the appropriate forms of display in the museum. Martin was dismayed by the reduction of the living animal, an individual with a life, to a scientific specimen intended only to illustrate a taxonomic diagnosis. Taxonomic diagnoses in turn, he argued, turned far too often on minutely measured differences of form, rather than on such characteristics as how the animal typically held its body in life—characteristics that the field naturalist would recognize instantly. The uniformity of stance imposed on preserved animals and birds set the search for order of the cabinet systematist against nature’s order itself, which reflected far greater diversity and liveliness. 36 This was a theme to which Martin would return repeatedly in his career. By the time he published the second volume of his Praxis in 1870, on animal modeling and museum display, he had sharpened his rhetoric considerably, scorning the typical museum exhibition of stuffed animals: “Even with the very fi rst [exhibit] cases we can hardly suppress the feeling of an unending boredom, and it requires an unusual disposition to sustain patience and interest all the way to the last case.—Everywhere hopeless monotony, a complete lack of objective presentation, and no other instruction than that meager amount which we receive from the never-failing label, in a language understandable to only a few.” 37 Martin argued for overthrowing this approach to display and replacing it with two kinds of collections: a research collection of unmounted skins and hides, which would serve taxonomic science even better than the unnaturally posed stuffed animals, and which could be kept in drawers— a practice already adopted at the British Museum and the Imperial Netherlands Museum in Leyden; and a much smaller display collection 36. This critique was common among field naturalists and animal artists. See esp. the discussion of the artists François Le Vaillant, Charles Willson Peale, and Charles Waterton in Wonders, Habitat Dioramas (1993), 26–33. 37. P. Martin, Praxis (1869–82), 2:2.

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of naturalistically reconstructed animals, posed in family groups and showing changes of feather or coat color across the seasons. The family, he argued, was the true “central point of a species, as in life,” and the future task of the museum was to build displays showing families in their natural homes. 38 Later on in the book he would elaborate on this point, explaining how to preserve nests and how to reconstruct underground burrows using plaster casts, and noting that the reconstruction of some homes, such as those in cliffs, require the construction of artificial surroundings. 39 While Martin argued that the family life and home of animals provided the largest field open to the taxidermic artist, he also noted two other important modes of lively animal display: fighting animals and scenes of animals together representing particular geographic areas. Long before Darwin made popular the “struggle for existence,” Martin wrote, people had been fascinated by the prospect of animals fighting to the death, resulting both in sports such as bullfighting, cockfighting, and bearbaiting and in artistic depictions by painters and sculptors. Little wonder, he went on, that people demanded to see such scenes in the medium of taxidermic art as well. Cautioning against unrealistic exaggeration, Martin emphasized the need for anatomical correctness in such scenes as well as the need to capture the various passions of the animals engaged in the fight. For such scenes, which generally required greater space than those of “peaceful family life,” Martin suggested adding background paintings: “If we want to show effectively the pursuit of an antelope by a lion or a leopard, the painted background of a desert belongs [in the scene].” 40 Although he admitted that such effects were hard to achieve, he set them as a goal for the future. Martin’s other principal category of display came under the heading “geographic tableaus, faunal groups, or zone pictures.” He argued that faunal displays intended to depict entire geographic regions were problematic on both scientific and artistic grounds. Scientifically they were untenable, because different plants and animals never had exactly the same geographic distribution; as Alfred Russel Wallace had shown, 38. Ibid., 2:5–6. Susanne Köstering analyzes the social implications of Martin’s emphasis on animals’ domestic arrangements. Köstering, Natur zum Anschauen (2003), 166–168; for an English-language version, see Köstering, “Biology—Heimat—Family” (2005). 39. P. Martin, Praxis (1869–82), 2:65–68 (also 2nd ed., 1880, 2:74–76). 40. Ibid., 2:69 (also 2nd ed., 1880, 2:77).

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closed geographic regions did not in fact exist. Artistically they were infeasible, since the only way to show an entire geographic region in all its variety would be to do it in three-dimensional imitation of a circular painting or panorama where the viewer stood at the center—a prospect too complex and expensive to contemplate. Individual scenes from particular sites, on the other hand, were feasible and attractive; Martin suggested showing scenes in which “we integrate everything that can live together and really does live together under given conditions.” Here he suggested “pictures from the local zones” of the polar seas and lands, “nesting sites of seabirds, images of prairies and steppes, life in the woods, marsh and water birds, alpine animals, desert images from the hot zone, tropical river and lake life of animals, scenes from the jungles, savannas, etc., etc.” Such work would provide a never-ending field of possibility for the taxidermist, though choices should be made from those locales where both the animals and their surroundings were well known. (Martin took the famous British bird artist John Gould’s illustrations as exemplary in paying as much attention to the landscapes as to the birds.) He then went on to describe in detail how to make a threedimensional scene of this kind, using examples of a marsh, a forest scene, and an alpine scene, with attention to background painting, appropriate plant and ground materials, and the mixture of animals native to the landscape.41 A few examples of these three different theatrical genres of display— family life, animal combat, and faunistic scenes—already existed, Martin noted. Some were on exhibit at the natural history museum in Detmold, to which Martin himself had been supplying group displays since 1858, and which he claimed was the “fi rst public institution of its kind that dared to defy the antiquated customs of systematics [dem systematischen Zopf die Stirn zu bieten].” 42 His brief list also included the private museum of the preparator Hermann Ploucquet in Stuttgart, which 41. Ibid., 2:71–72 (2nd ed., 1880, 2:79–80). On Gould, who began his artistic career as a gardener and taxidermist, see Tree, The Ruling Passion of John Gould (1991); McEvey, John Gould’s Contribution (1973), which addresses the complex question of how much Gould owed to his assistant; J. Smith, Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture (2006); and, most recently, Voss, Darwins Bilder (2007), esp. 49–81. 42. McEvey, John Gould’s Contribution (1973), 6. According to Rainer Springhorn, in the 1860s the Detmold museum acquired “a family of ibex and chamois (the adults with a juvenile male, climbing a cliff), a group of lions (lion and lioness hunting antelope), a tiger family (stealing their prey from the leopard), a family of six house rats, etc.” It seems

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emphasized fight scenes; that of Franz Leven in Frankfurt, which boasted a spectacular alpine landscape; and the collection of Württemberg naturalia in Stuttgart, which contained not only family groups with their nests but also a number of birds of prey in fl ight. Outside the Germanspeaking states, Martin noted, the British Museum and the new Galician National Museum in Lemberg (now L’viv, Ukraine) were moving in this direction; two other German collections (in Munich and Donaueschingen) had also expanded beyond the taxonomic style, but in another direction, by showing exhibits of animals’ developmental stages.43 In the second edition of this volume, published in 1880, Martin grew harsher in his condemnation of the taxonomic approach to display, perhaps because so little progress had been made in the intervening decade. Although he repeated his analysis of lively display types and his suggestions for how to realize them, he now omitted the listing of museums that he had optimistically seen as opening a new day for lively display and replaced it with a more elaborate explanation of the continuing monotony of museum presentation. He now blamed this on “the oversized enthusiasm for collecting, the force of habit, and the terrorism of system.” 44 The systematist’s thirst for collecting was insatiable, since evidence for one taxonomic system or another could be mounted by piling up individuals with suitable characteristics. The implication here was that the quantity of specimens processed rather than the quality of their display was what scientists valued. This of course held implications for the taxidermist’s practice. Taxidermists in the high-volume taxonomist’s world were technicians; in Martin’s project, they were artists. The power of custom exacerbated the problem. “Since Buffon had the unhappy thought of mounting all mammals on white planks and all birds on turned stands,” Martin wrote, “these are dutifully imitated from the Seine to the Neva, and maybe over half the world.” Unfortunately, the standard of posing birds on horizontal dowels meant that those such as woodpeckers that normally perched on vertical tree trunks could not be displayed in a natural pose. According to Martin, the power of the Parisian model, which had persisted long past Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte likely that at least some of these were produced by Martin. Springhorn, “Die frühe Phase” (1985). Cited in Köstering, Natur zum Anschauen (2003). 43. P. Martin, Praxis (1869–82), 2:6–8. For the discussion of Leven’s alpine landscape, see 72. 44. Ibid., vol. 2 (2nd ed., 1880), 4.

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de Buffon, through the authority of Cuvier, was such that few scientific museums dared to try something new. But Martin reserved special scorn for the “terrorism of system,” which, he said, led scholars to treat preserved animals as mere specimens, “representations of one or another peg-legged system,” rather than as “replicas of living nature.” 45 While the particular meanings Martin intended by the term “terrorism” in 1880 are not fully clear, it seems likely that he meant to suggest a system that forcibly prevented deviation from the official line, in this case stifl ing individual expression—and to associate this with France, the source of both the original Terror and the Parisian system of mounting.46 He would return to these themes as late as 1884, in a multipart article in the journal Der Zoologische Garten.47 In 1856, though he had expressed many of the same sentiments, Martin had been less damning and more hopeful. Since a chief source of the poor quality of museum displays lay with the lack of suitably trained preparators, one solution would be to train more preparators in artistic taxidermy and display. Just as art museums housed art schools, natural history museums should house schools of taxidermy. “It may therefore please many people, and especially some heads of collections, to learn that at present at the royal zoological museum in Berlin there is the intention, insofar as circumstances permit, to erect a school for naturalia preparation, taxidermy and conservation.” 48 With Lichtenstein’s support, he had received permission to take on pupils to train them in the art of preparing animals in imitation of their natures. Upon Lichtenstein’s death in 1857, Martin’s plans to develop a school at Berlin died, too. But the sentiments Martin expressed in his 1856 tract, and again in 1870 and 1880, fitted in well with the path already be45. Ibid., vol. 2 (2nd ed., 1880), 5–7. The association of Buffon with the dry, systematic approach to display is surely unfair to the eighteenth-century scientist, who abhorred “system” and championed a dynamic approach to natural history. 46. Among the nearly three dozen uses of the word “Terrorismus” in Meyers Konversationslexikon, 4th ed. (1889), a popular encyclopedia roughly contemporary with Martin, there is a strong association with the absolute power of those in charge to frighten people into compliance (not only during the Jacobin Terror). See, e.g., the entry on AlsaceLorraine (Elsaß-Lothringen) in vol. 5, p. 582, which discusses “the terrorism of the clerics and the educated, who used public and secret means” to prevent administrative reforms from being carried out. A searchable version is available on the Web at http://susi.e_technik .uni_ulm.de:8080/Meyers2/index/index.html. 47. P. Martin, “Die wissenschaftlichen und die praktischen Aufgaben” (1884). 48. P. Martin, “Ueber zweckmässiges Sammeln” (1856), 15.

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ing undertaken by the Württemberg royal cabinet and the Württemberg Association for the Study of Nature of the Fatherland, where he moved in early 1859.

Stuttgart: Representing Nature for the Fatherland On its surface, the position Martin took up at the Württemberg royal cabinet in Stuttgart bore a close resemblance to the one he had held in Berlin, though perhaps even more regulated. He was to skin and mount birds, mammals, reptiles, and fish for the royal collection, to aid in preparing skeletons and wet preparations as necessary, and to procure the materials and tools needed for these tasks. He was to help keep track of the inventory and help with the organization and display of specimens, to protect them from damage, and to clean each piece once or twice a year. He was to be in the building from eight to noon and two to six in the evening, arriving promptly and leaving only with the permission of the curator. He received a key to the building and its rooms but would have to ask the conservators to open cabinets containing specimens. In special circumstances, he might have to guard the collections during visiting hours, and he might have to accompany “visitors of distinction” from time to time. And—more restrictively than under Peters in Berlin—he was allowed to prepare specimens on commission from private persons or other institutions only on his own time and not on the premises of the museum. He was also expressly forbidden to buy or sell collections of naturalia (which might place him in competition with the cabinet).49 Despite the many similarities to his Berlin position, and its even greater restrictiveness, the situation in Stuttgart looked auspicious. It was a fresh start, and the position was fi lled with the promise of collaboration on a common goal—representing nature in a more naturalistic way. As Martin wrote to the head of the Württemberg natural history cabinet in October 1858, this was just what he had striven for under Lichtenstein (figure 2.3). 50 Most important for Martin, the staff at the Württemberg cabinet already placed considerable emphasis on mount49. “Eidesvorhalt und Dienstanweisung für den ersten Präparator des NaturalienCabinets,” 20 January 1859, in Stuttgart Personalakte Martin. 50. Martin to “Herr Professor” [probably Krauss], 14 October 1858, item A.2 in Stuttgart Personalakte Martin. It is not clear whether Martin actually prepared animals for the Verein’s Württemberg collection, as he was employed by the cabinet. See p. 59 below.

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figure 2.3. Philipp Leopold Martin (second from right, working on bear) and colleagues at work in the “Präparatorium” of the royal natural history cabinet in Stuttgart. Cartoon by Ferdinand Schlotterbeck. The figure spying in through the window is Ferdinand Krauss. From Rauther, “Rückblick” (1940), 11. (Reproduced with permission of the Gesellschaft für Naturkunde in Württemberg e.V.)

ing specimens as they appeared in nature—for example, presenting ornithological groups of a male, a female, and a chick at a nest. This approach had a long history in the royal collections—as early as 1786 Duke Karl Eugen of Württemberg had acquired a large number of artistic taxidermic groups of local animals, including a display of a “fox stalking a quail sitting in a bush” and another of a “squirrel nest, in which a mother lay with the greatest tenderness and protected her four nursing young by laying a forepaw over their heads.” 51 Three years later the duke ordered that the gaps in the collection of Württemberg animals be fi lled, with each species represented by a male, a female, and a young specimen, selected for their “particular beauty with respect to color and form.” 52 Thus, the project of completing a local faunal collection was already underway before 1800, and it already included attention to repre51. Magazin für das Neueste aus Physik und Naturgeschichte, 1786, 78–81, quoted in K. Lampert, “Die naturhistorischen Museen” (1904), 23. See also Schüz, “Zur Geschichte der Heimatssammlung” (1964), which reprints the initial report and another one from 1796 (in which evidently only three of the suckling young were left). 52. K. Lampert, “Die naturhistorischen Museen” (1904), 23.

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senting the life histories and natural settings of the animals (though the latter appear to have been valued more for their aesthetic than their scientific worth). In the mid-nineteenth century this approach continued under the oversight of the zoological conservator Ferdinand von Krauss (1812–91), a bulwark of natural history in Württemberg and Martin’s immediate supervisor. Krauss was a guiding presence at the museum for fi fty years beginning in the early 1840s and himself an example of upward social mobility. His father was a master tanner, prosperous enough to send his son to the universities of Tübingen and Heidelberg. In the late 1830s, Karl Ferdinand Heinrich Baron von Ludwig, a recently ennobled Württemberger who had lived his adult life as a banker in South Africa, arrived in Stuttgart to donate a large collection of South African naturalia to Württemberg’s king. Krauss, then volunteering at the royal cabinet, had helped to unpack the collection and was smitten with the desire to travel to South Africa and collect more. He accompanied Baron von Ludwig on his return trip to South Africa and stayed there, fi rst living in von Ludwig’s household and then striking out on his own. Upon his return to Stuttgart with his own substantial collection of South African fauna, he was named assistant attendant of the royal cabinet, charged with ordering the existing collection and integrating his own collections from South Africa into it. He rapidly rose from this lowly post, becoming conservator of mineralogy in 1852 and of the biological collections in 1856, a position he held until his death in 1891. 53 During his long watch, the royal cabinet expanded its mission to one typical of nineteenth-century museums— trying to offer as complete as possible a picture of the system of nature. Under Krauss’s oversight the collections increased steadily, particularly those of exotic animals sent home by missionaries, business travelers, and diplomats (whose names were noted on the exhibit labels). 54 But Krauss’s attentions were not focused solely on the royal cabinet. In 1844, he cofounded the Württemberg Association for the Study of Nature of the Fatherland. One of the many regional natural science societies established across the German states during the 1840s, the asso53. Information on Krauss comes from Fraas, “Nekrolog von Dr. Ferdinand v. Krauss” (1891). 54. Ibid., xxxvii; C. König, “Forschungsreisende und ihre Verdienste” (1991). The presentation of donors’ names on exhibit labels was noted by a visitor to the collection in 1868: Droste, “Ueber Errichtung von sogenannten Landes-Museen” (1868), 414.

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ciation took as its mission to collect and disseminate information about the natural resources of the kingdom, for scientific and practical purposes (including those of hunting, farming, and resource-based industry), and also to awaken the love of local nature. 55 While the society’s aims may have been similar to those of the Duke Karl Eugen from the 1780s, they entailed a distinctly more democratic form of patriotism, with a membership of over four hundred by the 1860s that included not only members of the nobility and the physicians, apothecaries, professors, teachers, clergymen, and government officials of the universityeducated Bildungsbürgertum but also businessmen, booksellers, foresters, engineers, manufacturers, and “private individuals.” 56 In 1849 the association decided to establish its own communal collection, for which Krauss was named one of four curators (while still maintaining his position at the royal cabinet). In contrast to the systematic orientation of the royal cabinet, the collection of the association was devoted to illuminating the nature of the kingdom. Its exhibits were dominated by the biological group style of display, showing “the animals in both sexes from egg and chick through as many stages as possible . . . to the mature animal, with attention to regions, altitudes, mountain formations, river areas, etc.” 57 The new collection fi rst found a home in the headquarters of the local agricultural society in 1850; in 1864, when the royal cabinet expanded its space with a sumptuous new wing downtown, the association—for which Krauss then served as secretary as well as zoological conservator—arranged to integrate its collections into the state’s new “central collection of Württemberg naturalia,” while retaining property rights to its own collections (along with the attendant costs 55. Andreas Daum lists the natural science associations in Germany (most of which concentrated on natural history) by founding date in Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung (1998), 91–95, table 2. This shows a jump in foundings in the 1840s (from thirteen in the 1830s and ten or fewer per decade for the previous three decades) to twenty-four in the 1840s, twenty-two for the 1850s, and another jump to thirty-one for the 1860s. The number of foundings then declines to twenty-three for the 1870s, fi fteen for the 1880s, and ten for the 1890s. These associations and the broader social fabric of local natural history in Germany are just beginning to receive detailed scholarly attention: see Sakurai, “Science, Identity, and Urban Reinvention” (2006); and Phillips, “Friends of Nature” (2003). The aims of the Württemberg Association are spelled out in its statutes, published in Jahreshefte des Vereins für vaterländische Naturkunde in Württemberg 1 (1845): 8–14. 56. See, e.g., in the Jahreshefte des Vereins für vaterländische Naturkunde in Württemberg 21 (1865): 1–13, the list of “Ordentliche Mitglieder.” 57. Krauss, “Das k. Naturalien-Cabinet in Stuttgart” (1878), 154.

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of maintaining and expanding them). The association’s ruling committee and the royal cabinet’s curators were to work closely together—not difficult given the overlap in personnel. 58 Thus, the royal collection, the association, and the state entered into a cozy relationship, and the collection of Württemberg naturalia, with its characteristic emphasis on animals in their family groups and natural settings, became a distinctive feature of the state’s museum. 59 A tight connection between the state, the royal collection, and a civic association for natural history was characteristic not only of Stuttgart. During the middle and especially the later decades of the nineteenth century, public and private collections across the German states developed similar symbiotic relationships. Already by the beginning of the nineteenth century, many of the princely collections had opened to the public; whether titled “royal” or “state” cabinets, and whether funded from a royal family’s private funds or by the state, they functioned as public collections of the state. In a separate trend, bourgeois civic associations for the study of nature were founded in many localities in the early and midnineteenth century. Such groups were private voluntary associations that usually rented a common space to house their collections of books, instruments, and natural history objects. As time went on, the collections of active associations would outgrow their original spaces; they then often asked local, provincial, or state governments to help house the collections, either by selling or donating them to the governmental body, or by arranging subsidies in return for which the associations would open up their museums to public visitation.60 By these various means, government and association collections mingled to create public museums that amalgamated the functions and values of both. The Württemberg collection in Stuttgart was one of the earliest to do this, and the resulting combination of systematics (for the global collection of the royal cabinet) and biological groups (for the Württemberg collection) would set a trend for later provincial, regional, and local museums. In developing

58. Krauss, “Rechenschafts-Bericht” (1865), 23–31. 59. The museum’s emphasis on local fauna arranged in biological groups was taken as a model for newly forming regional and provincial museums as early as 1868: Droste, “Ueber Errichtung von sogenannten Landes-Museen” (1868). 60. Susanne Köstering gives examples of all of these situations in Köstering, Natur zum Anschauen (2003), 30–39. The examples of Hamburg and Bremen will be discussed in greater detail later in this book.

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this connection, however, curators came up against the question of just how flamboyant biological groups could be and still strike the right tone for a public collection. This question became acute in the face of private, commercial displays of nature.

Commercial Displays: Nature as Spectacle The approach to naturalism expressed in the royal Württemberg collection, with its family groups posed in characteristic attitudes of life, was not the only one available at the time. Martin’s predecessor as preparator, Hermann Ploucquet (1816–78), whose departure in 1858 opened up the position for Martin, had left to pursue a different, more artistic way to reconstruct nature. Ploucquet was a year younger than Martin but by the end of the 1850s had gained a reputation well beyond that of his contemporary. He was another of those who pressed for greater artistry and naturalness in the taxidermic art, though he did so more by example than by writing about it. His life story shows marked resemblances to Martin’s and is worth an excursus here.61 The youngest son of impoverished dyers in Stuttgart, Ploucquet evinced early on a talent for catching, preserving, and mounting small animals and birds in lively poses, using methods he invented himself. He was reported to have hoped to become a sculptor or a painter, but the need to secure a living in order to take care of his ailing parents foreclosed that future. Instead, he was apprenticed to the royal gardener, using his free time on Sundays and in the evenings to supplement his inadequate royal income by making and selling taxidermic preparations, often of the deceased pets of Stuttgart families. In 1833, at seventeen, having completed his apprenticeship, and with skills evidently tending more toward animals than plants, he was taken into service as an assistant stuffer in the royal cabinet. He had been working there for seven years when Krauss arrived. We know little about the specific animals Ploucquet prepared for the royal cabinet in Stuttgart, other than that there were many. Thanks to 61. Information on Ploucquet, unless otherwise noted, derives from Ploucquet’s unattributed obituary, “Hermann Ploucquet †” (1878); and Dolmetsch, “Alt-Stuttgarter Erinnerungen” (1925). Copies of both in Archiv des Staatlichen Museums für Naturkunde in Stuttgart.

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his commercial success, we know more about his side projects. While working six days a week during daylight hours at the cabinet, Ploucquet continued to prepare mountings for private display and purchase, branching out to include comic and satirical anthropomorphic displays of animals. In 1850 he presented some of his group displays at a trade show in Leipzig, which won him much acclaim; this success emboldened him the next year to submit a series of taxidermic mountings to the famous Crystal Palace Exhibition in London. Ploucquet’s Crystal Palace exhibits were a hit. His gory displays of hounds baiting a boar, or bringing down a stag, and of hawks pouncing upon their prey contrasted thrillingly with his sentimental naturalistic scenes of domestic birds and their young—though one revolted British commentator wrote that the bloody hunting displays were “disgustingly painful; and unless the artist meant them to ornament the vestibule of a slaughter-house, we can hardly see what possible destination he intended for his handiwork” (figure 2.4).62 Gory and unpleasant though the hunting and predator-prey scenes might be, Ploucquet was in fact tapping into genres that had been popular in the medium of painting since the eighteenth century, and that were also already in fashion among some sculptors.63 In adapting such scenes to the taxidermic art, Ploucquet was taking familiar themes and replaying them in a potentially still more realistic medium. Nor was he the only taxidermist to do so at the Crystal Palace; preserved animals, including hunting scenes, abounded, especially among British and North American exhibitors.64 Thus, Ploucquet’s scenes of the chase were not completely novel, gruesome as they were. What attracted special attention was another kind of animal exhibit that Ploucquet initiated: a series of explicitly anthropomorphic scenes—as one catalog put it, groups “in imitation of the attitudes, habits, and occupations of rational creatures. The precise expression of intelligence given to these animals has formed one of the many attractions of the Exhibition.” 65 Ploucquet showed a weasel schoolmaster teaching reluctant rabbit pupils, a group of six ermines taking tea, duelling dormice, and so on (figure 2.5). Most substantial was his series of mounts illustrating the fable of Reynard the Fox. This tale, already famous among Germans, had been made even more so by Goethe’s poem 62. “The Natural History of the Exhibition” (1851), 135. 63. See n. 8. 64. “The Natural History of the Exhibition” (1851). 65. Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry (1851), 1120.

figure 2.4. Hermann Ploucquet, Crystal Palace hounds taking down a boar (top) and a stag (bottom). From Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 1851: Offi cial Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue, vol. 3, Foreign States (1851), fig. 220.

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figure 2.5. Illustration of Hermann Ploucquet’s taxidermic mount, titled “Kittens at Tea” by the Illustrated London News, at the Great Exhibition. The “kittens” were really ermines, which explains their elongated bodies. From Illustrated London News, 26 July 1851, 135.

on the subject, and had gained renewed interest in 1846 when a new edition of the latter appeared, illustrated by Wilhelm Kaulbach, painter to the royal Bavarian court. Ploucquet selected a number of Kaulbach’s illustrations to reproduce three-dimensionally, using preserved animals. This was bringing natural history to life, indeed, but in a way that had nothing to do with science.66 Encouraged (and enriched) by his success at the Crystal Palace, Ploucquet began exhibiting his creatures at other sites. In 1858 he resigned from the Württemberg royal cabinet to devote himself full-time to running a private, commercial museum. This displayed both his anthropomorphic exhibits and his many gory scenes of animals killing one another. A description from 1858 indicates that the museum was crowded from floor to ceiling with animal scenes constructed so that “everything 66. Ploucquet’s display sparked a children’s book called The Comical Creatures of Wurtemberg [sic], which used a combination of daguerrotyping and woodcut to transfer the three-dimensional scenes to paper; the enterprising author-publisher David Bogue added story text to flesh out the pictures. Transferred to paper, Ploucquet’s stuffed animals gained an enduring place in British children’s culture and in the modern history of the animal fable. Ploucquet et al., The Comical Creatures (1851). The original Kaulbach illustrations from which Ploucquet drew his scenes were reproduced “by English artists” in Arnold, Reynard the Fox (1860). Franz Leven, an artistic taxidermist in Frankfurt, would also produce a series of Reynard the Fox mounts; see Sakurai, “Science, Identity, and Urban Reinvention” (2006), 181.

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appears to be alive and simultaneously to be in a more or less continual fight to the death.” 67 Ploucquet’s life story from this point on illuminates the risks of the private museum business. The state appropriated the site of his museum for a railroad station in the mid-1860s; although he received recompense in the form of new quarters near the polytechnic school, these were only temporary. Ploucquet decided to move his collection to Vienna, but by 1866 war and unfortunate fi nancial choices led him to return to Stuttgart, where a few years later he sold his collection to “a consortium that displayed it in the garden of the new Stuttgart mineral baths,” 68 which provided enough capital for him to live out his years in a modest existence on the outskirts of town. Since the time he had left the royal cabinet he had been nearly blind (possibly a result of working with arsenic for too many years in enclosed spaces), so after he sold his collection he modeled no more.69 Ploucquet’s story is not the only one of a taxidermic artist pursuing a more dramatic form of representing nature. Franz Leven (?–1883), a contemporary of Ploucquet and Martin, developed his own commercial museum on similar principles. Leven is a somewhat shadowy historical figure.70 He fi rst worked as the conservator at the natural history cabinet at the University of Heidelberg, while also running an independent museum of his own preparations and a small zoo of local animals in the Heidelberg city forest. In the mid-1850s, he moved to Frankfurt, where he displayed his taxidermic groups in a “zooplastic cabinet.” (Plastik is 67. Büchele, Stuttgart und seine Umgebungen (1858). Quoted in Köstering, Natur zum Anschauen (2003), 159. 68. According to Ploucquet’s obituary in the Stuttgart Neues Tageblatt (“Hermann Ploucquet †” [1878]), the consortium resold it to the joint-stock company that ran the Crystal Palace permanent exhibition at Sydenham, where the collection was displayed until destroyed by fi re in 1936. This is confi rmed by a notice in 1873 stating that “the famous Ploucquet Group-Museum in Stuttgart has been sold to London for fl . 85,000 and will go there in the next few days.” “Miscellen” (1873), 397. Some of Ploucquet’s exhibits are still extant in private hands. Tia Resleure, personal communication, 4 February 2004. Resleure is the proprietor of the Web site www.acaseofcuriosities.com, which has photos of some of Ploucquet’s original exhibits. 69. On Ploucquet see n. 61 above. The attribution of Ploucquet’s blindness to arsenic comes from a letter from W. Scaloud to the Bavarian interior ministry, 7 April 1893, in Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, MK 19431: Akademie der Wissenschaften: Zoologisches Institut und zoologisch-zootomische Sammlung, In genere. 70. Information on Leven comes from Rieke-Müller and Dittrich, Der Löwe brüllt (1998); Sakurai, “Science, Identity, and Urban Reinvention” (2006); Hammer, “Zooplastik” (1860).

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a German term for sculpture; “zooplastic” thus referred to his animal models.) Martin suggested that the timing of Leven’s decision to found a museum was no coincidence: “Leven . . . had hardly heard of Ploucquet’s success when he rushed to come out with a representation of the animals of the alps.” 71 Like Ploucquet’s museum, Leven’s housed both naturalistic animal scenes (featuring especially animals in combat) and humorous anthropomorphic scenes of clothed animals. Unlike Ploucquet’s museum, Leven’s concentrated as much on the animals’ settings as on their poses. In 1860 Leven mounted part of his collection as a temporary show in Dresden, where a commentator expressed the wish that all museums would adopt this naturalistic exhibition style instead of simply furthering the “systematic scientific” approach to display. “How often has one seen stuffed lions and tigers that far more resemble stretched-out sofas, with some kind of face at one end and a tail at the other, than noble animal bodies!” In Leven’s museum, by contrast, “right upon entering one believes oneself to be transported to the forest and the mountains. Cliffs, gorges, gloomy fi rs, bushes, reeds, moss, and grasses surround us, and corresponding to these local and vegetable differences, which are artificially formed from natural materials, are the most manifold groups of animals, which are stuffed with such anatomical and artistic understanding that they appear to live.” 72 This appears to be the fi rst German museum on record to have reconstructed the animals in full scenic settings, in the style we have come to associate with the diorama (figure 2.6). Leven did not remain in Dresden. In 1861 he was in Munich; in 1862 he took his zooplastic cabinet to Vienna; and by 1871 he was back in Frankfurt, where he fell into debt before his death.73 Despite the artistic successes he enjoyed, his frequent moves suggest that he was unable to achieve fi nancial security from his taxidermic art alone. The stories of Ploucquet and Leven reveal that the project of bringing dead nature to life included a version more attuned to public appeal than to satisfying scientific standards. This is not to say that their work was not accurate or realistic—the dramatic group scenes of animals killing other animals certainly gained in artistic power from being lifelike—but 71. P. Martin, Praxis (1869–82), 2:7. 72. Hammer, “Zooplastik” (1860). For a description of Leven’s Frankfurt cabinet, see Sakurai, “Science, Identity, and Urban Reinvention” (2006), 177–79. 73. Rieke-Müller and Dittrich, Der Löwe brüllt (1998), 138, 178; Sakurai, “Science, Identity, and Urban Reinvention” (2006), 177.

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figure 2.6. “Ein Keiler von Wölfen angefallen: Zooplastische Gruppe von Leven” (A wild boar attacked by wolves: Zooplastic group by [Franz] Leven). Illustration by the hunting genre painter and illustrator Edmundo Guido Hammer, accompanying Hammer’s article “Zooplastik,” Die Gartenlaube, 1860, 315–17, on 316. The illustration, of course, extended the audience for the diorama beyond those who could actually view the three-dimensional display. Note the similarity to Ploucquet’s display (fig. 2.4, top).

their juxtaposition with humorous anthropomorphic scenes and their removal from the taxonomic context of the natural history museum led the realism of the group scene away from the concerns of science. Thus, despite Martin’s hopes that such lively types of exhibit would be the wave of the future in public natural history museums, this theatrical direction was not easily reconciled with either science or governmental support. In Germany, indeed, until the end of the century, such efforts to join zoological truth with artistic imagination would remain largely within the privately supported commercial realm.

Bringing Nature’s Past to Life Martin knew of both Ploucquet’s and Leven’s work and may have been inspired by them (despite their wobbly fi nancial examples) to pursue

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his own path to a private museum of animal reconstructions in the mid1860s. His work represents yet a third approach to enlivening natural history display, by making sculptural reconstructions of prehistoric creatures. In creating these, Martin was charting new territory in the European museum world. Although paleontological reconstructions of skeletons dated back at least to the early nineteenth century, and illustrators and painters had begun to depict imaginative scenes from the earth’s distant past, few precedents existed for three-dimensional reconstructions of whole animals. The only model available to Martin was the work of the British artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, whose prehistoric monsters posed in the gardens of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham beginning in 1854, to great publicity. Although Martin’s reconstructions used different materials and a different construction technology to reproduce some different animal types, his general aims were similar.74 Martin’s job at the royal cabinet undoubtedly had made him aware that Württemberg was a site of extraordinary fossil fi nds, ranging from the Cannstatt mammoth made famous by Cuvier to the Neckar crocodile studied by Oscar Fraas, the curator of the royal mineralogicalpaleontological collection. The local interest in fossils and prehistoric life was intense, and enlivened by construction projects that had uncovered fossils regularly as Stuttgart and neighboring Cannstatt expanded. Fraas’s popular paleontological epic Before the Flood! (Vor der Sündfluth) was littered with references to local fossils, and he explained why the Neckar River basin was so rich in them.75 (Although this book did not appear until 1866, it was based on investigations that had been taking place over decades previously.) In the summer of 1864, Martin started making sculptural models of prehistoric creatures, using a papier-mâché-type technique for the underlying form that enabled 74. Martin mentions Waterhouse Hawkins’s reconstructions in his pitch to Berlin in August 1867: P. Martin, “Entwurf zur Gründung eines ‘Museums der Urwelt’ in Berlin, bestehend in 3 Bogen Text und zwei Beilagen von Leopold Martin, Weiberstraße 66 in Stuttgart,” in GSPK, Rep 76 Vc, Sekt. 2, Tit. XXIII, Lit. A., Nr. 75, Bd. I: Acta betr. die Gründung eines Museums urweltlicher Gebilde zu Berlin durch den Inspektor am archäologischen Museum zu Stuttgart, Martin, vom August 1867. On Hawkins’s dinosaur reconstructions, see J. Secord, “Monsters at the Crystal Palace” (2004), 138–69. On the early history of paleontological illustrations, see Rudwick, Scenes from Deep Time (1992). 75. Fraas, Vor der Sündfl uth! (1866), 199–202, 208–16, 413–14, 418–20. Like Krauss, Fraas was a longtime leader of the Württemberg Association for the Study of Nature of the Fatherland and was committed to bringing natural history before a broad public.

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him to make very large bodies that were more easily transported than if made of plaster, ceramic, or wood.76 Their initial display, it appears, took place in late 1865 in the recently built royal building known as the Königsbau (notably, not the royal cabinet) and included a reconstruction of the fossil crocodile, an ichthyosaurus gliding into the water from a mudbank, a plesiosaur, a cave bear, and a moa, as well as some plaster casts of bones of these creatures to demonstrate the reliability of the reconstructions.77 By 1867 Martin’s collection of prehistoric reconstructions had grown to include a dozen items, among them an antediluvian lion, which he presented to the king of Prussia, and a two-horned rhinoceros. His plans for the collection had grown as well: beginning that year, he started to shop around his idea for an independent Museum of the Primeval World (Museum der Urwelt). According to his proposal, this museum would display in twelve large niches the reconstructed beasts and plants from twelve different prehistoric eras, posed together in front of large paintings drawn from the works of Fraas, the paleobotanist Franz Unger, and other authorities on the antediluvian world. This was the fi rst time Martin argued for including significant background scenery for his animal reconstructions. As visitors walked through time, they would also view present-day scenes to show the contrast between then and now.78 Martin fi rst tried to obtain a site for his collection in Stuttgart in February 1867 by asking Württemberg’s cultural minister if he could supply a suitable locale (apparently hoping for a location that Martin could use for free). The minister responded by asking the director of the scientific collections his opinion of the project. After consulting with Krauss, the director responded witheringly that the plan “should not be considered to bear any actual scientific significance, and that its value lies substantially only in giving the sensation seeking of the public a nobler appearance.” He went on to stress that such an exhibit should not be located in 76. The papier-mâché-type modeling method is mentioned in [Quik?] to cultural minister Michler, 5 August 1867; and its benefits are described by Martin in “Entwurf zur Gründung,” both in GSPK, “Acta betr. di Gründung,” as cited in n. 74 above. The use of papier-mâché for scientific modeling was well established by the French fi rm of Louis T. J. Auzoux. See Davis, “Louis Thomas Jerôme Auzoux” (1977). For a vivid Web site, see Maerker, “Auzoux’s Animal Models” (2006). 77. Reported in Der Zoologische Garten 6 (November 1865): 436–37, reprinted from Neues Stuttgarter Tageblatt (date not given). 78. P. Martin, “Entwurf zur Gründung” (see n. 74 above).

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or near or indeed have anything to do with the royal natural history cabinet, “which must preserve its scientific character.” 79 This judgment suggests that to Krauss, whose advice the director had sought, sculptural reconstructions, as products of artistic imagination that went beyond the available evidence, were not scientific. The implication is that museums displayed only the “real” thing: fossils and casts made from them. Ancient creatures needed to be represented in museums by bones and matrix to guarantee their authenticity. At least, so it would seem for Krauss. It is noteworthy that the paleontologist Fraas was much more sympathetic to Martin’s desire to represent a fossil animal with a skin covering—his book on the antediluvian world contains dozens of illustrations, including many reconstructing animals in past landscapes. And as we will see, he would later supply scientific authentication for Martin’s work. Beyond Krauss’s evident sense of the distinction between science as truth and art as imagination, another problem was festering, which could only have exacerbated the official hostility to Martin’s project. During all the time when he had been making and exhibiting his private paleontological reconstructions, Martin had still been contracted to work eight hours a day as preparator at the royal natural history cabinet. In a pattern reminiscent of his fi nal year in Berlin, the list of complaints concerning his outside activities as well as his disrespectful attitude toward his boss, Krauss, was growing rapidly. Already in 1861 Krauss had begun keeping a list of such episodes in Martin’s personnel fi le, documenting outbursts of rudeness, insolence, and lateness. The spring of 1867 was especially bad—Martin had taken six weeks’ vacation to prepare exhibits for and travel to the Paris Exposition Universelle, where he had shown some of his paleontological reconstructions, and he had returned a week later than expected. To Krauss’s outrage, when confronted with this dereliction of duty, Martin did not show the appropriate shame. By 1868 Martin was not coming close to keeping up with the incoming animals— which, thanks to Krauss’s efforts and the generosity of Württembergers abroad, were coming in at a rapid rate. The preparation of a single dromedary had taken Martin thirty-four workdays, a rhinoceros twenty-four,

79. Minister des Kirchen- u. Schulwesens [Württemberg] to Direktion der wissenschaftlichen Sammlungen, Stuttgart 15 Feb. 1867; draft of a response 24 Feb. 1867, item C.VI. Nr. 8, in Stuttgart Personalakte Martin.

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even, Krauss blustered, with the help of an assistant! Meanwhile, cases of new specimens were piling up, their contents, Krauss feared, already spoiling. Krauss longed to be rid of Martin, but he appears to have been unable to fi re him.80 Martin, for his part, was trying to leave, as evidenced by his applications for positions at several zoos, where he hoped in vain to fi nd some support for his paleontology museum. Following the rejection by the Württemberg government of his request for a permanent site for his museum, in August 1867 he contacted the Prussian cultural ministry to offer it to the people of Berlin in exchange for a suitable (free) building to put it in. To the Prussian government he suggested that he receive free use of a large exhibition space (120 feet × 40 feet and at least 20 feet high) with associated work quarters in the capital city of Berlin, along with moving expenses, in exchange for the eventual inventory of the collection (after Martin’s death) and free entry for school groups and other appropriate persons. Martin also offered to provide plaster casts and other reproductions of materials in the museum at cost. His offer was refused.81 A year later, he tried again to gain a state-sponsored site in Stuttgart. This time Krauss, seeking to wash his hands of his uncooperative subordinate, pleaded with the ministry to fi nd Martin a suitable locale.82 Again, though, the project fell through. Martin’s efforts to gain state subsidies for a private museum might seem audacious, and even doomed to failure, but they offer insight into the ways in which support for natural history could be conceived of in mid-nineteenth-century Germany. Martin’s work experience in Berlin and Stuttgart had been in state institutions, both under the oversight of the cultural ministry; the museum arrangements that Martin would have known best, namely, those in Stuttgart, involved a tightly interdigitated arrangement between the royal collection and the chartered jointstock Association for the Study of Nature of the Fatherland. Indeed, many joint-stock companies that offered exhibits with claims to public 80. Krauss to Direktion der wissenschaftlichen Sammlungen, 5 Juni 1867, item C.II.34, fol. 34; and Krauss to “Königliche Direktion,” 9 Mai 1868, item C.II.34, fol. 39, both in Stuttgart Personalakte Martin. 81. Direktion der wissenschaftlichen Sammlungen to Minister des Kirchen- und Schulwesens, 24 Feb. 1867 (draft), item C.VI. Nr.8, in Stuttgart Personalakte Martin; P. Martin, “Entwurf zur Gründung” (see n. 74 above). 82. Krauss to “Königliche Direktion,” 9 Mai 1868, item C.II.34, fol. 39, in Stuttgart Personalakte Martin.

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educational interest—not only natural history museums but also historical associations and the zoos that were proliferating across Germany in the 1860s—did have such arrangements with governments (though, to be sure, more often with local city governments than with state ones). So, for example, in Hamburg in 1858, the city leased the land to the zoo for fi fty years free of charge; and in Breslau in 1863, the city donated thirty-five of the zoo’s grounds of forty morgens (a morgen is about two-thirds of an acre).83 City government officials were often on the governing boards of zoos and museums. Conversely, the fi nancial risks of private institutions like those of Ploucquet and Leven were surely becoming clearer by 1867, when Martin applied to the states of Württemberg and Prussia for subventions. So it was perhaps not as brazen an act for him to ask for state assistance as it might at fi rst seem. Yet state support for a project that mixed art and science in this way was forthcoming from neither Prussia nor Württemberg In the event, it would be several more years before Martin found a situation for which he felt able to leave the royal cabinet. The solution came in the form of a private zoo. Since 1866 the Stuttgart innkeeper Johannes Nill had run a menagerie out of the garden of his establishment, and its success had led him in 1871 to expand his operation to a fullfledged zoo, with substantially greater acreage. In 1874 Martin left the royal cabinet, opened his long-dreamed-of school for preparators in his “expanded atelier,” and established the museum on the grounds of Nill’s zoo, opening in the late spring 1875. The museum bore considerable resemblance to the plan he had shopped around in 1867, though it was less ambitious. Its left side showed four prehistoric scenes, from the lower, middle, and upper Triassic, and the lower Jurassic, with their characteristic plants and animals. 84 Its right side presented four contemporary scenes: a northern Vogelberg, or nesting cliff (which would become a staple of German museum dioramas after 1900); a German forest; an African desert; and an East Indian jungle. The literal and figurative high point of the museum, standing 83. On Hamburg: Bolau, Führer durch den Zoologischen Garten zu Hamburg (1890), v. On Breslau: Der Zoologische Garten 4 (1863): 257. 84. German geological terms of the period differ from English in referring primarily to the composition of the stone rather than to chronology: Martin used the German terms bunter Sandstein (colored or mixed sandstone), which translates to “lower Triassic,” Muschelkalk (mollusc or shell-chalk) for “middle Triassic,” Keuper for “upper Triassic,” and schwarzer Jura (black Jura) for “lower Jurassic.”

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figure 2.7. Martin’s mammoth. Uncredited photograph. From Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde Stuttgart, Archives.

in its center, was the eighteen-foot-high reconstruction of a mammoth (figure 2.7). Martin also planned to use his museum to teach and display the zooplastic art to other conservators, showing the techniques of taxidermy and artistic preparation.85 It is not clear to what extent he was able to do this, though by January of 1876 he had on display some fi fty mammals that he had prepared for the Smithsonian Institution, which were to be shown fi rst at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia before moving to Washington for permanent exhibition.86 Within another year Martin’s plans had changed once again. In December 1876 Henry A. Ward, the head of the largest American supplier of natural history preparations, visited the museum. In February 1877 85. Advertisement in Der Zoologische Garten15 (April 1874): 200; P. Martin, “Mittheilungen aus dem Nill’schen Thiergarten” (1875). 86. P. Martin, “Mittheilungen dem Nill’schen Thiergarten” (1876). Records from the Smithsonian Institution confi rm that Martin was paid $185.90 in gold for fi fty-nine specimens and, in a separate transaction, $5.40 for two specimens of quadrupeds (at 20 marks apiece, with 1 mark figured at 27 cents). Smithsonian Institution Archives, record unit 70, box 6, “Exposition Records of the Smithsonian Institution and the U.S. National Museum, 1875–1919,” folder 3, Daybooks, 1875–77, pp. 88 and 149. My thanks to Pamela Henson for unearthing these documents.

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Ward wrote to the paleontologist Oscar Fraas at the Stuttgart cabinet, inquiring whether the mammoth was scientifically accurate and based on fossils at the cabinet, as Martin had claimed. Fraas returned an affi rmative answer, along with an offer from Martin to sell the original for 12,500 marks or to make Ward a copy for 8,000 marks. Ward chose the former course and returned in April to oversee the breaking down of the mammoth model and its careful packing into large cases for transport to America. (Within a year, Ward had sold three copies for the equivalent of 14,000 marks apiece.)87 Having sold the centerpiece of his museum and gained a considerable nest egg, Martin closed it down for good and turned to writing full-time. Nill replaced the museum with a roller skating rink.88

Public/Private, Science/Art, Elite/Popular: Natural History Institutions and Values If we step back to consider the various kinds of taxidermic work that came within Martin’s sphere of activity, two important sets of categories emerge, one revolving around the distinctions and overlaps between public and private institutions, the other around science and art. While both of these areas were in considerable flux during Martin’s lifetime, it is possible to identify certain associations between these sets of categories that were becoming characteristic of the political economy and value system of German natural history. Martin’s peregrinations, along with those of Brehm, Leven, and Ploucquet, indicate that interest in natural history could be found among nearly all of the different sectors of German society—royalty, aristocrats, landowners, the educated middle class, the commercial middle class, craftsmen, and workers; only peasants are absent from our records of Martin’s contacts as a taxidermist, and they might well have been among his clients in Bunzlau. The preponderance of natural history collecting after midcentury, however, was connected with public collections, and these were generally the products of cities and towns that provided a density of population more readily yielding enough inter87. Adam, “Die Stuttgarter Mammut-Nachbildung” (1961), 56–59. 88. Klunzinger, “Geschichte der Stuttgarter Tiergärten” (1910), 191.

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ested individuals and capital to pool their resources into a communal collection. What was “public” about a public collection could involve a variety of attributes. The German states supported collections and collecting, mainly through state and university museums, but in relatively limited ways. Much more activity took place at the local level. Capital cities of German states and provinces and those with royal seats, because they could draw on the resources of both the state and the city, provided especially lively centers of museum development. As we have seen, in many of these cities, public support for natural history grew out of the cooperation of city, provincial, or state governments with voluntary associations; these associations themselves were “public” both in the sense that their memberships were open in principle (though women were scarce or absent among these memberships) and in their civic sense of contributing to the public good. Public collections were also open to the public, for at least a few hours a week; during these hours (usually the midday hours on Sunday and one other afternoon a week), museums were open free of charge. Being public did not mean that an institution offered unregulated access to everyone: membership dues de facto limited participation in the association (though these were often kept low), and museums run by voluntary associations might further control their admissions by issuing a limited number of tickets for those hours when the museum was open to the public, while restricting admission to members or even further, to scholars working with the collections, on other days. 89 Nevertheless, public access was an important principle of public museums. The museums of Martin, Ploucquet, and Leven might also be viewed as “public” in the sense of seeking a general audience, but they differed from the museums run by states, cities, and voluntary organizations. Most notably, they were capitalized privately, with no contribution from official bodies. Nor, apparently, did they make use of the relatively new fi nancial device of the joint-stock company, which was being widely used contemporaneously to spread the risks and enlarge the pool of investors in other natural history enterprises ranging from expeditions to zoological gardens. Although we know vanishingly little about the fi nancing 89. Stuttgart (1878): Krauss, “Das k. Naturalien-Cabinet in Stuttgart” (1878), 154. Hamburg: Weidner, Bilder aus der Geschichte (1993), 295–96. Braunschweig (1878): Zoologischer Anzeiger 1 (1878): 319–21. Danzig: Conwentz, Das Westpreussische ProvinzialMuseum (1905), 1, 5, 43. Lübeck: Lenz, “Die Sammlungen” (1900), 10–11, 30.

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of these private museums, the available information suggests that they would have been expected to produce income for the taxidermic artist, either through admissions charges or (perhaps more likely) through the sale of the exhibits or further commissions.90 In other words, they were commercial ventures. The distinction between the civic museums developed by voluntary associations and the commercial museums of Leven and Ploucquet went further, however. Whereas the former drew their justifications from their contributions to science and to public education, the latter operated to entertain and please the public through an artistic rendering of nature. Although Martin sought to get his Museum of the Primeval World placed amid the former group, its lack of official endorsement resulted in its being situated in a private zoo, much more in the realm of the latter. Moreover, the aesthetic values Martin promoted in advocating family scenes, animal fights, and faunistic dioramas as well as in his prehistoric animal reconstructions differed radically from the orderly ideal, conducive to comparing specimens, held by the systematists who controlled the scientific presentation of public collections. Indeed, in Berlin the strict systematic approach to display would continue through the mid-1880s and would cement the association of the state-run civic museum with the systematic approach to zoological display.91 What emerges, then, is a series of linked associations and distinctions: science was associated with the civic museum, with an aesthetic of uniformity, and with truth; art (or artistry), by contrast, was associated with commercial gain, with an aesthetic of drama, even spectacle, and with imagination. Hidden within these associations are intimations of class differences as well: the civic museum was a place of middle-class domination, sometimes stretching upward in imitation of and association with the crown, sometimes reaching downward to elevate the taste of “the masses.” The commercial museum, like the exhibitions and fairs that supported the same kinds of work, catered to sensationalism, to 90. Ploucquet certainly made his money from selling off his displays. See “Hermann Ploucquet †” (1878); and Dolmetsch, “Alt-Stuttgarter Erinnerungen” (1925). 91. Important innovations were undertaken in other state-run zoological collections during this period, namely, those run as parts of universities. The zoology professors in charge of these collections in the late 1860s and 1870s increasingly demanded control of the comparative anatomy collections (often previously in the hands of anatomists), and got them. They thereby shifted attention away from systematic zoology per se to comparative morphology, with its attendant implications for evolution. See Nyhart, Biology Takes Form (1995), 230–35.

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Schaulust, to the tastes of the vulgar. At least, such was the view from the perspective of the public museum.92 Such distinctions were not absolute, of course. The onetime private royal collections that formed part of the foundation of many civic natural history museums had their decorative aspects, as the history of the Württemberg royal cabinet reminds us; and the Württemberg regional collection, with its emphasis on biological family groups, shows that a slightly more dramatic or decorative aesthetic could gain hold in a civic museum precisely because of its broader appeal. But Ploucquet’s bloody hounds taking down a boar would have run the risk of appealing to voyeurism rather than more elevated educational sentiments. As late as 1900, the fear of theatricality and humbug would lead curators at many German natural history museums to shun the elements of drama encapsulated in the scenes of the animal hunt or dioramas with elaborate scenery and painted backgrounds.93 Even as interest in biogeography and ecology increased among museum researchers at the turn of the century, the representation of animals in their habitats held a limited place in German museums of natural history—largely, I would argue, because of these associations. These distinctions and associations were not inevitable. Leading public museum curators in the United States would embrace the group display form with enthusiasm in the 1870s and 1880s; the British Museum (Natural History) adopted a similar strategy for bird display in the late 1870s, and the diorama concept would sweep public museums in Sweden in the 1890s.94 Even within the German-speaking lands, the artistry of imaginative reconstruction was not entirely excluded from another area of natural history: paleontology. Although public paleontology collections did not clothe their fossil skeletons in skins, as Martin did, their very enterprise was engaged in understanding the living creature and its environment through reconstruction, and scientists were less shy of collaborating with artists to create lively representations of those animals. 92. Taxidermic art appears never to have been included among the art categories supported by the official art schools and salons, or the independent artists’ associations that provided artists with their gallery space in the later nineteenth century—but this is hard to tell for sure from the major surveys, since they almost exclusively discuss painting and not three-dimensional work. On the social, economic, and cultural structures of German art from the mid-nineteenth century, see Lenman, Artists and Society in Germany (1997). For the later nineteenth century, see Lewis, Art for All? (2003). 93. See Nyhart, “Science, Art, and Authenticity” (2004), and chapters 5 and 7 ahead. 94. Wonders, Habitat Dioramas (1993).

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Indeed, in 1867 one advocate of museum reform pointed explicitly to paleontological collections as a model for zoology museums. Gustav Jaeger noted that paleontologists typically mounted two kinds of display: systematic ones, in which the specimens were organized taxonomically, and historical ones, in which specimens were grouped according to the rock layers in which they were found. Similarly, he argued, zoology museums should support two kinds of collections: scientific collections organized along taxonomic lines, in which the skins did not even require stuffi ng, and public collections organized biogeographically. The public section of the cabinet should “place together what lives together” to create a series of biogeographic set pieces.95 This would be viewed as a cutting-edge approach some twenty years later, but by then the association of naturalized animal scenes with art (imagination), drama, commerce, and even humbug, in contrast to boring but truthful state-sponsored systematic science, would be well entrenched among public-museum-based scientists.96 It would require new kinds of justification—from both the state and the scientists themselves—to overcome this prejudice. In the meantime, a more direct approach to enlivening natural history was sweeping across Germany, in the form of the zoo movement.

95. Jaeger, “Das Ploucquet’sche Museum” (1867). 96. See Nyhart, “Science, Art, and Authenticity” (2004).

chapter three

The World in Miniature: Practical Natural History and the Zoo Movement

P

ractical natural history encompassed not only the hunting, killing, preparing, mounting, and display of dead animals but also the care, presentation, and breeding of live ones, creating a conjunction of care for dead and living animals that is surprising today. The large majority of attention to living wild animals, both native and exotic, was channeled into the zoo movement, a Europe-wide phenomenon that manifested itself especially intensely in Germany from the late 1850s through the 1870s.1 Indeed, in the intellectual, social, and economic context of the time, the distinction between “native” and “exotic” animals was one many practical naturalists were concerned to overcome via acclimatization, the process of introducing and adapting exotic animals to the northern European climate. The zoo movement intersects with our story as a part of the intertwined reform projects of practical natural history and of enlivening and democratizing natural history. Often characterized as representing “the world in miniature,” the zoo was an institution that encompassed diverse agendas. Many zoo founders promoted the zoo as a source of civic pride and general social and moral uplift, and their fi nancial backers often seem to have been less in-

1. On the history of zoos in the nineteenth century, see Baratay and Hardouin-Fugier, Zoo (2002); Ritvo, “The Order of Nature” (1996); and Rieke-Müller and Dittrich, Der Löwe brüllt (1998). For America, see Hanson, Animal Attractions (2002).

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terested in the animals themselves than in their symbolic value as emblems of engagement with the larger world. But to succeed, zoos always had to fi nd someone who knew something about animals to take charge of the day-to-day operations and animal care, usually with the title of “inspector,” “conservator,” or (occasionally) “director.” The fi nancial health of the zoo depended heavily on these men, a few of whom were involved in founding particular zoos but most of whom were hired hands. Some not only oversaw the care of the animals but also worked actively to promote their zoos through newspaper and magazine articles, public lectures, and, beginning in the mid-1870s, the development of entertainment schemes aimed at bringing in a return audience. Thus, although those skilled in the practical natural history of the living animal formed just a small slice of the overall spectrum of zoo enthusiasts, visitors, and observers, they are of special interest here. By bringing living nature to the public, they fused a populist vision of natural history with one oriented toward the living animal. At the same time, zoos offered a new source of employment in natural history for men who lacked the educational background and resources to become scientists or school natural history teachers. The zoo movement provided a common focal point for these practical naturalists, drawing them from their scattered isolation in different German towns together into a community. As was common with many institutions, the founding and development of new zoos offered occasions for visits to existing ones and for written communication among animal practitioners. At least as important in increasing the density of communication was the journal Der Zoologische Garten, founded initially as the organ of communication for the Frankfurt zoo in late 1859. This journal rapidly attracted contributors from across the German-speaking states and beyond who were eager to share their knowledge of living animals, whether or not they were formally involved with a zoo. By its fourth volume in 1863, it had gained the descriptive subtitle Journal for the Observation, Care, and Breeding of Animals (Zeitschrift für Beobachtung, Pflege und Zucht der Thiere), and it contained contributions on observations of the behavior of exotic and native wild animals in captivity, annual reports of zoos, notices of societies devoted to living animals, practical advice on how to breed new races of birds and small mammals, philosophical essays on the nature of the animal mind, and natural history travel writing of the kind also available in family magazines. The nonstop outpouring of contributions persisted through an instability in

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editorship in the fi rst half dozen years, indicating an abundance of interest in communicating about the natural history of the living animal. The practical naturalists involved in the zoo movement contributed in significant ways to the rise of the biological perspective. To be sure, visitors to nineteenth-century zoos did not see animals surrounded by their habitats, and attention to reproducing what we today would view as their “natural” conditions was fairly minimal. But the movement brought into focus three key aspects of this emerging perspective. First, to practical naturalists the zoo, as a new institution in the mid-nineteenth century, represented an open field of possibilities for imagining what displays of living animals might look like. A number of zoo enthusiasts developed schemes for inclusive parks that would contain plants, animals, and information about geology and topography—even about humans. It was in this sense that the zoo as a “world in miniature” was most fully imagined. For reasons both ideological and practical, none of these concepts was realized at the time. However, in the zoological gardens that were built, the display of exotic beasts was often accompanied by a geographic iconography that associated particular organisms with particular landscapes, architectural styles, and decorations representing geographically specific forms of foreignness. This iconography contributed substantially to the biological perspective as it developed over the nineteenth century, for it became a visual resource for identifying the “natural” settings for different kinds of animals, and signs of it often remained even as attention to animals’ natural habitats increased. And because the same people who developed ideas for zoo displays often worked on museum displays as well, the aesthetic vocabulary readily traveled between the two forms of representation. A second contribution to the biological perspective was less symbolic and more direct. Keeping exotic animals alive under northern European conditions turned out to require considerable attention to functionality and behavior. Why did zoo animals keep dying with such rapidity? What could be done to prolong their lives and induce them to breed? The problem of keeping expensively purchased animals alive led zookeepers to pay increasing attention to animals’ needs in the way of food and shelter, their breeding seasons and habits, and their requirements for space and activity—all issues that contributed to expanding natural history in the direction of functional knowledge of the living animal. A third facet of the biological perspective developed through the zoo movement was its connection to nature protection. Here again,

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the theme of the “world in miniature” resurfaces, only this time from a moral perspective. Caring for living animals in captivity extended beyond ensuring their survival: it raised questions about the appropriate relations between the caretaker and the individual animal and about the moral obligations of humans toward living nature in general. Zookeepers and others who bred and cared for animals were the earliest pioneers of the nascent nature protection movement, which in Germany was overlain with strong moral and often antimodern overtones. 2 Nature protection was high on the agenda of proponents of the biological perspective, and to understand their close connections, we may look to the community of practical naturalists to see how these views became tied together early on. Philipp Leopold Martin is again a central figure in this chapter, for his life and work epitomize the connections among populist natural history, the care and study of living animals, and the biological perspective. Much of the present chapter is devoted to elucidating Martin’s views on living animals, including his vision of the ideal zoo and his concerns for nature protection, and to situating these views within the larger network of those who exhibited and worked with living animals at the time. But to understand fully the significance of the living animal for German natural history in the 1860s and 1870s, we must remind ourselves of Martin’s larger category of “practical natural history” and recognize that both people and ideas circulated through a range of natural history venues. A key goal of practical natural history, as we have seen, was the restoration of life to natural history. Work with living animals, especially as channeled into the zoo movement, clearly played a role in this larger project. Not only Martin but also Gustav Jaeger, Alfred Brehm, and Karl Möbius, along with historically less well known figures such as Lud2. The dominant tradition in the history of German nature protection has focused on institutional founders and national organizations. Beginning with Schoenichen, Naturschutz, Heimatschutz (1954), it has been developed more recently by Knaut, “Zurück zur Natur!” (1993), which focuses on the “Heimatschutz” movement, largely after the turn of the century. Raymond Dominick III helpfully acknowledges a wider variety of early roots in The Environmental Movement in Germany (1992), but his main focus is on national organizations and their constituencies—movements that got organized only after 1900. Hermand, Grüne Utopien (1991), offers a deeper historical perspective, stretching back to the eighteenth century, and discusses both literary and institutional expressions of what he calls “ecological consciousness,” but is more impressionistic than systematic. More recently new directions in the social and cultural history of German nature protection have opened up. Schmoll, Erinnerung an die Natur (2004); Lekan, Imagining the Nation (2004); Coen, “The Greening of German History” (2008).

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wig Reichenbach, Franz Schlegel, and Hermann Landois, participated in an extraordinary variety of natural history activities. These men led local voluntary associations for natural history; looked after and promoted zoos, aquariums, and museums; and publicized these institutions in the illustrated press. They worked with others who confi ned their energies to one or two of these areas, collectively establishing and maintaining the extrauniversity institutions that structured popular educational interactions with living animals in German society. 3 It should not be surprising, then, that ideas developed in one institutional realm—in the museum setting, for example—might carry over into another, such as the zoo, or that narrative and visual styles common in print media might shape the perception or presentation of nature in three-dimensional form. Indeed, once we consider “practical natural history” as an integral whole, the lives of a number of practical naturalists seem less accidental and more coherent. In addition, it becomes possible to see the relations of museums and zoos in a new light. As I will argue in the last section of the chapter, for this network of people the projects of “practical” and “popular” natural history were deeply intertwined, with important consequences for our understanding of the relationship between museums and zoos, and for the aesthetic, social, and cultural positioning of the biological perspective.

The Zoo as a Cultural Institution Between 1858 and 1881, zoos opened in over a dozen German cities. Those that survived past infancy included the ones in Frankfurt am Main (opened 1858), Cologne (1860), Dresden (1861), Hamburg (1863), Hannover (1865), Breslau (1865), and Karlsruhe (1865); another wave of foundings followed in the 1870s and early 1880s (Münster 1873, Düsseldorf, 1876, Leipzig, 1878, Crefeld, 1877, Elberfeld, 1881, Aachen, 1882). These zoos joined the venerable Jardin des Plantes in Paris and the royal 3. Although the educational functions of nineteenth-century zoos might not be considered very serious by today’s standards, there is no doubt that zoo promoters thought that the sorts of interactions they expected to take place between visitors and the caged animals would be uplifting or instructive one way or another, as well as entertaining. In contrast to commercial animal handlers who provided exotic animals for other animal entertainments as well as zoos, the practical naturalists I am concerned with here did not slide over into the promotion of circuses or animal fights (though they did do such things as present chimpanzees at tea).

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Austrian zoo in Schönbrunn outside Vienna, both of which dated from before 1800, and the zoos founded earlier in the nineteenth century in London (1828), Amsterdam (1840), Antwerp (1843), Berlin (1844), Brussels (1851), and Ghent (1851). Adding to the density of interest in zoos were a number of zoo projects that never got past the planning stages (Frankfurt, 1853–55; Bonn, 1854–55; Stuttgart, 1863–64, 1864–65) and those that failed within a few years of opening (Vienna, 1863–66; Munich, 1863–66).4 The classic zoo that developed in the second half of the nineteenth century was a site of rational recreation, a place supported by middleclass citizens to combine fashionable strolling in a park setting with the stimulation provided by captive wild animals. In contrast to the princely menageries of the eighteenth century and earlier, which were heavily laden with the symbols of monarchical power, 5 the new public zoo was an institution where the wealthy urban bourgeoisie flexed its civic muscle. The modern power of the Bürgertum echoes through the statements of zoo promoters of the nineteenth century, such as that of the founding editor of the German zoo journal Der Zoologische Garten, David Friedrich Weinland. “It is not princes, not scholars, not pedagogues, not education ministers who founded the zoological gardens in Dresden, Cologne, in Hamburg, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Rotterdam, Brussels,” Weinland wrote in 1862. “It is instead the educated majority of the citizens of these cities, who have been driven by what we almost might call an unconscious urge toward the observation of living nature. . . . The state administrations on the one hand, the scholars on the other certainly are involved everywhere and . . . in a few cases carry the decisive voices of authority, but the initiative did not lie with them. The zoological gardens are far more substantially popular [volkstümliche] institutes and will also survive in these cities only as long as they are supported by public opinion.” 6 This message was certainly populist in comparison to the narrow slices of the social spectrum occupied by the kings and princes who had earlier established royal menageries and animal parks for their 4. Cities and opening dates taken from Rieke-Müller and Dittrich, Der Löwe brüllt (1998), passim; and P. Martin, Praxis (1869–82), vol. 3, pt. 1, passim. 5. On the iconography of royal menageries in the eighteenth century, see esp. Paust, “ ‘. . . nach der zu Versailles . . .’ ” (2001); Robbins, Elephant Slaves (2002), 37–67; and Spary, Utopia’s Garden (2000), 221–31. 6. Weinland, “Ueber den Ursprung” (1862), 1–2. Weinland would gain fame in later life as the author of the best-selling novels of early Germanic life Rulaman (1875) and Kuning Hartfest (1879).

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hunts. However, zoological gardens were not exactly wide-open institutions socially: in associating themselves with science and rational recreation, urban zoo promoters claimed for their institutions a higher social tone than the traveling menageries that attracted a wider audience, including the vulgar. Zoo admission prices were set to regulate the rabble: in the mid-1870s the largest and oldest German zoos (Berlin, Cologne, Frankfurt, Hamburg) typically charged adults 1 mark per entry, with children at half price, to ensure socially comfortable conditions for well-to-do families. Only on specified days (usually one or two Sundays a month in the summer, and in some cases Sunday mornings only) was the price dropped to half this (or less) to accommodate a broader crowd. Smaller establishments generally charged about half what the large zoos charged, with the least expensive in 1878 being Karlsruhe at 30 pfennigs (children and soldiers 15 pfennigs)—but the Karlsruhe zoo by that time was half owned by the city and by civic standards was expected to make its institutions more readily available to a broader public.7 The zoo’s fashionableness in the 1870s and 1880s was a commonplace mentioned in newspaper articles, painted by artists, and recalled in memoirs. As one writer remembered Berlin’s zoo, “It was the gathering place of Berlin’s elegant world. A posh restaurant with a large concert hall and a broad terrace in front of it was the meeting place of the upper crust. The lower terraces, installed later, with their many chairs and tables in the open, were always taken by the good bourgeois public.” 8 A contemporary noted the “stream of the ‘best society’ ” to be found promenading at the zoo, mentioning in passing that “zoology for the Berliners [at the zoo] was unimportant.” 9 The theme of the nineteenth-century zoo as a quintessentially bürgerlich phenomenon has been developed by a number of historians. The German cultural historians David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley have 7. Numbers are drawn from P. Martin, Praxis (1869–82), vol. 3, pt. 1, separate entries on each zoo. On Karlsruhe, see ibid., 72. By comparison, civic museums were a bargain: both natural history and art museums were generally free of charge, though typically open only two afternoons a week. On natural history museums, see chapter 2; on art museums, Sheehan, Museums in the German Art World (2000), 117–18. An annual subscription to the popular illustrated family weekly Die Gartenlaube cost 7 marks, making it one of the less expensive forms of rational amusement available to families with disposable income. Graf and Pellatz, “Familien- und Unterhaltungszeitschriften” (2003), 430. 8. Hans Fechner, Der Spreehanns (1925), quoted in Kaselow, Die Schaulust (1999), 143. 9. Pietsch, “Die Donnerstage des Dr. Bodinus” (1870), 1–3, quoted in Kaselow, Die Schaulust (1999), 144.

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viewed zoos as expressions of a new, liberal, bourgeois culture that similarly produced the public restaurant, the philanthropic society, and the subscription concert. Other historians have noted that the zoo developed in the same period as such other urban institutions as opera houses; city museums of art, culture, and natural history; chambers of commerce; and city parks.10 Moreover, most public zoos were capitalized as jointstock companies, a form of fi nancing recently popular among bourgeois groups because it allowed individuals without extraordinary resources to pool their wealth into the sizable quantities required for such an expensive endeavor and spread the associated fi nancial risks. Indeed, the zoo as a place of instructive recreation for a high-class, strolling urban public has now been solidly cemented in the history of nineteenthcentury culture.11 However, the zoo historians Annelore Rieke-Müller and Lothar Dittrich, examining more closely the circumstances surrounding the founding of the German zoos, have discovered that this generalized picture masks considerable diversity. The founding of zoos in Germany reflected important local differences in the social and fi nancial composition of support and the aims of zoo founders. The Berlin zoo, though officially a joint-stock company, was tightly controlled by the Prussian crown until 1869; the zoo in Frankfurt drew the support of banking interests and leaders of the Jewish community; scientific interests were especially important to the founding of the zoos in Dresden, Hamburg, and Hannover, whereas the Hamburg zoo founders emphasized more than the others the morally uplifting aspects of communing with exotic animals.12 Moreover, Rieke-Müller and Dittrich divide the zoo foundings into three historically specific waves that reflect the changing politics of the time. The aims of the earliest German zoo founders, after Berlin, who began organizing themselves in the mid-1850s and opened by the early 10. Blackbourn and Eley, The Peculiarities of German History (1984), 199–201, 203; I. Jahn, “Zoologische Gärten” (1992); Baratay and Hardouin-Fugier, Zoo (2002), 83; Hanson, Animal Attractions (2002), 12–27. See also Bartels, “Berlin’s Tiergarten” (1982). 11. Baratay and Hardouin-Fugier, Zoo (2002), 99–102. Sakurai, “Science, Identity, and Urban Reinvention” (2006), chapter 3, offers an exemplary analysis of what it meant for a zoo to be a bourgeois institution. Parallel movements have been closely analyzed elsewhere in Europe: Mehos, Science and Culture for Members Only (2006); Åkerberg, Knowledge and Pleasure at Regent’s Park (2001). 12. Rieke-Müller and Dittrich, Der Löwe brüllt (1998), 61–64, 261–63 (Berlin), 86–88 (Frankfurt), 153–54 (Hamburg), 248 (Dresden, Hamburg, Hannover).

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1860s (Frankfurt am Main, Cologne, Dresden), expressed a politics of openness toward the larger European world. Dominated by a coalition of the commercial and educated bourgeoisies that held an economically liberal and culturally cosmopolitan outlook, they looked toward the zoos in Paris and Antwerp as models and combined scientific and popularizing goals into a stance of entertaining instruction. The founders of these zoos, according to Rieke-Müller and Dittrich, generally shared a goal of popular enlightenment, seeking to assist visitors in making independent observations of nature and coming to their own judgments about it. The zoos founded between 1861 and 1865 (Munich, Stuttgart, Hannover, Karlsruhe, and Breslau), by contrast, expressed less liberal and outward-looking ideas, taking as their models the existing German zoos rather than non-German zoos. The founders of these zoos emphasized the function of the zoo as an emblem of the modernity of their cities and as a socially fashionable meeting point. Finally, beginning in the mid-1860s and going into the 1870s, the commercial successes of private zoos in Berlin, Stuttgart, Munich, and Leipzig led the way toward viewing the zoo primarily as a venue of leisure and entertainment, lessening the already loose connection to science and instruction and increasing the level of spectacle with the introduction of concerts, fi reworks, traveling entertainments such as displays of indigenous peoples, “Wild West” shows, and performances of animal trainers.13 By the late 1870s German zoos, while still exhibiting some diversity in their goals and animals, were starting to look more alike than different and had become the fashionable gathering places their visitors later recalled. The aims and cultural meanings of zoos were as manifold as their founders, employees, and visitors. The propaganda of the zoo promoters stressed spielende Lernen or “effortless learning,” as the motto of the age, and clearly visitors were to have their horizons broadened and even to gain moral uplift by their contact with exotic and native animals. In promoting this goal, the bourgeois zoos of the nineteenth century embodied mixed moral stances about human relationships to nature. On the one hand, they did cage animals, depriving them of their freedom. Certainly the domination of animal creation is a trope easily found in contemporary depictions. An article on the Dresden zoo in Die Gartenlaube in 1862, for example, opened with these words: “The old Bible phrase ‘Man should rule over the birds in the sky and over all the cat13. Ibid., 248–66.

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tle that creep over the earth’ has indisputably found its most real fulfi llment in zoological gardens. For all are imprisoned and must obey, and only the son of Adam’s race ambles freely and as master between the bars and cages.” 14 Pictures of lions and other animals being “tamed” or subdued by the human hand at the zoo could be found frequently in the illustrated magazines of the later nineteenth century (figure 3.1).15 On the other hand, the zoo was also associated with a less aggressive, more Edenic view as a place where humans and animals came together in peace and harmony—an image of the zoo cultivated as early as those French revolutionaries of whom it was said that they had “freed” the royal animals and had given them their “rights” as citizens of the world.16 One measure of the “enlightened” modern zoo frequently mentioned by its nineteenth-century promoters was that animals were not confi ned to the tiny cages of the menagerie but had spacious apartments in which to roam, often connected to outdoor yards as well.17 While the public proclamations of zoo enthusiasts often remained at the vague level of general popular enlightenment, those who managed the zoos had several scientific goals that were somewhat more specific (and not always consistent with one another). One leading aim—to collect, display, and learn more about peculiar and exotic creatures—was generally elevated from the raw sensationalism of traveling and commercial menageries by being framed in terms of zoological systematics. As in a natural history museum, zoo animals were understood to form a systematic “collection,” representing the different kinds and subkinds of animals. Although zoos could not hope to strive for a complete representation of the world’s animals, the systematic framework structured the arrangement of animals in most zoos, which housed together taxonomically similar organisms, so that there were separate buildings for big cats, birds, monkeys, bears, hooved animals, reptiles, and so forth. Practical considerations about the animals’ feeding, maintenance, and 14. “Ein Stündchen in Dresdens zoologischem Garten” (1862), 699. 15. Kaselow, Die Schaulust (1999), 84–119. 16. Ibid., 158–64. In fact, the royal animals were not actually set loose but simply moved from the royal menagerie to the Jardin des Plantes, where they continued to be held in cages. Burkhardt, “Constructing the Zoo” (2002), 234–35. For the broader, complex history of “captive” versus “free” animals in Paris during the French Revolution, see Robbins, Elephant Slaves (2002), esp. chapters 7 and 8. 17. Weinland, “Was zu einem ‘ganzen’ Thiere gehört” (1860); Schmidt, “Ueber Thierhaltung” (1864); Liebe, “Einige neue Erfahrungen” (1870–71).

figure 3.1. Gustav Werner in the lion’s cage at Werner’s Stuttgart zoo. From an original drawing by Friedrich Specht. From Ueber Land und Meer 13 (December 1864): 165.

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handling may have had much to do with this organization, of course, but it was made to seem natural by the predominance of the systematic viewpoint in zoology.18 Some zoo enthusiasts in the late 1850s and 1860s had a different aim, however, and followed the Paris Société d’acclimatation in seeking to introduce new animals to the European setting. In Paris and elsewhere, acclimatizers hoped to develop breeds that would be economically useful for their fur or feathers, their labor, or their food value.19 This motivation was especially strong in the late 1850s and early 1860s and contributed to the foundation of the zoo in Cologne and the never-realized zoo in Stuttgart. 20 But economic motives were not the only ones. Exercising humanity’s God-like power over animals was not the least of the appeal of the work that went on under the rubric of acclimatization. According to Carl Bruch, editor of Der Zoologische Garten in 1864, the highest object of acclimatization was “to improve and ennoble” (zu verbessern und zu veredeln) animal races. Veredelung carries multiple meanings: used by gardeners it refers to grafting; in technological processes it means refi ning or processing; when used in relation to character, it refers to ennoblement. A further connotation is the drawing out of the inner potential lying hidden in the individual. All these connotations seem to be implied in the use of the term by acclimatizers. 21 To produce a new, improved domestic animal would be an achievement indeed; “the creation 18. It must be said that the aim of a taxonomically “complete” organization was less clearly in evidence in most German zoos than in the Paris and London zoos, most probably because these animal collections were built up more through opportunistic acquisitions than through a systematic plan. 19. On acclimatization, see Osborne, Nature, the Exotic, and the Science of French Colonialism (1994); Anderson, “Climates of Opinion” (1992). As Harriet Ritvo has noted for the London zoo, this aim would seem to dictate a strategy for animal collecting that differed from and perhaps confl icted with the systematic goals, but most zoos seem to have had ambitions sufficiently capacious—or to have been sufficiently dependent on what was made available by live animal dealers—to accommodate both. Ritvo, “The Order of Nature” (1996), 44–46. 20. On acclimatization and the Cologne zoo, see Rieke-Müller and Dittrich, Der Löwe brüllt (1998), 122–23. On the Stuttgart acclimatization garden, see below in this chapter, “Designing a World in Miniature.” 21. The fi rst three defi nitions come from Brough, Langenscheidts (1996), s.v. “Veredelung.” My thanks for the fourth connotation and for further clarification from Manfred Laubichler, personal communication, February 17, 2004. Whereas Grimms Wörterbuch from the 1850s concentrates on the abstract uses, the practical meanings can be found in Meyers Konversationslexikon from 1885–92, accessed online on 9 September 2007 at http://susi.e_technik.uni_ulm.de:8080/Meyers2/seite/werk/meyers/band/16/seite/0105/ meyers_b16_s0105.html#Veredelung.

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of a new animal species would be a triumph such as few that science has celebrated!” 22 Yet the likelihood of success of acclimatization efforts was a matter of dispute among breeders. Zoo men disagreed over whether races weakened in captivity, requiring regular infusions of new blood from the wild, and over whether hardy new breeds could be made from crossbreeding existing types. 23 Thus, acclimatization melded easily with ongoing questions about breeding and crossbreeding domestic animals. These activities in turn gained further urgency from theory, as well, after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, which suddenly made animal breeding a field for testing of Darwin’s theory of the mutability of animal types. In 1863, for example, the virulent anti-Darwinist Rudolf Wagner, a distinguished professor of zoology at Göttingen, called on zoological gardens to apply rigorous experimental standards to their crossbreeding efforts to make them valid as evidence concerning the pliability of species. 24 As it turned out, simply getting the animals to live through the winter and breed in captivity posed a real challenge; zoo officials came to view these as ends in themselves, and their annual reports stressed the number of new births as a sign of the well-being of the zoo itself. The acclimatization movement contributed directly, if somewhat paradoxically, to the biological perspective: in the interests of effacing geographic and ecological differences among animal breeds, their caretakers found themselves attending closely to those physiological, nutritional, and behavioral needs that seemed to be unchangeable and tied to the organisms’ original ecological setting. But what constituted the animals’ “needs” must be understood in relation to their caretakers’ often anthropomorphic attitudes toward animal care and behavior. Rather than primarily looking to science, then, for the contributions of the zoo move22. Bruch, “Unsere Aufgabe” (1864), 6. 23. A traveler to Berlin reported that Lichtenstein observed that a kangaroo pair in the royal menagerie on the Pfaueninsel near Potsdam had brought forth ten to twelve offspring a year in the beginning of their stay there, a number that diminished over the years until fi nally no more were born and they all died off. Turkeys kept in Europe, he claimed, were small and not hardy, and their population should be improved by importations from America. On the other hand, Lichtenstein also thought hybridization yielded poor results as well and recommended that farmers and landspeople strive to keep their races of fowl pure. On both accounts, Lichtenstein looked upon acclimatization efforts with disapproval. Eversmann, “Erinnerungen” (1861), 57. Martin also referred to the “Veredelung der Rassen” as a goal of acclimatization gardens in Praxis (1869–82), vol. 3 pt. 1:155. 24. R. Wagner, “Ueber eine wichtige Aufgabe” (1863).

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ment to the biological perspective, we need to look at the symbolic and moral meanings given to the zoo and to animal care. Here again we will begin with Philipp Leopold Martin.

Designing a World in Miniature Martin was a restless man. Although one might have thought that keeping up with the steady stream of incoming specimens at the royal cabinet in Stuttgart would have provided enough to do in a day, dealing with them did not satisfy Martin’s ambitions and interests. Even before he took up the fossil reconstructions that would result in his Museum of the Primeval World, in the early 1860s he was developing yet another interest on the side: he was becoming a zoo entrepreneur. Although Martin himself would never succeed in running a zoo, he became an active participant in the movement, visiting, studying, and analyzing zoos, designing two that were never built, and, as we have seen, installing his museum of prehistoric life on the grounds of one. In his plans for zoos we see him carrying over to this new realm many of the commitments already evident in his taxidermic work—the need for greater attention to and valuing of practical zoology, the commitment to making zoology accessible and interesting to a broader public, and an aesthetic presentation of animals integrated with their natural surroundings rather than stripped of them. His zoo work simultaneously expanded the possibilities for expressing these commitments and formed one of many bridges between the museum and zoo worlds being built at the time. It remains unclear why Martin approached the office of the Württemberg court (Obersthofmeisteramt) in 1862 with a proposal that the king found a zoo. To be sure, Martin already had his own experience with zoos and animal care. When he had worked in Berlin, he had often visited the Berlin zoo with his boss, Martin Hinrich Lichtenstein, who ran both the zoological museum and the zoo. He was a keen observer of animal life, especially bird life—indeed, in his 1856 pamphlet on taxidermic reform, he had stressed the importance for proper taxidermy of the artist observing living animals in their “characteristic moments of life” and being able to sketch and reproduce those moments, 25 and later he would insist that the zoo was the place to carry this out. In his proposal to the 25. P. Martin, “Ueber zweckmässiges Sammeln” (1856), 4, 13–14.

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Württemberg court, his representation of the zoo as a “world in miniature” that would awaken the visitor’s “love of nature” and thus contribute to “allgemeine Bildung” echoed arguments made much earlier by Lichtenstein for Berlin. Martin’s proposal also stressed the importance of acclimatization—a special interest of the elderly King Wilhelm I (1781–1864), who already raised and bred exotic sheep, goats, deer, zebus, and yaks on his palace grounds. Indeed, Martin called his project not a zoo but an “acclimatization garden.” In appealing to the value of acclimatization for “practical life,” Martin stressed a theme that he could count on interesting the king, whose own interest in acclimatization was part of a larger commitment to the agricultural development of Württemberg, which was not wealthy and had seen repeated episodes of famine during his reign. 26 Martin received royal encouragement for the project and moved forward with it, sketching plans for the animals and their proper accommodation. In 1863 he took time off from the royal cabinet to visit the zoos in Frankfurt, Dresden, Berlin, Cologne, and Hamburg (something that could only have exacerbated the growing tension between himself and his supervisor at the royal cabinet, Krauss, over his inefficiency in preparing taxidermic specimens). Although the ailing king spent the summer visiting various spas, his aides encouraged Martin to hope for groundbreaking on the royal grounds in the winter of 1863–64. After a number of delays, approval for the project was granted on 1 March 1864. 27 In late June, however, just as work on the fi rst building was ready to start and Martin was on his way to Frankfurt to pick up new animals, the king died. His son, who apparently disliked the idea of a public zoo on the royal grounds, immediately called a halt to the project. 28 Martin’s bitter disappointment at the sudden end to this zoo rings through his brief history of the project in volume 3 of his Praxis der Naturgeschichte, a volume devoted to surveying existing zoos and delin26. The story of Martin’s efforts to found a zoo in 1862–64 derives from Rieke-Müller and Dittrich, Der Löwe brüllt (1998), 188–95. On the acclimatization movement more generally, see ibid., 115–24; Osborne, Nature, the Exotic, and the Science of French Colonialism (1994); and Anderson, “Climates of Opinion” (1992). 27. Martin, letter to Der Zoologische Garten, 7 March 1864, in P. Martin, “Correspondenzen” (1864), 155. 28. Martin recalled (Praxis, vol. 3, pt. 1:101) that the new King Karl had stopped the project the very day after King Wilhelm’s death (25 June); this appears to refer to the halting of the building preparations, since the overall project itself was stopped on 8 July, as documented in Rieke-Müller and Dittrich, Der Löwe brüllt (1998), 194.

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eating an ideal one. But this experience had opened up for him new possibilities for enlivening natural history and a new circle of acquaintances engaged in similar tasks. In his travels to zoos he had met a quite a number of zoo people, including Gustav Jaeger, a Stuttgart native then living in Vienna as a natural history entrepreneur, who would become important to Martin just a few years later, when both would become involved with the private zoological garden run in Stuttgart by the restaurateur Johannes Nill. Through his work on the royal acclimatization garden, too, Martin became acquainted with Ferdinand Hackländer, who as director of royal gardens and buildings had supervised the zoo project. 29 Since 1858 Hackländer had also been editor of the popular Stuttgart-based family magazine Ueber Land und Meer, and it was almost certainly this connection that resulted in Martin’s publishing a series of four articles about zoos in that magazine in 1864–65. In the opening essay, Martin fi rst articulated the conceptual distinction between “practical” and “scientific” zoology that would later provide the central theme for his Praxis. Here he allied practical zoology with the tasks of the zoo, arguing that because scholars had taken so much trouble “to view zoology as a pure, learned doctrine, which wasn’t required to have anything to do with common life, there arose among practically oriented minds—even in the camp of the learned—the need to do zoology in a more practical way.” The study of living individuals, identified with “practical zoology,” would fi ll the gaps left by the exclusive study of dead animals, gaps all too evident from the “stiff, lifeless forms in museums” and the dry, “one-sided” zoology textbooks associated with systematics. “This is the scientific orientation that is incumbent on the modern zoological garden.” 30 Thus, already in 1864 Martin was transferring his hostility to traditional systematic zoology from the museum context into that of the zoo, and expanding his notion of “practical zoology” to include the zoo. Here he was in line with other zoo proponents of his time. According to Carl Bruch of Der Zoologische Garten in 1864, zoos had already overcome the “sharp separation between theory and practice” that had existed in Germany, whereby Wissenschaft was “solely the property of the scholar.” The practical direction in which zoos were taking zoology was 29. P. Martin, Praxis (1869–82), vol. 3, pt. 1:100. On the controversial Hackländer, see http://www.fw_hacklaender.de/php/hack_person.php; and Bendt and Fischer, Friedrich Wilhelm Hacklä nder 1816–1877 (1998). 30. P. Martin, “Wanderungen” (1863–64), 582.

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to promote “knowledge of the living animal” and render such knowledge useful by bringing it into the direct presence of the common man. At the same time, the purpose of the journal, as of zoos themselves, according to the editor, was to bring the practical animal breeder and keeper together with the scientific specialist into a common conversation, with the end of enhancing and broadening zoological knowledge. 31 Martin’s enthusiasm for zoos as the new direction for practical zoology as well as his growing discontent in his job at the royal cabinet led him in the mid-1860s to apply for positions that opened up at zoos in Hannover, Hamburg, Vienna, and Breslau. For all of these, he was either turned down or ignored. 32 However, his interest in the acclimatization, crossbreeding, and care of living animals persisted. In 1871 he founded the Württemberg Association of Bird Lovers (Württembergische Verein für Vogelfreunde), a society devoted to bird breeding and care. Its members, who numbered 145 at the end of 1872, competed in exhibiting their varieties of pigeons, fowl, and ornamental birds; scattered birdseed for wild birds in the winter; and provided nesting boxes at cost to support the breeding of wild birds. Martin himself won a prize from the society for a fancy pigeon pair he entered in 1872, at the same meeting where he displayed a collection of twenty-one stuffed useful and harmful birds (with information on how they gained these attributes). 33 That same year he published a book on “bird houses and their inhabitants,” an updating of a highly successful book by the famous ornithologist Christian Ludwig Brehm (father of Alfred Brehm). 34 His promotion of practical zoology went further. After he became associated with the Nill zoo in Stuttgart 31. Bruch, “Unsere Aufgabe” (1864). Bruch identified himself as coming from the scholarly side of the enterprise (p. 2), and during his seventeen-month tenure as editor, the journal contained more contributions from the university community than it would in subsequent years. 32. P. Martin, “Entwurf zur Gründung eines ‘Museums des Urwelt’ in Berlin, bestehend in 3 Bogen Text und zwei Beilagen von Leopold Martin, Weiberstraße 66 in Stuttgart,” in GSPK, Rep 76 Vc, Sekt. 2, Tit. XXIII, Lit. A., Nr. 75, Bd. I: Acta betr. die Gründung eines Museums urweltlicher Gebilde zu Berlin durch den Inspektor am archäologischen Museum zu Stuttgart, Martin, vom August 1867. 33. “Verein der Vogelfreunde in Württemberg” (1874). On Martin’s cofounding the Verein and his pigeon prize, see Noell, Paul Martin (1987), 4–6. Martin’s Verein was not the only one of its kind; in February 1868 the association Vogelfreunde was founded in Nürnberg with purposes similar to those of the Stuttgart one. Jäckel, “Die Gesellschaft der Vogelfreunde in Nürnberg” (1869). 34. P. Martin, Das Vogelhaus und seine Bewohner (1872). This was advertised on the title page as the third, completely revised edition of Christian Ludwig Brehm’s Kanarienvögel book, published as a “reprint from the third part of Die Praxis der Naturgeschichte.”

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in 1874, he published a series of notes in Der Zoologische Garten on the births and animal crosses there (with special interest in the cross between a polar bear and a brown bear). 35 And in 1878 he revisited the issues of zoo design and management in the fi rst part of volume 3 of his Praxis, presenting an analysis and critique of the practices of keeping living creatures in zoos, botanical gardens, aquariums, and terrariums. Here we can see the same commitments that infused his taxidermic reconstructions, to the unity of nature and to representing animals’ lives in their ecological and geographic settings. Martin praised the development from menagerie to zoo, which involved giving the captive animals more space in their cages and pens than was afforded by the close quarters of the traveling or fi xed commercial menageries. More space was “more comfortable and more natural” for animals—“natural” here implying a more respectful, harmonious, and less exploitative attitude toward animals than that shown by the menageries. 36 He praised the acclimatization gardens in Paris, Rotterdam, the Hague, Melbourne, and Calcutta for combining exotic animals and plants into unified “botanicalzoological” gardens and rebuked German zoos for their hesitancy in following this course. He suggested that the experience of tropical greenhouses open to the public would be enhanced if appropriate birds were included in aviaries under their glass roofs. He urged zoo builders to broaden their vision even further to include not only animals and plants together in their purview but also to represent the geological formations that underlay them and the primitive peoples that stood “at the threshold of our present-day cultural peoples,” as well as archaeological and paleontological reconstructions that would connect the present to the past. 37 His garden was thus a “world in miniature” indeed, a universal living museum that embraced nature and culture, past and present. Martin’s vision for what such an institution might look like is most fully expressed in a design that serves as the culmination of the 1878 volume of Praxis. The result of over fi fteen years’ reflections, observations, and participation in the emerging zoo scene, it represents both an epi-

35. P. Martin, “Mittheilungen aus dem Nill’schen Thiergarten” (1876); P. Martin, “Die Bären-Bastarde” (1877); P. Martin, “Mittheilungen aus Nill’s Thiergarten” (1878); P. Martin, “Die Bären-Bastarde” (1882). The bears would eventually end up in the royal natural history cabinet after their deaths: K. Lampert, “Zur Geschichte des k. Naturalienkabinets in Stuttgart” (1896), 387. 36. P. Martin, Praxis (1869–82), vol. 3, pt. 1:3–4. 37. Ibid., vol. 3, pt. 1:6–8.

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tome of what he held to be best about the many existing zoos that had sprung up in the German lands in the previous two decades and a critique of where they had failed. It was a decisively original product, an imagined object of a different kind from what existed, yet wrought from features already available in his culture. It also reveals his acute awareness of the zoo as a fundamentally aesthetic form of representation. Martin’s fi rst significant revision of existing zoo concepts was not to call his imagined institution a zoological garden. Instead, he called it a “central garden for the study of nature and peoples,” which offered a unified representation of the world in its natural connections among plants, animals, and people. This meant putting plants, animals, and representations of people (generally buildings but sometimes monuments or other cultural symbols) from one place all together, representing simultaneously ecological, geographic, and cultural unity. “What God has joined, let no man put asunder,” Martin intoned (in some contradiction to his earlier enthusiasm for acclimatization). This idea had immediate implications for the organization of the collection. “What is more natural and simultaneously more instructive, than to display nature in our gardens by world regions, zones, and local conditions? ” 38 In contrast to the systematics-oriented tradition dominating European public zoos, Martin laid out his zoo and its inhabitants to represent the geographic distribution of animals into four different realms: Europe (in the center of his plan), Asia, inclusive of Australia and New Zealand (on the left), Africa (at the top) and the New World of the Americas (on the right) (figure 3.2). This arrangement held specific meaning for Martin not only for the animal collections, but also for the way that he expected visitors to use the space and to recognize their own place in the world. The zoo entrance, at the gates marked A and B, led immediately into the European area (appropriately enough, in the center, marked by capital roman letters). This contained the cultural accoutrements then associated with zoos. The area marked C contained a museum and restaurant; D was the music pavilion; the two circles marked t were kiosks for information and small sales. In this design, the cultural and commercial aspects of the zoo, along with the necessary machine, storage, and work buildings (Oekonomie-Hof), were placed around the edges, to minimize disturbances to the animals, and to the visitors’ attention to them.39 38. Ibid., vol. 3, pt. 1:202. 39. Ibid., vol. 3, pt. 1:208.

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figure 3.2. “Schematic Plan” of Martin’s zoo. From Martin, Praxis (1869–82), plate 12 of atlas to vol. 3, pt. 1.

But even more lay behind the layout of the European realm. To Martin, the restaurant represented the place in the zoo where European visitors were most at home, most comfortable and themselves. From the restaurant’s terrace, the visitor could look out over the familiar display of native European deer to see the pond, ornamented by peaceful waterbirds. (Martin noted that he modeled this visual scheme on the zoo in Frankfurt, but such scenery would already have been familiar from three or more generations of princes’ and aristocrats’ deer parks and “English gardens,” with their characteristic open lawns and obligatory ponds.)40 In this way, Martin explained, the fi rst impression upon entering the zoo was of familiar scenery, so that the visitor could adjust easily, as if on a trip leaving from and returning to a well-known sight. To ensure this illusion, 40. Ibid., vol. 3, pt. 1:209, 249; Baratay and Hardouin-Fugier, Zoo (2002), 76–78.

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a line of hills on the northern border of the European realm, on which goats and sheep frolicked in their topographically appropriate “alpine” setting, masked the African realm on the other side, so that visitors sitting on the terrace or looking out from the restaurant were unable to see it.41 Just across the pond that anchored the European area lay the aquarium, marked E, which was located mainly underground. Aquariums were an increasingly common feature of late nineteenth-century German zoos, after the successes of the fi rst one installed in the Hamburg zoo shortly after it opened in 1863. Placing an aquarium in the ground was a practical means to keep aquarium water temperatures cool and stable introduced by W. Alford Lloyd, the English originator of the large-scale aquarium, but the presentation of the underground aquarium as a romantic grotto that Martin adopted was a flourish he took from the private aquariums in Hannover (founded 1867) and Berlin (founded 1869), both designed by the architect Wilhelm Lüer (figures 3.3, 3.4).42 To add to the romance, the aquarium could be reached not only by the path but also by a gondola (launched at WF, and landing at the “Fingal’s Cave” entrance, FH). This was an added pleasure park feature of Martin’s own that underlined his theme of travel from the familiar to the exotic. Although Martin clearly drew from existing models in his aquarium design, here, too, he suggested some innovations in line with his geographic and ecological commitments. Existing saltwater aquariums typically contained fish and plants from all over the world in one tank; Martin suggested dividing them into different zones—arctic, moderate, and hot. For freshwater aquariums he recommended showing amphibious animals and plants surrounding the water, next to the tanks with the water creatures themselves (figure 3.5).43 Visitors to Martin’s imagined zoo could travel not only in space but also in time. The European area boasted a prehistoric section that contained part of the pond (figure 3.2, area II, marked GJK and ringed by dots and plus signs; figure 3.6). Here the visitor traveled forward through time from the Jura period, with extinct plesiosaurs and mososaurs emerging from the water and ammonites decorating its edges. Moving toward the left past the models of the mammoth and Irish elk, the visitor arrived at a little cluster of prehistoric lake dwellings that represented the

41. P. Martin, Praxis (1869–82), vol. 3, pt. 1:208–9. 42. Dittrich and Rieke-Müller, Ein Garten für Menschen und Tiere (1990), 24. 43. P. Martin, Praxis (1869–82), vol. 3, pt. 1:209–10.

Figure 3.3. Idealized underground grottoaquarium for Martin’s zoo, drawn by his son Leopold Martin. From Martin, Praxis (1869– 82), plate 9, fig. 4, of atlas to vol. 3, pt. 1. Figure 3.4. Berlin Aquarium. Detail of a two-page engraving from a drawing by Emil Schmidt. From Die Gartenlaube, 1873, 166–67. FigURE 3.5. “African Crocodile and Turtle Pond in a Greenhouse,” drawn by P. L. Martin’s son Leopold. From Martin, Praxis (1869– 82), plate 9, fig. 2, of atlas to vol. 3, pt. 1.

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figure 3.6. Park of ancient animals, drawn by Leopold Martin for P. L. Martin’s zoo. The temporal sequence moves from the Jurassic world, on the right, to the Tertiary period, in the middle and on the left. From Martin, Praxis (1869–82), plate 10, fig. 2, of atlas to vol. 3, pt. 1.

earliest European culture. Again, such features were not without precedent: the Crystal Palace in Sydenham famously displayed Waterhouse Hawkins’s extinct monsters outdoors in its park beginning in 1854.44 But Martin’s zoo represented a much fuller integration of past with present than existed in real zoos. Its narrative elements drew not from zoo culture but from popular paleontological epics such as that of his Stuttgart colleague Oscar Fraas’s Vor der Sündfluth, which told the history of the earth and life on it up to the emergence of humans. And, of course, it represented an elaboration of Martin’s own historical reconstructions in his Museum of the Primeval World.45 Just beyond these representations of prehistory, heading south again, were the European animals now nearly hunted to extinction but which represented “the past life of the German primitive forest”—wolves, foxes, with thick forest surrounding them (K); red deer, elk, reindeer, European bison, and wild hogs in a parklike setting; and the bearpit. As we will see in the section below on nature protection, exhibits of rare European animals were not uncommon in German zoos. From Europe one traveled outward to the surrounding realms. On the three sides surrounding Europe were Asia (on the left), Africa (above), and America (on the right). Each of these realms, like the European

44. For the best recent scholarly analysis of the Crystal Palace monsters, see J. Secord, “Monsters at the Crystal Palace” (2004), 138–69. 45. See chapter 2.

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area, was marked not only by the animals and plants native to it, but also by architecture representing the native peoples. Thus, the European deer received a traditional hunting house, the reindeer a stone hut and a pond to cool off in (decorated with rune stones to add Germanic flavor). The American buffalo were displayed with wigwams, and to heighten the sense that these wigwams were recently inhabited, scalps and “war trophies” were displayed from their tops; “and who knows,” wrote Martin, “whether [the Indians] or their enemies will suddenly break out of a nearby bush? ” 46 Along the same lines, the African realm sported three large buildings: an “Egyptian temple,” a greenhouse (with pavilions for lions, leopards, apes, and birds), and a Nigerian “common house” for West African animals, the tribal huts in front providing summer housing for animals. The Egyptian temple, which housed neither gods nor ancestors but African elephants, rhinoceroses, giraffes, and antelope, was intended to evoke the civilization of four thousand years in the past. (The zoos in Antwerp and Düsseldorf already had built similar buildings, though in lesser dimensions than Martin drew.) Along the foyer ran an internal basin for hippos; the rest of the interior cages were to be occupied by ostriches and antelope.47 Such exotic zoo architecture was typical of German zoos after about 1870, and it worked to situate animals with regard to particular building types and landscapes. This tradition may be traced back to the “Swiss valley” section of the Jardin des Plantes, developed at the end of the eighteenth century. In contrast to the baroque formal gardens characteristic of the French gardening style of the early eighteenth century, the Swiss valley followed later eighteenth-century fashion in developing a picturesque garden landscape complete with hills and grottoes and associating this style with one of the most wild and romantic areas of Western Europe. While by the end of the eighteenth century such picturesque gardens often included domestic animals, the novelty of the Jardin des Plantes was to introduce exotic animals and building styles into this picture, and to associate the animals with the landscape and the architecture. However, what made the Swiss valley “Swiss” was not a geographically authentic set of Swiss animals, habitats, or enclosures, but rather an evocation of the exoticism and wildness then associated with Switzerland, 46. P. Martin, Praxis (1869–82), vol. 3, pt. 1:240. 47. Ibid., vol. 3, pt. 1:241.

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figure 3.7. Picturesque goat enclosure in the Swiss valley of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, signed “Harrison.” From Cap, Le Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle (1854), 162. (Courtesy of Memorial Library Special Collections, University of Wisconsin.)

only slightly tamed by the existence of enclosures and curving paths that created a form of scenery charmingly described by one writer as “bien accidentée.” By the 1840s the Swiss valley boasted a variety of exotic exemplars of both architecture (in various rustic styles) and wildlife, including tortoises, gazelles, ostriches, and according to one report, tigers among its inhabitants (figure 3.7).48 The zoo designs of the mid-nineteenth century owed much indeed to earlier trends in landscape gardening. Artificial cliffs had become fashionable in the late eighteenth-century landscape gardens of the wealthy; in the mid-nineteenth century these reappeared in zoos, now adorned 48. On the Swiss valley see Baratay and Hardouin-Fugier, Zoo (2002), 77–78. Bernard, Le jardin des plantes (1842–43), 20, made both the comment “bien accidentée” and the claim about tigers, which actually were housed outside the Swiss valley complex (though not far away).

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by goats and sheep (which were thus set in their “natural” surroundings). Similarly, the grotto architecture of Lüer harkened back to the romantic artificial grottoes that decorated aristocrats’ grounds (figure 3.8). And the persistence of the bear fortress (Bärenburg), which dated to the medieval period, may also be attributed to a romantic-nostalgic view of “German” nature and the German past.49 As zoos grew and new buildings were built in the 1870s and after, geography enhanced the romance: Asian and African animals were typically housed in increasingly elaborate buildings intended to evoke “oriental” exoticism, although such geographic and cultural associations were sometimes complicated or undermined by putting animals from different regions together (as Martin did in placing animals belonging to the African plains together under the rubric of “Egypt”). Martin somewhat scornfully described the more exotic buildings, such as the elephant house at the Berlin zoo, as “fantasy buildings” evoking “the Thousand and One Nights”: “one looks around, sadly in vain, for the half-veiled priestesses . . . and Indian dancers [Bajaderen] that could linger here, until a plump, thick-skinned rhinocerous comes rolling around and destroys all our illusions” (figure 3.9). 50 Not all zoos were slavishly imitative in their associations, of course. Where Martin represented the American bison with grass huts and wigwams, Dresden’s American bison, by contrast, had received a pioneerstyle log cabin when the city’s zoo was built in the 1860s; the Berlin zoo took yet a different tack, introducing an Indian longhouse (with totem poles) in 1905. 51 For Germans, all of these represented “America” equally. Buildings and their decorations, rather than a reconstruction of habitats, were used to evoke the geographic home of the animals. Even where such efforts were less elaborate, the imagination, with a little help from contemporary writing, could supply the needed details of geography and habitat. At the Dresden zoo, animals were caged without much attention to habitat or geographic organization. Nevertheless, the author of an 1862 article in Die Gartenlaube presented his readers with a zoo travelogue not unlike Martin’s later one. “With the camel, one doesn’t in fact know whether this animal was made for the desert or 49. Rieke-Müller and Dittrich, Der Löwe brüllt (1998), 217–18. 50. P. Martin, Praxis (1869–82), vol. 3, pt. 1:35–36. 51. On the Berlin longhouse, see Klös, Frädrich, and Klös, Die Arche Noah an der Spree (1994), 107. This building was destroyed in World War II and rebuilt in the late 1950s under Klös’s directorship (239). On the Dresden zoo, see “Der zoologische Garten in Dresden” (1862).

figure 3.8. Cliffs and “engagement bridge” (Verlobungsbrücke) designed by the architect Wilelm Lüer at the Hannover zoo. From Dittrich and Rieke-Müller, Ein Garten für Menschen und Tiere (1990), 29.

figure 3.9. Berlin elephant house, known as the “Elephant Pagoda,” opened in 1873 and destroyed by Allied bombers on 22 November 1943. From Klös et al., Die Arche Noah an der Spree (1994), 81.

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the desert was made for the camel, the two fit so well together. . . . What thoughts and images go through the mind” when looking at this animal: the Old Testament, oriental caravans, the tales of Scheherazade. Then one hears the crow of a German rooster next door. “The oriental fantasies dissolve, we feel ourselves once again in the German homeland.” A little later, heading toward the ostrich house, “it is African again.” 52 Reinforced by such evocations in family magazines and newspapers, German zoos developed a robust set of cultural-geographic associations for animals without reproducing their natural habitats. Martin’s expansion of zoo symbolism to a more generalized representation of geographic realms and their union of flora, fauna, and human culture captured an appealing idea but did not set a trend among zoo builders. Only in the twentieth century, with the opening in 1907 of the Stellingen zoo, a private zoo established outside Hamburg by the animal dealer Carl Hagenbeck, would the introduction of the “barless enclosure” allow the illusion of geographically unified beasts—and even here, the illusion was inaccurate, even by standards of the time. 53 In the intervening quarter century, zoo managers would not venture much further than largely symbolic representations connecting animals to their geographic homes through building design and through familiar and suggestive landscape constructions such as cliffs and grottoes. The significance of Martin’s garden lies not in its anticipation of the future, then, but in what it tells us about the early zoo boom in Germany: it reflected the optimistic hopes of a group of early scientific zoo enthusiasts for the possibility of reconstructing a geographic and ecologically oriented “world in miniature” in the zoo. As early as 1854, the zoologist Albert Günther, then working under Lichtenstein in Berlin, enthused about the possibility of organizing a zoo with animals grouped along geographic and ecological lines. 54 In 1863, another writer proposed uniting zoological and botanical gardens into “the by no means unreachable ideal of a living museum of natural history.” Indeed, a start had already been made: he pointed to the efforts of the botanist Heinrich Göppert in Breslau, who as director of the university’s botanical garden had begun 52. “Ein Stündchen in Dresdens zoologischem Garten” (1862). 53. On Hagenbeck’s Tierpark in Stellingen, see Rothfels, Savages and Beasts (2002); and H. Reichenbach, “Carl Hagenbeck’s Tierpark” (1980). 54. Rieke-Müller and Dittrich, Der Löwe brüllt (1998), 78–80. From 1857, Günther was curator of fi shes and reptiles at the British Museum; later he would become director of its zoological division.

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displaying fossil plants and animals together with reproductions of the mountain formations from which they came. 55 David Friedrich Weinland noted about the same time that the Breslau zoo, then under development, with Göppert among its organizers, sought “as far as possible, to put flora and fauna, plants and animals of the same regions [Länder]” together. (He cynically added, “That this is unfortunately only to a very limited degree possible, praxis will soon teach.”)56 And Gustav Jaeger, then developing what would be a short-lived zoo in Vienna, hired the landscape and animal artist Anton Schrödl to design “natural” scenery for it as part of his effort to recreate a natural environment for the animals. 57 Weinland, Jaeger, and Günther had been close friends at the University of Tübingen in the early 1850s (where Weinland and his distant cousin Günther shared an apartment with a large aviary), and it is possible that they may have discussed such ideas even then. 58 In any case, there was clearly a desire among these naturalists of the early zoo movement to try to realize a more natural form of displaying animals. They would largely fail, but this desire would continue to fuel their efforts for years to come. 59

Caring for Animals: From Daily Life to Nature Protection The use of landscape architecture and building design to evoke particular relations between animals and their environments was central to zoo 55. Jäger, “Die Zoologische Gärten” (1863). It is very possible that the fi rst initial H is a misprint for G. Gustav Jaeger, then working in Vienna to set up a zoo in the popular leisure-time Prater park, would have been an extremely likely author for such a piece. See below on Jaeger. 56. Wd. [Weinland], “Zoologischer Garten in Breslau” (1863). 57. Weinreich, Duftstofftheorie (1993), 58 n. 70. 58. Ibid., 20. On Günther and Weinland’s aviary, see Gunther, A Century of Zoology (1975), 233. 59. Weinland’s best-selling children’s book Rulaman (1875) would re-create the landscape and lives of prehistoric people and animals in the “Swabian alps,” using the scientific excavations of the caves around Urach for his evidence. http://www.showcaves.com/ german/explain/Literature/RulamanIntro.html. Albert Günther, as keeper of the zoological collections of the British Museum in the early 1880s, would oversee the replacement of crowded rows of ornithological specimens with family groups with nests and young, following precepts he had fi rst learned from Ploucquet in the 1850s. Gunther, A Century of Zoology (1975), 379–81. Ironically, these exhibits at the British Museum would be taken as a model of how the British did things right by German museum reformers in the 1880s and 1890s. See chapter 5.

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developers’ structuring how nature, both exotic and native, should be imagined, especially by the zoo visitor. For practical naturalists working with animals, however, the relations between animals and their environments were also constituted through the everyday business of keeping the animals alive. Although not considered especially scientific in retrospect, practical naturalists working with living animals in and out of zoos in the later nineteenth century contributed (literally) volumes of information about animal habits, behavior, and basic living requirements— interests that in and of themselves, though not systematized, constituted an enormous expansion in explicit attention to living animals and thereby contributed directly to biological knowledge. Much of this activity took place within the conjoined frameworks of acclimatization and breeding, on the one hand, and an anthropomorphic view of animal behavior, on the other. These may both be understood within the broader frameworks of mastery and stewardship over nature that Keith Thomas identified long ago,60 with attendant moral obligations to animals that stretched from day-to-day care to animal preservation and protection. Acclimatization was a complex process. It simultaneously involved adjusting an animal to a new physical environment, with attendant changes in temperature, moisture, and food; and domesticating it. Domestication in turn meant both taming animals—getting them to obey humans and not be dangerous to them—and getting them comfortable enough in their captive situations to breed.61 The pages of Der Zoologische Garten are fi lled with information about how to achieve both acclimatization (for exotic organisms) and domestication (for both exotic and native organisms). Correspondents contributed tips on how to accustom captive wild birds to take standard foods such as barley mixed with water or mealworms, and on how much space birds and animals required to feel the illusion of freedom (and thus act “naturally”); by the same token, zookeepers provided monkeys and bears with branches to climb on.62 Not surprisingly, much attention was given over to getting the animals to breed successfully. Authors detailed their observations of the mating activities of their animals, the changes that came over the pregnant female, signs of health and illness during pregnancy, the length of

60. Thomas, Man and the Natural World (1983). 61. Bruch, “Unsere Aufgabe” (1864); Schmidt, “Ueber Thierhaltung” (1864). 62. E.g., Liebe, “Einige neue Erfahrungen” (1870–71).

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gestation, the relations of newborns to their mothers, and so forth. Nor were such efforts at acclimatization and breeding confi ned to zoo animals and those small birds, mammals, reptiles, and fish that could be kept and observed at home. Contributors wrote in to report on experiments with economically useful species that were absent from zoo displays: the cultivation of sponges; the introduction of new silk-producing insects from South America; the artificial culture of fish in fishponds and of oysters in coastal beds.63 All of these activities were predicated on humans’ manipulating and shaping the processes of animal nature—activities steeped in assumptions about the right (and even duty) of humans to dominate and control nature. At a general level, then, the German case is similar to the English one so fully analyzed by Harriet Ritvo in The Animal Estate, in which domination and mastery are central themes. But there are differences as well. The colonial impulse that contributed so much to British self-conception and sense of mastery of the world is largely absent from the writings of the colony-less Germans of the 1860s and 1870s. Nor do the German practical naturalists appear to have been as obsessed with introducing exotic new meats and fowl for the table as were the members of the London Acclimatization Society.64 Conversely, absent from Ritvo’s account of British acclimatization and breeding is the deep sense of sympathy and obligation to animals that permeates much of the German writing about these subjects. Indeed, central to the concerns of practical naturalists was keeping their charges alive and comfortable. As the director of the Frankfurt zoo, Max Schmidt, wrote in 1864, if captivity is not to descend into “criminal mistreatment,” then the zookeeper must love animals and must situate them in conditions as close to nature as possible. This meant that they deserved proper physical conditions: fresh air, clean water and adequate food, shade in hot weather, and warmth in cold weather. (In agreement with this tenet, Martin followed the Hamburg zoo in designing his llama huts to look like straw huts in the style of Andes dwellers to convey the cultural cue for their habitat, but reinforced the huts with hidden wall- and floorboards to protect the animals against north63. On sponges: “Miscellen” (1869). On silk insects: Ernst, “Correspondenz” (1870). On artificial fi sh culture: e.g., “Miscellen” (1869). On oyster culture: Noll, “Die bisherigen Resultate der Austernzucht” (1870). 64. Ritvo, The Animal Estate (1987).

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ern winters.)65 Zoo men also recognized that psychologically natural conditions were important: companionship and space, for example, would make the state of captivity bearable to animals and were necessary to provide visitors with a true view of the living animal. As Weinland put it “An animal that sits alone, passing its days in mourning in its cage without psychological [seelische] connections to another living being, is hardly a more instructive object for our observation than a well-stuffed museum specimen.” 66 Elsewhere, in an article titled “What Belongs to a ‘Whole’ Animal, and How It Might Be Possible to Keep Tropical Animals Healthier,” he emphasized the importance of space, again using the museum as his negative exemplar: “If we see two hundred birds in a room together, each species in a small cage, where free fl ight is not possible, where there is hardly room for a leap of ten inches, such a menagerie is hardly better then a museum of stuffed birds, which present themselves pretty and straight on their branches, all in a row.” 67 An index of this well-being, as well as of success in acclimatization, was success in keeping animals alive for a long time and breeding them. It is striking how much space is devoted in the pages of Der Zoologische Garten to reporting successful births and listing the lengths of lives of zoo animals. While it is not unreasonable to interpret this as zookeepers’ demonstrating their mastery over their animals, and that of humans over nature, another element is present as well. These lists implicitly express the view that, having made the animals captive, the zookeepers had a particular obligation to try to avoid shortening their lives. Martin made this view explicit when he condemned the London zoo for the brief life expectancy of its monkeys, which rarely lived through the winter and were replaced annually by new ones. Over a thousand monkeys had lost their lives in Regent’s Park in the fi fteen years previous to his 1878 volume, and Martin estimated one must at least double this number to take into account the number that perished during the voyage from their native lands, “in order to satisfy the thirst for knowledge of the scholars at Regent’s Park.” Echoing his own earlier critiques of museums, he noted that it was fortunate “that in our German gardens the animals are not 65. “Sträfl ichen Quälerei”: Schmidt, “Ueber Thierhaltung” (1864); P. Martin, Praxis (1869–82), vol. 3, pt. 1:237–38. 66. Weinland, “Was ein zoologischer Garten leisten soll” (1860), 2–3. 67. Weinland, “Was zu einem ‘ganzen’ Thiere gehört” (1860), 187.

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viewed as ‘specimens,’ that must serve only as evidence for an alwaysshifting systematics, but as ‘individuals,’ which possess both material and scientific value.” 68 The sense of moral obligation to animals quickly drew practical naturalists into concerns for animal and nature protection, which formed a significant dimension of the biological perspective. Indeed, practical naturalists were among the earliest in Germany to call public attention to species and habitat losses and to call for formal programs of protection. Historians writing about nature protection in Germany have concentrated on national societies for nature protection and on the interventions of the state, most prominently in the form of the German office for care of natural monuments (Naturdenkmalpflege) that was founded in 1908. To them, generally, the “pioneers” of the movement were such men as Hugo Conwentz and Ernst Rudorff, who were instrumental in creating national-level organizations. But long before the movement was nationalized, activists working at the local and regional levels were already concerned about the species and habitat losses they saw around them. Practical naturalists such as Martin and others who cared for living wild animals were among them, using the zoo journal Der Zoologische Garten to communicate their concerns across the German-speaking world from the early 1860s and founding local organizations to protect species and habitats beginning in the early 1870s.69 Martin’s most important contribution to nature protection, aside from his work with birds, appeared in the last part of his Praxis, completed in October 1881 and published in 1882. Volume 3, part 2, of Praxis opened with the essay “Allgemeiner Naturschutz” (General nature protection), which began with a jeremiad against modern civilization and its moral degeneration, moved on to analyze the problem of agriculturally “useful” and “harmful” animals in strikingly ecological terms, and fi nished with recommendations for action to improve the situation.70 It represented the culmination of over twenty years of observation and activism, 68. P. Martin, Praxis (1869–82), vol. 3, pt. 1:159–60. 69. For sources on the nature protection movement, see n. 2; specifically on the ideological arguments surrounding bird protection, see Schmoll, “Indication and Identification” (2005). I have been unable to fi nd any overview of local nature protection organizations in the mid- to late nineteenth century. 70. This was just the fi rst of four parts of this last part of the handbook. It was followed by a short chapter on acclimatization and a longer one on how to keep captive mammals and birds healthy, both cowritten with Martin’s son Paul, a veterinarian. For the fi nal chap-

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fi rst on behalf of birds and later extended to other animals subject to destruction or endangerment at human hands.71 Martin concentrated his essay on the deliberate destruction of animals by humans. He began with a general historical and geographic overview, claiming that many “primitive” cultures held certain locations and their inhabitants sacred, and generally viewed organisms with respect. By contrast, the Roman tradition, “with its despotic way of thinking,” had lacked such respect for nature and had incorporated this attitude into Roman law, which left animals with no protections against cruelty. Then, representing the Roman Catholic Church as the heir to the Roman empire, Martin argued that its religious tradition likewise offered no protections to animals, as evidenced by bullfighting in Catholic Spain, songbird trapping and shooting in Italy and France, and the broader European practices of hunting for sport.72 Europeans’ moral failings were compounded by ignorance of basic laws of nature. Forest destruction in southern Europe led to the drying up of rivers and wetlands.73 Rather than pouring money into the canalization and control of rivers, Martin argued, it would be better to replant the mountain forests around the rivers’ sources. But the greatest example of human destruction of nature, Martin wrote, was America, where ignorance of nature’s laws combined with unchecked individualism and wanton profit seeking. The mindless chopping down of America’s great forests for profit, he wrote, had led to the massive western fi res of the summer of 1871, which had destroyed forests

ter, on the care and maintenance of terrarium animals, Martin recruited Bruno Dürigen, editor of the popular hobbyist magazine Isis. 71. P. Martin, Praxis (1869–82), vol. 3, pt. 2, foreword, pp. v–viii. 72. Ibid., vol. 3, pt. 2:2–3, 21–23. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer had similarly laid blame for the willingness to destroy animals on the Christian denial of the animal soul as early as 1819 and again in 1851. Hermand, Grüne Utopien (1991), 47–48. 73. Alexander von Humboldt had long since noted the deforestation of southern Europe in his widely read Ansichten der Natur (1808), which was reprinted in new editions in 1826, 1849, and 1877, just a few years before Martin published this essay. Given that the Ansichten summarized Humboldt’s observations on his trip to South America, it seems quite likely that Martin had read the book before his own voyage there in 1849. Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung (1998), 269–70, discusses the Ansichten; 269–86 discusses the publishing history of Humboldt’s Kosmos; and 138–70 and passim discuss the launching of the popular Humboldt-Vereine after 1859. On the broader history of ideas about the relations between rain, moisture, and forests, which has a long and interesting heritage, see Grove, Green Imperialism (1995).

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the size of the kingdom of Saxony and, in Martin’s opinion, had led to a permanent change in the American climate.74 Though ignorance might be the cause of such wanton destruction, in which case education in practical natural history could help, Martin contended that other causes were at work as well. Moral depravity had led to the drastic reduction of the (passenger) pigeon and the bison in the United States, and it could be combated only by the collective intervention of state, school, and church, which should be mobilized to protect nature and to teach people the value of nature protection. Expanding his view to a global perspective, Martin argued more generally that free trade and its attendant greed and materialism led to moral corruption and poverty. It was the source not only of the slave trade, but also of the ivory trade that destroyed elephants and walruses for producing luxury items from walking sticks to billiard balls; the fur trade that decimated populations of fur seals; and the whaling fisheries that had reduced whale populations to the polar regions and led to the complete extinction of the Steller’s sea cow.75 Within the German-speaking lands the culprit was different: the rise of “rational” forestry and agriculture, which had encouraged the killing of songbirds as destructive to crops. Martin argued that this widespread but mistaken advice rested on a hubristic approach to agriculture that recognized neither the self-regulating powers of nature nor the harmful effects of interfering with it. Thus, if songbirds ate fruits and berries valuable to the harvest, they also ate insects that otherwise would overwhelm the crops. Similarly, bats, moles, hedgehogs, shrews, wild cats, foxes, and swallows all performed useful functions in the economy of nature (mostly by keeping down populations of other animals) that if disturbed would result—indeed, according to Martin, had resulted—in an increase in the damages caused by vermin.76 Even some birds recognized as useful, which had formerly lived in hollow logs, dead tree trunks, and forest undergrowth, no longer had a place to live, thanks to the exces74. P. Martin, Praxis (1869–82), vol. 3, pt. 2:7–8. Fires that summer burned from the Rockies to Pennsylvania and culminated in the great Chicago fi re and great Peshtigo fi re in Wisconsin, both of which began on 8 October 1871; the latter burned over a million acres of land. See Lapham, “The Great Fires of 1871” (1965). By 3 October, fi res had devastated a tract 150 miles long in Minnesota: “Prairies in Flames” (1871). 75. P. Martin, Praxis (1869–82), vol. 3, pt. 2:10–20. 76. Ibid., vol. 3, pt. 2:20–27, vermin, p. v. For a broader analysis of nineteenth-century German ideas about forest pests, see Jansen, Schädlinge (2003).

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sive zeal for tidiness of modern rational foresters.77 Overall, “our unnatural economic system in field and forest,” a “system of despoliation,” was largely to blame for the loss of natural life.78 Other accompaniments of modern civilization contributed to the ongoing environmental catastrophe as well. Martin blamed the deaths of many migratory birds on lighthouses, which drew the birds to their lights at night, causing them to crash into the glass, and aboveground electrical telegraph and telephone lines, which birds flew into in the dark. The immediate cause of the 1871 summer fi res in America, Martin ominously reported, was a spark from a locomotive, a classic symbol of modern technology.79 Other inadvertent causes of harm to animals, among many, included egg collecting; artificial fish culture, which introduced fishpond-bred fish into polluted waters with no experience of their natural predators; guns and dynamite, which caused accidents; poisons that affected animals other than those at which they were directed; and finally, the women’s fashion industry, which resulted in the killing of thousands of decorative birds annually, both in Europe and abroad.80 To combat these many sources of animal destruction, Martin called for greater activism for “general nature protection” among voluntary associations, to raise the consciousness of people about the harmonious laws of nature and to take practical steps, such as creating nesting boxes for songbirds. This would not be enough, he feared, and so he also called for state intervention in the form of stricter controls over hunting. He also called for the reform of schools of agriculture and forestry, which had not yet learned that “the sole correct path goes only through nature, whose help we so often, in our shortsightedness, reject.” As forestry had been taken over by men of science who knew something about trees but lacked larger practical knowledge of the forest, the loss of knowledge had been great.81 Theory and practice needed to be reunited at every level, down to the schoolchild, who should be exposed to nature directly and taught to love it in all its interconnectedness.82 Martin’s hostile attribution of the neglect of animals’ rights to Roman law and the Catholic Church appears to have been idiosyncratic (though 77. P. Martin, Praxis (1869–82), vol. 3, pt. 2:28–29. 78. Ibid., vol. 3, pt. 2:41. 79. Ibid., vol. 3, pt. 2:42. On the spark from the locomotive, see 7. 80. Ibid., vol. 3, pt. 2:44–48. 81. Ibid., vol. 3, pt. 2:50–51, quotation on 50. 82. Ibid., vol. 3, pt. 2:52–53, quotation on 53.

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it fed rather well into the broader anti-Catholic tone among Protestants of the time). His connection of animal destruction to immorality and in particular, to the immoral nature of free trade, was likely to have had more resonance at the time, especially among an older generation. Free trade seemed to carry with it all the risks and none of the virtues of a more regulated economic system. This would have been especially apparent to someone from Martin’s background. When Martin was born in 1815, his village in Silesia had only recently dropped its formal guild laws, which strictly controlled the economic patterns of the town to assert the right to a fair living for everyone. Martin’s father was one of two bakers allowed to operate within village limits, one who baked bread and other items from customers’ flour and the other who prepared baked goods for purchase. Each was allowed to demand the custom of everyone who lived within a mile of the bakery. Even after this law was eliminated by the Prussians in 1810, it seems likely that the moral codes that went along with it stayed largely in place.83 The underlying logic of Martin’s argument certainly favored a regime of balance and regulation. The moral economy of the village, like that of nature, was subject to laws that ensured an equilibrium; when this was removed in favor of unrestricted free trade, chaos ruled and the natural order of things disappeared. Not all advocates of nature and animal protection were so explicitly antimodern, but echoes of Martin’s deeply moralistic nature protectionist positions may be found in abundance in the pages of Der Zoologische Garten from its beginning in 1859. In an article titled “Barbarism against the Animal World,” a writer in 1868 reported on “the senseless war of extermination that English tourists are conducting against the free-living animal world in lands where no hunting laws hinder them.” Many people already knew of this thanks to Brehm’s Animal Life, but a new weapon in this war had just appeared: on the banks of the Nile, Lord Landsborough had erected a swiveling cannon fi lled with buckshot, which he directed at the birds feeding in the river’s shallow waters, to kill hundreds of birds at a time. The author reported that similar means had caused the extinction or near extinction of numerous waterbirds in New Zealand. Nor was all his outrage directed at foreigners. Even in Germany, advocates of bird protection had been unable to enact protective legislation, with the result that in one area on the Baltic coast, 83. E. Dewitz, Geschichte des Kreises Bunzlau (1885).

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a good year would see the capture and sale of up to a million birds, with the hunters getting a price of one taler for 140 birds.84 Numerous writers in the Der Zoologische Garten commented on less deliberate species destruction as well, proposing various means to deal with it. As early as 1861, in the second volume of the journal, Max Schmidt wrote of the gift to the Frankfurt zoo of two ibex hybrids from the Archduke Ludwig Joseph of Austria. “It is generally known,” Schmidt wrote, “that the ibex are becoming ever rarer, so that the complete extinction of this stately species is to be feared.” To avoid this, steps had been taken to protect the species and to breed it in captivity. Since this turned out to be exceedingly difficult, “it is not only a fully justified but even a highly commendable experiment, to cross ibexes with the closely related goat,” and Ludwig Joseph had succeeded.85 In 1865, Franz Schlegel, director of the recently opened Breslau zoo, wrote, “One of the nicest tasks of zoological gardens is to grant asylum to animal families threatened with extinction, to allow our human grandchildren to view as living things that which they would otherwise only see in museums as mummies.” He went on to report on his unsuccessful efforts to fi nd native beavers for the zoo, where he had hoped to breed them in captivity.86 And in Frankfurt the medical doctor W. Stricker wrote a series of articles on animals in different parts of Germany that had gone extinct during human history.87 Habitat destruction reared its head early on in Der Zoologische Garten as well. In 1866 Ludwig Reichenbach, director of the Dresden royal natural history cabinet, wrote of the loss of many native species of amphibians and small mammals in his area through sales for terrariums outside Germany, and noted that even if this were stopped, the growth of cities led to the loss, often through deliberate draining, of the ponds and puddles where “innocent” amphibians lived. Reichenbach, whose conservative perspective on the unity and harmony of nature closely resembled Martin’s, hoped that amphibians might be spared the “disharmony” already irremediably affecting humans’ relations to mammals.88 In 1870 Martin himself, in reporting on observations of seabirds he had made 84. Lungershausen, “Barbareien gegen die Thierwelt” (1868). 85. Schmidt, “Nachrichten” (1861). 86. Schlegel, “Die Biberzucht” (1865), 367. 87. Wilhelm Stricker, “Zur naturgeschichtlichen Statistik” (1867–68). 88. L. Reichenbach, “Nachricht über einen hochgelben Triton” (1866). On Reichenbach, see Rieke-Müller and Dittrich, Der Löwe brüllt (1998), 126–30.

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over twenty years earlier on his voyage to South America, told of the destruction of untold numbers of birds by natives who took their eggs from their breeding grounds on the small coastal islands. One must recall, he wrote, “that the guano mountains [used for fertilizer] do not originate from themselves. . . . Of the influence that the thoughtless lessening of seabirds will have on the development of animal life in the sea, we have as yet no knowledge.” 89 In the work of Martin and other practical naturalists, then, the activities of acclimatization, breeding, and caring for animals on a day-to-day basis were bound together with the broader issues of providing care for animals: the need to protect their habitats and to preserve the animals from extinction. All may be understood together to constitute a broad moral regime of stewardship that extended beyond animals to the natural world and yet further to reflect on human behavior as well. As Martin expressed it, “He who has learned to respect and love nature will also respect his fellow man and the laws of society, for the one determines the other!” 90

The Circulation of People and Ideas Martin’s life story shows one person’s travels across the different facets of practical natural history, as he worked in different settings preserving dead animals, invented a new kind of sculptural representation of extinct animals, promoted the zoo as a new institution, practiced and observed breeding of animals and birds, and sought to protect nature from the damages caused by humans. If Martin had the distinction of expressing all these as aspects of one unified approach, he was not alone in moving across its different parts. It is startling, at fi rst, to think of the activities of killing and preserving dead animals and caring for living ones as part of the same project. Yet if we take practical natural history seriously as a category, this conjunction is less odd. Certainly, others besides Martin did both. Consider Franz Leven, whom we previously met as an artistic taxidermist. He moved in and out of the zoo world: in Heidelberg while working at

89. P. Martin, “Aus dem Leben” (1870), 40. 90. P. Martin, Praxis (1869–82), vol. 3, pt. 1:195. On physico-theology see Rieke-Müller and Dittrich, Der Löwe brüllt (1998), 43–44.

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the university’s natural history cabinet, he ran a private zoo (in the city forest!); when he moved to Frankfurt—following complaints from the Heidelberg city forestry officials about the damage caused by his animals to the trees—he tried to gain fi nancial backing to start a zoo there, though this failed. However, he did settle in Frankfurt, and in 1858, when a different group successfully organized a zoo, he was hired to direct it (presumably because of his practical experience with animals, which the wealthy shareholders wholly lacked). He lasted less than a year in this position, though. In 1860, when he took his zooplastic cabinet to Dresden (see chapter 2), he was also employed as “inspector” of the zoo being built there, but as in Frankfurt, the relationship was not to last long, and he parted ways with the zoo before the end of 1861, under suspicion of embezzlement. Broader class and personal issues may also have been at work, hinted at in a description by a Frankfurt zoo initiator, who characterized him as “notoriously unreliable and unrefi ned [ungebildete].” 91 Similarly, the conservator and preparator at the Breslau university museum, Friedrich Tiemann, who kept small birds and mammals at home, was among the founders of the zoo there, and initially served as its “inspector.” In 1864, however, even before the zoo opened, however, a new position of “director” was created, and Tiemann was passed over in favor of Franz Schlegel, much to the consternation of many locals, who thought the position should have gone to Tiemann instead of someone from outside Breslau. The director position was most probably intended as a more public and managerial one, and Schlegel, a medical doctor who also owned a personal menagerie, clearly had the credentials needed to gain the respect of the city’s moneyed elite.92 The story is only slightly different for the Hamburg zoo, where the curator and preparator at the natural history museum, Wilhelm Ludwig Sigel, was hired as “inspector” at the zoo in 1862. He, too, was passed over for director when this more political and public position was created, and he continued on 91. On Leven, see Rieke-Müller and Dittrich, Der Löwe brüllt (1998), 73–76, 84, 94, 178, quotation on 76; and Sakurai, “Science, Identity, and Urban Reinvention” (2006), 177ff. Sakurai notes (p. 177) that Leven lost his job in Frankfurt because of “alleged embezzlement.” 92. Tiemann, “Winterschlaf und Gefangenleben” (1867); “Correspondenz” (1867); Rieke-Müller and Dittrich, Der Löwe brüllt (1998), 187; Gleiss, Unter Robben, Gnus und Tigerschlangen (1967), 16–19. On Schlegel’s private menagerie, see “Correspondenz” (1863), 16–18.

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in the position of inspector (day-to-day caretaker of the animals) until his death in 1878.93 These shifts of position demonstrate the difficulty of fi nding naturalists with sufficient practical experience to take care of the animals and at the same time with high enough social standing to be treated with respect by the boards of directors who hired them. The local communities of naturalists who devoted themselves to living animals were small, and museum preparators tended to be people who enjoyed and knew animals but lacked the resources, education, and social standing to fi nd other kinds of nature-related jobs. For them, the zoo movement surely represented a way to move beyond the work of preserving dead animals to earning a living with live ones.94 But these men, it seems, lacked the status necessary to be public figures, the social and educational background that would allow them to mingle comfortably with the zoo’s backers— hence the belated introduction of the post of “director.” Few and far between were men like Alfred Brehm, who had experience bringing exotic wild animals back to Germany (as well as preserving them in the field), and who was, moreover, well educated and articulate. No wonder that in 1863 Brehm, then working as a schoolteacher in Leipzig, was hired to be director of the Hamburg zoo. At the beginning, the board of directors especially valued his gifts for popularizing natural history, whether expressed through his many books and articles for illustrated magazines or through his public lectures, for they expected these would help attract visitors to the zoo. Yet as Brehm devoted himself increasingly to writing, the board transferred ever more day-to-day decision-making power to Sigel, so that in 1866 Brehm tendered his resignation, complaining that he had no more power there than any common visitor.95 Brehm would go on to establish the Berlin aquarium in 1869. Eventually he would have difficulties with his shareholders in that 93. Weidner, Bilder aus der Geschichte (1993), 244–48. 94. Hamburg’s Sigel specifically mentioned the fi nancial (and health) improvements he would realize upon taking the job as zoo “inspector” and quitting his position as taxidermist at the museum, where he had not had a raise in the previous seventeen years. L. W. Sigel to [Wilhelm Peters], 15 January 1862, MfN d. HUB, HBSB, Sig. SII: Museum Hamburg, Bd. I, 1849–1899, fol. 26–27. 95. Brehm originally gave over a year’s notice, but then was let go by the board in November 1866. On Brehm in Hamburg see Strehlow, “Alfred Edmund Brehm” (1987), esp. 72–73, on his reduction in power; Weidner, Bilder aus der Geschichte (1993), 163–69; and Rieke-Müller and Dittrich, Der Löwe brüllt (1998), 151–57.

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venture as well, and by the end of 1873 he would be forced out of his directorship.96 Thenceforth he would devote himself fully to travel and travel writing. Gustav Jaeger (1832–1917) was another figure who, like Brehm, was university educated and devoted to an entrepreneurial practical zoology. His career exemplifies again the multiplicity of venues for popularizing this new kind of zoology oriented toward the living animal—as well as the difficulties of making a living this way. Another impoverished native of Württemberg, Jaeger helped pay for his university education at Tübingen by writing natural history and science articles for a local popular magazine, Das Buch der Welt. Hoping for better prospects in a more cosmopolitan setting, he moved to Vienna in 1856. In 1860 he opened an “aquarium-salon” there, establishing one of the fi rst public aquariums on the Continent; its success was such that three years later he founded the zoo Am Schüttel in the public park known as the Prater, as a populist alternative to the royal zoo outside Vienna at Schönbrunn. Financial stability was hard to come by, however, and the Prater zoo closed in 1866. Thereafter, Jaeger scratched out a living as a popular natural history writer, publishing articles and books for a general audience on microscopy, aquarium keeping, and zoo animals.97 Jaeger’s university preparation allowed him to qualify as a postsecondary educator—a possibility not open to men like Martin. In 1867 he was appointed Hilfslehrer (adjunct teacher) at the Württemberg agricultural and forestry institute in Hohenheim, and in 1869 he began teaching courses at the polytechnic school in Stuttgart; in 1870 he gained the title (though not the salary) of professor. The teaching jobs at the two institutions brought in barely half what he estimated he needed to support his wife and six children, and he continued to seek new ways to add to his income. In 1871 he added to his portfolio the position of “scientific director” of Nill’s zoo, where he would work with Martin. Martin would subsequently recruit him to write sections on microscopic and embryological preparations for the second edition of volume 2 of Praxis, which appeared in 1880. From 1877 to 1879 (still teaching, now some nine hours a week with an added contract with the Württemberg school of veterinary medicine), he served as an editor of the new popular science mag-

96. Strehlow, “Alfred Edmund Brehm” (1987), 77–78. 97. On Jaeger see Weinreich, Duftstofftheorie (1993). On his zoo venture in Vienna, see Hochadel, “ ‘Ein Volksbildungsinstitut ersten Ranges’?” (2003).

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azine Kosmos. In the early 1880s he became the proponent of a health reform system based on clothing, in which he advocated wearing only animal products, especially wool. This was so successful that he left the world of natural history altogether in 1884 to make his living as a clothing and health reformer.98 Jaeger’s life shows not only the difficulties of cobbling together a living in the borderlands of popular and professional zoology but also the ways that ideas could, through such a life, circulate through different media to become visible to different audiences. Just as Martin and Brehm would move among taxidermy, collecting, writing, and zookeeping, Jaeger too mixed his media. As an outspoken advocate of Darwinism and of a biogeographic and ecological approach to natural history, he had wanted to include a museum of animal geography in his Viennese zoo, though this would not come to fruition. Not surprisingly, he was a fan of the naturalistic animal scenes of the artistic taxidermist Ploucquet, whose work he had encountered as early as 1851 when he had been studying at the Stuttgart natural history cabinet.99 In an article in Vienna’s newspaper Neue Freie Presse in January 1867, he argued for extending Ploucquet’s artistic approach to natural history museums everywhere. Such scenes, in which the characteristic animals of a particular locale would be displayed together with its characteristic plants, would not substitute for a systematic collection, he asserted, but would supplement it, thereby satisfying the desires of the two audiences for natural history: scientists and the general public.100 Jaeger’s ideas about museums and zoos, along with the example of Martin’s Museum of the Primeval World, housed at a zoo, suggests that a reexamination of the relations between these two kinds of institutions is in order. The existing history of the museum-zoo relationship has argued that the main utility of zoos for museums in the early years of the zoo movement was to provide exotic specimens for zoologists to examine in life and to dissect after death, generally within the theoretical frameworks of systematics and comparative anatomy.101 The iconic example 98. Jaeger’s clothing reform system, which involved a patented tunic design, was sufficiently successful that he was able to open branch outlets across Germany as well as in London and New York to sell his clothes. Weinreich, Duftstofftheorie (1993), 233–47. 99. Ibid., 18–19. On Ploucquet, see chapter 2. 100. Jaeger, “Das Ploucquet’sche Museum” (1867). 101. H. Landsberg, “Das erste Zootier des Museums” (1994); Mehos, “The Rise of Serious Science” (2001); Rieke-Müller, “Die Gründung zoologischer Gärten” (2001).

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for European zoos, again, was the Jardin des Plantes, where the museum stood on the grounds of the zoological garden. The status hierarchy was clear; as Weinland put it in 1862, the zoo was “a living illustration of natural history, a necessary extension of the zoological museum.” But if we look at this relationship from the perspective of the reforming practical naturalists, we see a different set of relations being imagined at the time, in which the living animals of the zoo might provide the model for the museum. Martin expressed this most clearly in his last publication, “The Scientific and Practical Tasks of Displaying Our Naturalia Collections,” which begins with the zoo as the starting point for the modern possibilities of representing exotic animals in museum displays.102 The best-realized example of this new relation of zoo to museum, Martin thought, was the new Westphalian zoo and provincial museum in Münster. The brainchild of the colorful and organizationally gifted Gymnasium teacher Hermann Landois (1835–1905), the Westphalian zoo (opened in 1875) grew out of a local society, also founded in 1875 by Landois, devoted to the care, protection, and promotion of exotic and native wild birds. Correspondingly, the zoo, which was to emphasize the “practical side without neglecting scientific interests,” 103 included a building for fowl that would be suitable both for displaying them and for cultivating and breeding them for sale, and aviaries for songbirds and decorative birds. The concept rapidly expanded to include displays of native fauna in general, as well as sites for the breeding of rabbits, honeybees, and silkworms. Because neither this society nor the provincial umbrella society with which it was affi liated had the resources to keep expensive living exotic animals, and some native species did not survive well in zoo conditions, the museum offered substitutes for both in the form of zooplastic groups. For years Landois had been preparing his own displays of insects, fi rst as a teaching tool and later for commercial gain; with the founding of the provincial museum, he expanded both the size and the ambition of these displays. Together with the talented preparator Rudolf Koch, whom Martin claimed as a student, Landois developed a large number of biological groups in spacious glass-fronted niches, in front of walls “decorated with characteristic painting.” By the end of 1882, the museum contained niche displays of “Australia with its typical animal 102. P. Martin, “Die wissenschaftlichen und die praktischen Aufgaben” (1884). 103. Landois, “Geschichtliche Notizen” (1882), 356 (emphasis in original).

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forms,” “the North Sea with its beach-dwellers,” “German forest (double niche),” “African landscape,” and “Westphalia’s prehistoric period with the remains of prehistoric animals (fossils).” 104 This was thus perhaps the earliest public museum in Germany to realize the diorama concept. Here the museum fi lled out the incomplete “world in miniature” represented by the animals outside, inverting the relationship of museum to zoo and substituting geography for systematics as the guiding principle of organization.

Conclusion The histories of zoological museums, zoological parks, and popular writing about natural history are usually treated as three different, independent stories that occasionally touched one another. Once we look at them together, however, as aspects of a common history, we see something new. The circulation of ideas through the media of living animal collections, museums, and popular magazines was not a chance affair. These ideas were carried by people who moved among these venues through a combination of purpose and necessity. The purpose was clear enough: these people loved animals and nature and sought to reinvigorate natural history by making it come alive and bringing it to a broader public. Moreover, such work could be justified as conveying moral uplift through inducing a greater appreciation of nature, and when attached to movements to protect nature offered yet deeper moral messages. The necessity should also be clear by now: over and over in the lives of these men there arose the problem of making a living. As Andreas Daum has shown for this period, writing popular natural history both took advantage of the burgeoning new magazine and book market and helped move it toward natural history, making this a prominent segment of the cultural spectrum available to bourgeois readers. But almost no one could make a comfortable living by writing about nature, and Daum offers many examples of writers lurching from project to project, just 104. Ibid. Martin claimed Koch as a student in Praxis (1869–82), vol. 3, pt. 1:81. It is worth noting that three of the dioramas listed in Landois’s list—the German forest, the African jungle, and the prehistoric world—sound remarkably similar to the scenes Martin displayed in his Museum of the Primeval World. See above, chapter 2, “Bringing Nature’s Past to Life.” On Landois’s pedagogical and commercial ventures with Koch, see Köstering, Natur zum Anschauen (2003), 194–95.

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one step ahead of the bill collectors.105 Working as a preparator, a zoo inspector, or even a zoo director did not pay well either, and the social standing attached to such jobs was certainly lower than that of even a hack writer. Thus, doing practical natural history and writing about it were simultaneously ways of spreading the gospel of popular natural history and cobbling together a living. The matter of social standing is not unimportant here, for it was attached to another aspect of the movement for popular natural history: its oppositional relation to traditional systematic natural history. Whether represented as a much-needed rounding-out of natural history or as a more radical reform that would replace systematics as the highest goal of the subject, the reformers’ message was consistent: studying and representing the living animal in its geographic and lived environment rather than according to its taxonomic context would offer a more valuable picture of nature. The doubly oppositional character of practical natural history—on the one hand, practiced by less educated people and those university-educated people who championed their practical knowledge as a kind especially suitable for “the people,” and on the other hand, opposed to the systematic knowledge produced by stuffy, closeted scholars—made this project not only popular but populist. It would take a remarkable set of circumstances to transform this practical knowledge into a form that could be valued in museums, universities, and schools alike. Those circumstances emerged in the life of another self-made man, Karl August Möbius.

105. Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung (1998), 391–417.

chapter four

From Practice to Theory: Karl Möbius and the Lebensgemeinschaft

K

arl Möbius (1825–1908) was the man who transformed the broad, undertheorized ecological, environmentalist, and functionalist ideas of the practical naturalists into scientific theory (figure 4.1). He did so by developing the concept of the Lebensgemeinschaft, or living (biotic) community, a term he coined in 1877, when he was professor of zoology at the University of Kiel. Möbius’s life story is critical for understanding how the values of the practical naturalists became incorporated into science, for his relentless upward striving carried with it a set of values and experiences foreign to the more privileged academic world he entered. As an impoverished outsider to the academic scientific community—someone who never felt fully comfortable there, even when he had achieved a professorship at the University of Berlin—Möbius was exquisitely aware of the place of individuals in their environments and of how well they fitted into it or disturbed its equilibrium. This consciousness, I suggest, gave the community concept its deep resonance in Möbius’s psyche. But it was the path that his life took, upward and into the academic community, that allowed the concept to become a scientific theory. Before he arrived at Kiel in 1868, Möbius spent fi fteen years in Hamburg working as a natural history activist with a portfolio quite similar to that of Brehm and Jaeger. In Hamburg, where he taught at the leading secondary school, he also became a leader of the natural history com-

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figure 4.1. Karl Möbius in Hamburg, 1854. Frontispiece from Friedrich Dahl, “Karl August Möbius” (1905). (Photograph courtesy of Zoologisches Institut und Museum der Universität Hamburg.)

munity, running the natural history association and serving on the governing committees of the natural history museum and the zoological society (established in 1860 to found a zoo). He promoted the aquarium that was his pet project within the zoo and wrote popular pieces about natural history in the local newspaper. In contrast to Brehm and many other practical and popularizing naturalists, however, Möbius was also deeply committed to scientific research of a kind that would gain him recognition from a more traditional academic community. This union of the popular with the scholarly, rather than the opposition between the two felt so strongly by Martin, characterized Möbius’s activities and writings. Like Martin and other practical naturalists of his generation, Möbius exercised his natural history activism across different media and institu-

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tions. A major difference from Martin, however, lay in Möbius’s educational background and the opportunities that arose from it. Though he started as an elementary school teacher—a path often taken by bright but impecunious German youths—Möbius managed to fi nd his way to university studies and from there to becoming a high school teacher and fi nally a university professor, ultimately ending his career as a professor at the University of Berlin and director of Germany’s leading natural history museum, the Berlin Museum für Naturkunde. This chapter follows Möbius as he leapfrogged over barriers of education and status that normally took two or three generations to surmount.1 It examines his career as a schoolteacher and natural history activist in Hamburg between 1853 and 1868, his elevation to the position of a university professor at Kiel, and the development of his community concept there. In particular, it considers the ways in which Möbius’s very social mobility provided the conditions for the development of the community concept, as he fashioned himself into a new kind of scientist pioneering a new science: animal ecology.

Karl Möbius: Upwardly Striving Youth Born in the town of Eilenburg, Saxony in 1825, Möbius was the eldest of four children of a cartwright. From a young age it was clear that he was intellectually gifted, but his choices were limited fi nancially: he was too poor to afford the Gymnasium attendance that would have allowed him entrance to the university. Like many other young men in this position, he trained as a primary school teacher, and for five years he taught elementary school, in the town of Seesen in the Harz mountains. 2 During his time there, from 1844 to 1849, he kept a diary that both recorded his love of nature and afforded him a chance to practice his writing—a form of conscious self-improvement and self-cultivation—as he strove tirelessly to prove himself. In the diary’s pages he alternated rhapsodies over his hikes in the mountains with admonishments to himself to be a bet1. Kocka, “The Middle Classes in Europe” (1995), 793. 2. Schoolteaching was a notoriously ill-paid profession; indeed, Möbius’s salary as a beginning teacher in 1844 was two hundred taler—half of what Martin would earn upon being hired as a taxidermist at the Berlin museum in 1851. Biographical information on Möbius is drawn from R. König, “Karl Möbius” (1981), 5–16; and Weidner, Bilder aus der Geschichte (1993).

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ter man. As he voraciously read history and nature writing, and studied English and the classical languages in his spare hours, he sought to live up to a standard of virtue that would overcome his resentment of his poverty. “Cannot the privation wrought by poverty and the disdain brought on by underestimation and misjudgment lead the spirit [den Geist] to depend on itself and to drive it to be enough for itself?” he agonized in September 1847. “Thoughts, feelings of inspiration, and pure will: these are the pinions that will break through the final barriers to draw us into the inspiring center of the All, into the deity.” His communion with nature, which offered him considerable spiritual sustenance, was deepened by reading Humboldt. “Great Humboldt!” he gushed a few months later. “With the purest, most warmhearted enthusiasm you [Du] have penetrated into the unity [Zusammenhang] of the world, and in your Kosmos you have given to your race [deinem Geschlechte] the treasure of your spirit, your great knowledge, in clear, poetic language drenched with the warmth of your heart.” The human race “gazes in amazement at your work and wants to thank you on its knees.” 3 Reading Shakespeare and Goethe inspired him to similar heights; their works allowed him to imagine himself “on the throne of the world,” with a view of God’s laws of eternal human nature. From this vantage point, he forgot his individual existence and felt part of a larger, God-given order.4 One route to this sublimation was science: “Science [die Wissenschaft] is the most beautiful bride. He whom she has once kissed is caught in her magic.” 5 These youthful yearnings for connection and unity would persist in his private writing as preoccupations with community and self-abnegation and may be viewed as the fi rst, ill-formed inklings of what would emerge in scientific form years later as his living-community concept. Dissatisfied with the limitations of his life as a primary school teacher, with the support of his school principal (though against the wishes of his father) Möbius obtained special permission to attend the University of Berlin, where he studied natural sciences, concentrating on zoology. Life was not easy there. The courses shocked him with their demand for 3. Karl Möbius, typescript copy of diaries, 1847–1908, in Zoologisches Museum der Christian-Albrechts-Universität Kiel, Archiv, Karl Möbius Nachlass (hereafter Möbius diaries). The diaries were transcribed by his granddaughter Helene Möbius and the transcription donated to the museum; the originals remain in family hands. 4. Möbius diaries, March 1848 (typescript pp. 8–9). 5. Ibid., 19 May 1848.

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detail. Financial disaster continually loomed. He could not attend the chemical laboratory course that would have helped him understand the lecture material better, because he was spending two hours each morning teaching at a girls’ school and another hour in the afternoon tutoring a rich man’s children, in return for a small fee plus supper. In addition to this income, which amounted to some 220 taler a year, he depended heavily on small amounts of money sent by his reluctant father and food packages from his doting stepmother. He would later recall envying the liveried servants he saw in Berlin, because “they did not have to worry about food.” 6 After he excelled in zoology in his second semester, the zoology professor and museum director Martin Hinrich Lichtenstein helped tide him over with small jobs that added up to 80 taler per year and allowed him a view of the museum from the working side. (In this way he became acquainted with Martin, well enough to ask Lichtenstein to greet Martin for him in a letter after he had left Berlin).7 Möbius was still committed to teaching, only now he set could set his sights higher, on a position at a secondary school. To make this possible, in addition to his formal university studies he caught up on the subjects necessary to pass the school leaving exam (Reifeprüfung), a prerequisite for taking the licensing examination for high school teachers. He passed both in 1852. Late that year Lichtenstein, a Hamburg native, was asked to suggest someone to teach math and science at the Johanneum Academy in Hamburg. He recommended Möbius.8 And so Möbius made the jump from elementary school teacher in a small town to science-teaching Oberlehrer at a distinguished academy in one of the largest Germanspeaking cities. It was characteristic of this man, who always looked forward and glanced backward as little as possible, that thereafter he never returned to his birthplace of Eilenburg.9 6. Ibid., 2 April 1866. 7. Möbius to [Lichtenstein], 12. Juli 1853, in MfN d. HUB, HBSB, Zool. Mus., Sig. SII, Möbius, K., Acta betr. den Schriftenwechsel mit Dr. K. Möbius von 1853 bis 1886 (hereafter Möbius correspondence, MfN Berlin). On his father’s opposition: Weidner, Bilder aus der Geschichte (1993).119. 8. Möbius diaries, 2 April 1866. See also R. König, “Karl Möbius” (1981), 6. 9. Karl Hinrich Peters, personal communication, March 2004. Herr Peters is the husband of Liane Peters, b. Schirren, one of Karl Möbius’s great-granddaughters; this couple has undertaken genealogical work on the Möbius family that has taken them back to Eilenburg, where they discovered that Möbius’s nonreturn was well known among the city’s residents, who had recently dedicated a school building to Möbius’s memory.

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Natural History in Hamburg The Hamburg milieu into which Möbius stepped in the spring of 1853 differed sharply from the academic, state-oriented context of the Berlin museum. Hamburg in the 1850s and 1860s was still an independent city-state, a vibrant, rapidly growing mercantile seaport ruled by commerce. In this environment, academic life was fairly low on the cultural agenda, and accordingly Hamburg did not support a university; the Johanneum, which ran up through the precollege level, was the highest state-supported school. However, there was an active natural history scene in Hamburg, where a broad range of men (and a very few women) collected naturalia. Participants in the local naturalist community included not just the university-educated physicians, pharmacists, and teachers who formed the leadership of the formal voluntary associations devoted to science, but also merchants, ships’ captains, and sailors, for whom maintaining, increasing, and often selling natural history collections was one bonus of a life in overseas trade and travel.10 In this setting, natural history served as a meeting ground of the learned and the propertied, for the practice of building and maintaining a collection involved the resources of both. Knowledge of natural history was esoteric, involving not just Latin but also detailed familiarity with one’s chosen corner of the natural world. At the same time, of course, the collection of exotic specimens made use of an extensive infrastructure of ships, trade routes, and governmental and private expatriate contacts that spanned the globe—an infrastructure that the merchants of Hamburg were partially responsible for constructing and maintaining. The interaction between the interests of learning and commerce was constant and central to the development of natural history in the citystate. In the late 1850s, for example, the natural history museum commission engineered an agreement with the trading fi rm of J. C. Godeffroy to help a young zoologist with his passage to Australia. In exchange for free fi rst-class passage aboard one of Godeffroy’s ships, he was to send specimens back from Australia to a value of 625 marks courant (the Hamburg currency) within two years. Another example of the intimate 10. Background information on the natural history scene in Hamburg is drawn principally from Weidner, Bilder aus der Geschichte (1993); Weidner and Kraus, “Aus der Geschichte des Naturwissenschaftlichen Vereins” (1988); Panning, “Beiträge zur Geschichte,” pt. 1 (1955); Panning, “Beiträge zur Geschichte,” pt. 2 (1956); Panning, “Beiträge zur Geschichte,” pt. 3 (1957); and Panning, “Beiträge zur Geschichte,” pt. 4 (1958).

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connections between the commercial and learned aspects of natural history may be found in Georg Thorey, a pharmacist and member of the natural history museum commission from 1843 to 1859. Known widely for his collection of exotic beetles, Thorey also ran a side business selling beetle specimens to other collectors. His position as a collector and trader made him especially useful to the museum commission when it came to negotiating for collections for the museum as well as for his contacts with specialists to whom the museum could apply to work through the taxonomic identification of recently acquired collections.11 Lest we think that the relationship of knowledge mongers and merchants involved mainly a crass barter of knowledge for goods, however, we should remember that they did not merely trade—they also shared. The cultivation of natural history reinforced in both subgroups a sense of cosmopolitanism that was important to their common culture, drawing together the intellectual cosmopolitanism inherent in the pursuit of universal scientific knowledge with the need for travel to obtain university and worldly educations. This sense of cosmopolitanism was further manifested in the collections that were the chief objects of their attentions. A collection that represented all parts of the world stood as a proxy for the travels of the collectors—each specimen stood for a story about trade and fi nancial empire as well as about nature. Furthermore, the size of a collection, which translated into “completeness” from a taxonomic perspective, could also represent a kind of ownership of the world (which was often translated into monetary terms: a big collection cost a lot to put together, and so was a sign of the collector’s worldly success as much as anything else). This sort of cosmopolitanism was that of the merchant trader, who mastered the world through commerce. It is significant for the values of natural history in Hamburg that the cosmopolitanism of the knowledge seeker merged with that of the trader in the building of collections, so that natural history came to instantiate both together. This merging took place in a variety of ways, as when a naturalist actually traveled along on a merchant voyage to be a collector, or when a collection was being evaluated for possible purchase by the natural history museum, in which case the collection’s “completeness” in a taxonomic sense, its representativeness of an exotic place, and the 11. Weidner, Bilder aus der Geschichte (1993), 83–84, 75. Hamburg shared with Lübeck a monetary system based on two kinds of money: marks courant, which were the currency (which fluctuated relative to other currencies), and marks banco, which were the official unit of account. Both systems were incorporated into the German mark after 1871.

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value-added aspects of its assembly (the costs of getting the specimens and bringing them home, their preservation and maintenance) all had to be factored into the decision of what to bid for it. It is this very blending of taxonomic universality with the quite different sense of trade cosmopolitanism that gave natural history in Hamburg its characteristic flavor.

Natural History Activist When Möbius arrived in Hamburg to teach at the Johanneum, natural history in the city was in something of a lull. As a result of differences already simmering in the early 1840s, several members had left the Natural Scientific Association (Naturwissenschaftlicher Verein), founded in 1837, to establish a rival Natural Scientific Society (Naturwissenschaftliche Gesellschaft) in 1845.12 The secession had left the Association weak and underfunded, and its membership and meeting attendance sank further under the authoritarian regime of the Gymnasium professor Karl Wiebel. The Society was populated by busy men who had little time for their studies and lacked a full-time naturalist to lend scientific gravitas to their hobbyists’ endeavors.13 The shipping magnate J. C. Godeffroy VI had not yet turned his nascent collecting activities into the full-blown private museum it would become after 1860, when he began to hire collectors and a conservator to develop one of the largest and most distinguished private collections of naturalia and ethnographic artifacts of his day. And the port city’s trade in live animals, which would soon blossom with the zoo movement, was still in its infancy.14 All these circumstances would change over the course of the later 1850s and 1860s, and Möbius was among those who helped galvanize the local community for natural history. During his fi fteen years in Hamburg (1853–68), he completed his doctorate, reunited the city’s two feuding natural history societies, rejuvenated and expanded their museum, and helped found the zoo, where he also established the fi rst saltwater public aquarium in Germany (one of the fi rst in the world). He promoted 12. The original documents that might have clarified the nature of the confl ict were destroyed in World War II. Ibid., 57–58. 13. Ibid., 57–58; Weidner and Kraus, “Aus der Geschichte des Naturwissenschaftlichen Vereins” (1988), 29–35. 14. On the development of the animal trade in Hamburg, see Hagenbeck, Von Tieren und Menschen (1909), esp. chapters 1–2.

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natural history by writing newspaper articles and pamphlets and by giving popular lectures. At the same time, he sought to solidify his reputation as a researcher in the community of professional zoologists, fi nding time to coauthor a major monograph surveying and analyzing the fauna of the Kiel Fjord—all while teaching between twenty-two and twenty-six classroom hours a week!15 This was an immense, many-sided labor, and Möbius threw himself into it with characteristic intensity. Two features emerge from his work in Hamburg. First, he was remarkably skillful at fi nding projects that could be used simultaneously to address multiple audiences. Second, his choice of such projects helped to concentrate Möbius’s attention on questions of the physical and organic conditions of existence—the basis of the living-community concept he would articulate in 1877. His civic activities in natural history, his research (presented in both professional and popular forums), and his teaching mutually reinforced his interest in these problems. Möbius made his presence known in the natural history community within weeks of his arrival in Hamburg. In April 1853, he offered to work through the collection of South American wasps in their nests sitting in the museum and was (unprecedentedly) given a key to the museum to allow him to do so. (This work resulted in his fi rst sizable publication, a paper over fi fty pages long with nineteen plates published in the organ of the Natural Scientific Association in 1855 and, extracted in eleven pages with one plate, in the more widely circulating Archiv für Naturgeschichte the next year.)16 By the end of 1853 he was voted onto the museum commission for 1854; in 1855 he was voted vice president, and in 1856, president—the fi rst of many terms he would serve in this capacity.17 Meanwhile, as a member of the Natural Scientific Association 15. The bürgerliche work ethic that this represents is worthy of a separate study; I thank Andreas Daum for pointing this out to me. The best source on Möbius’s Hamburg years is Weidner, Bilder aus der Geschichte (1993), 117–45 and passim. In 1865 Möbius wrote in his diary that he had been teaching twenty-six hours per week (Möbius diaries, 21 January 1865); a letter from 1853 to Lichtenstein reports twenty-two, including his teaching at the Gelehrtenschule: Möbius to Lichtenstein, 2 May 1853, in Möbius correspondence, MfN Berlin. 16. Möbius, “Die Nester der geselligen Wespen” (1855); Möbius, “Vergleichende Betrachtungen” (1856). 17. Meeting minutes of 23 April 1853 and 30 December 1853, as excerpted in a typescript titled “Protokoll der Sitzungen der Museumskommission: Auszüge, soweit sie entomologische Fragen betreffen,” p. 4 in E. Titschak, “Zur Geschichte des Naturhistorischen (Zoologischen) Museums in Hamburg: Die Zeit der Museumskommission 1843–1882,”

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he often spoke at its meetings, especially on his investigations into material at the museum; he spoke at the Society as well, presenting sixteen speeches on general interest topics in biology before 1864, when, as president of the Association, he was able to persuade the society’s members to rejoin the fold.18 By this time, Möbius had already made his mark in another way, as a member of the board of the Zoological Society, founded in January 1860 to establish a zoo in Hamburg. The rest of the governing board drew from Hamburg’s wealthy merchants, the cream of the city’s society; Möbius was evidently there to serve as the token scientist. The only other serious naturalist among the founders of the society was Heinrich Adolf Meyer, Möbius’s good friend and the owner of several profitable businesses that manufactured products out of whalebone, ivory, and rubber. A few years earlier, Meyer had sought out Möbius to learn more about natural history; though Meyer would continue to expand his business ventures, his interests increasingly revolved around science. Together he and Möbius would instantiate the pairing of wealth and learning as they promoted the zoo, traded presidencies of the natural history museum commission, and carried forward their common interest in the ocean through the making and stocking of aquariums and their cooperative research on the Kiel Fjord. It appears that Möbius initially expressed his willingness to be offered the directorship of the zoo. The board decided to look elsewhere, perhaps because of his lack of practical experience with mammals and birds, the major zoo animals. In the event, remaining on the board instead of taking the directorship worked in his favor: in the commission structure so prevalent for running everything in Hamburg, the real power lay not with the director but with the commission. Thus, Möbius was on the other side of the table when Alfred Brehm applied for the directorship in 1862 (and most probably when he quit in 1866). As a member of the zoo board, Möbius was able to promote his own special interest in marine life and aquariums, without being subordinate to the other board members. Although Möbius initially concentrated his scientific research in Hamburg on insects and other invertebrates, he also participated in Sig. DaZIM 2a.1, in Universität Hamburg, Zoologisches Institut und Zoologisches Museum. (Original meeting minutes were destroyed during World War II.) 18. Weidner, Bilder aus der Geschichte (1993), 127–28; Weidner and Kraus, “Aus der Geschichte des Naturwissenschaftlichen Vereins” (1988), 29–35.

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the enthusiasm for aquariums that was sweeping in from England. His friend Meyer built aquariums for his homes in Hamburg and Kiel, where Möbius conducted some of his observations, and in 1859 Meyer donated another aquarium to the zoological museum. This last aquarium, not coincidentally, was located in the building of the Johanneum, where Möbius taught. And in 1863 the two men together saw to the inclusion of an entire aquarium building as part of the new Hamburg zoo, on the board of which both sat.19 As participants in founding the zoo, Meyer and Möbius incorporated their fascination with the aquarium’s aquatic world in miniature into their civic mission, recruiting the British aquarium maker William Alford Lloyd to build an aquarium building housing some dozen tanks, both freshwater and saltwater (figure 4.2). There Lloyd would oversee the aquarium for its fi rst several years, before moving on to other aquarium-building projects in Naples and London. 20 This project was clearly dear to Möbius’s heart. He kept his zoo colleagues across the German states apprised by writing articles about the Hamburg zoo’s aquarium in Der Zoologische Garten, he wrote the fi rst guide to the aquarium for zoo visitors, and he promoted it to lay readers in the newspaper. “Ancient Babylon had hanging gardens,” he wrote; “the chief modern seats of wealth and luxury even make for themselves hanging seas, in order to amble among the flower animals that unfold their silent beauty in the hidden gardens of the water dwellers. . . . Now the secret is laid bare before our seeing eyes, but the magic remains.” 21 These aquariums were devoted primarily to the creatures of the Baltic Sea that were also Möbius’s research materials; traveling in glass containers fi lled with the low-saline Baltic water, specimens could arrive in Hamburg fresh from Kiel in less than three hours. 22 As a practical aquarist, Möbius had to be concerned first and foremost with keeping the organisms alive. This meant attending to their physical requirements, fi rst the need for well-aerated water of appropriate salinity, and then especially to the different materials needed on the floor of the aquarium—sand, mud, or rock. Möbius criticized the stan19. Weidner, Bilder aus der Geschichte (1993), 134–36, 158, 161. 20. On Lloyd, see Rieke-Müller and Dittrich, Der Löwe brüllt (1998), 152.; and Fantini, “The History of the Stazione Zoologica” (2000). 21. “Blicke in das Leben der Thiere des Aquariums” (1864); unpaginated clipping in “Kleine Aufsätze und Vorträge von K. Möbius,” in Zoologisches Museum der ChristianAlbrechts-Universität Kiel, Archiv, Karl Möbius Nachlass. 22. Möbius, “Ostseeaquarien” (1862), 167.

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figure 4.2. Aquarium at the Hamburg zoo. Full-page engraving after an original drawing by M. Haller in Hamburg. From Die Gartenlaube, 1865, 389.

dard method of populating aquariums: “We catch fish in rivers, crabs in streams, snails in bogs, mussels in pools, and put all of them in the same place. It is as if we confi ned mammals, birds, reptiles, and insects from the hot and cold zones, from dry deserts and from damp, shady woods all in a single room! And then we expect them to move around happily, to eat, and to reproduce!” Thus, for Möbius, aquarium work afforded— demanded, even—a focus on the relations of the organisms to their environments in a manner perhaps even more intense and direct than the zoo’s land organisms called for. As he summed it up, “We must follow nature” and reproduce the organisms’ natural environment as closely as possible. 23 Möbius’s teaching undoubtedly reinforced his attention to the interactions of organisms with their physical environment. In contrast to a uni-

23. “Einige Fingerzeige für die Bevölkerung und Erhaltung der Aquarien” (1865), 212. An earlier article carried the same message: “Einige Bemerkungen über Aquarien” (1863).

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versity professor who might concentrate either on plants or animals, as a high school and middle school science teacher, he had the entire physical world as his purview, for his course load covered not only botany and zoology but also physics, mineralogy, and geognosy. 24 Teachers at this level, like university natural history professors earlier in the century, were more likely to think in terms of a larger united picture of nature—indeed, to see such a picture as the goal of their teaching and research. 25 Although we have relatively little direct evidence here about Möbius during his time in Hamburg, we have some clues to his pedagogical approach both before and after. In 1847 he was much enamored of the unified world offered by Humboldt’s Kosmos. By 1848 he was reading a pedagogical text called Education toward a Public Spirit (Erziehung zum Gemeingeist), whose author argued that philosophy was to play a very minor role in his proposed reformed “Naturgymnasium.” “Here I must object,” Möbius wrote in his diary. “Shouldn’t the student of modern subjects [Realschüler] learn from geology, physics, chemistry, etc., the laws of the world organism? The perceived unity of the world is the most magnificent event in the study of nature, it is the content of all true philosophy; for even the mind and its development, which philosophy in its narrow sense has considered up until now, is itself a production of nature.” 26 He appears indeed to have carried out this unified vision in his teaching, for in his old age Möbius recalled that during his time in Hamburg, he had never simply taught children the systematic characteristics of animals, but had focused on “the structure and the activities of animals and the correspondence of both with the external conditions of existence.” 27 This appears to have followed not only his general philosophy of nature, but also a pedagogical approach that sought to start from what would interest the students and that was practiced, as we know from his course descriptions at the Johanneum, through looking at living objects, taking field trips, and generally trying to interest the children in the natural world around them. 28 24. Weidner, Bilder aus der Geschichte (1993), 121; Scheele, Von Lüben bis Schmeil (1981), 68–69. 25. On natural history in the universities, see Nyhart, Biology Takes Form (1995), 90–93. On the influence of Humboldt’s unified vision of science as presented in his Kosmos, see Daum, “Naturwissenschaften und Öffentlichkeit” (1998). 26. Möbius diaries, December 1847, quotation in entry for October 1848. 27. Quoted in Leps, “Karl August Möbius” (1969), 856. 28. For a survey of natural history teaching in Germany, see Scheele, Von Lüben bis Schmeil (1981). On the basis of her investigation of individual schools’ annual course lists

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Even as he was pursuing all these different facets of public and practical natural history, Möbius also was developing a research program. Just as Martin was insisting on bringing natural history to life through zoos and lively museum installations, Möbius was focusing on the living animal as well—only his main medium was water, his major animal groups marine invertebrates. This was fortuitous, for not only did marine invertebrates such as sea cucumbers, sea roses, and sponges make beautiful aquarium displays, but they and the creatures they lived with also offered open territory for new research.

The Fauna of the Kiel Fjord Möbius’s chief scientific project for the decade between 1859 and 1868 revolved around the fauna of the Kiel Fjord, for which he sought to establish the fauna’s relationship to its conditions of existence. This project, which culminated in a two-volume study of the fjord, again owed much to his coauthor Meyer, whose villa outside Kiel overlooking the fjord was the launching point for their research. In 1859, Möbius and Meyer began studying the fjord, and over the next six years they ventured out on Meyer’s yacht at least once a month to collect specimens and measure various physical features of the fjord. When Meyer moved to Kiel full-time in 1863–64, he measured the temperature of the surface water and air above it daily for a year, along with regularly measuring the water temperature at two other depths. Meanwhile, Möbius conducted careful anatomical and geographic studies of the fauna living therein. 29 By 1865 they had completed the fi rst volume of their faunistic study, Die Fauna der Kieler Bucht, a lavishly illustrated large-format book whose publication was fi nanced by Meyer (figure 4.3). 30 and descriptions as well as the programmatic literature, Scheele suggests that Möbius’s approach was highly unusual (85–87), but the pedagogical tradition of learning about nature on the basis of looking at the objects of the surrounding living world was of long standing in Germany. In addition to Scheele, who outlines earlier reform efforts in her book, see also Heesen, Die Weltkasten (1997), 179–83. 29. Weidner, Bilder aus der Geschichte (1993), 158–59. Yacht-based dredging and sounding was also characteristic of British ocean studies at the same time: Rozwadowski, Fathoming the Ocean (2005), 70–86, 150–57. 30. Meyer and Möbius, Die Fauna der Kieler Bucht (1865). This title offers a potential source of confusion to modern readers. Kiel is located at the head of a narrow fi rth or fjord (now consistently called the Kieler Förde) which opens up into a broader body of water

figure 4.3. Map of Kiel Bucht, showing water depths as the fjord empties into the bay. From Meyer and Möbius, Die Fauna der Kieler Bucht (1865), vol. 1. (Photograph courtesy of Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin.)

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The book’s stated goal was to establish the physical conditions affecting the geographic distribution of the creatures of the fjord—a project that was practicable in this narrow area only two miles long, less than a mile wide at its mouth, and rarely deeper than fi fty feet. Die Fauna would also contribute to three further goals, its authors wrote: it provided a necessary information base for uncovering “the true causes of the variations that animals of a single species develop in different regions”; it afforded a significant point of comparison with similar areas along the North Sea coasts whose faunas already been investigated; and a careful description of this fjord, which ran along the shores of Schleswig and Holstein to open into the Baltic, also provided the beginning of a more thorough mapping of the fauna of the Baltic Sea itself. The Baltic, an apparently sparsely populated sea, had long been neglected by German researchers, who knew far more about “the animals of foreign coasts than about the inhabitants of their own seas.” Indeed, one of Meyer and Möbius’s fi ndings would be that, while it was still less rich in life-forms than, say, the Italian shores of the Mediterranean, the Baltic coast held a far greater variety of life than had previously been suspected. Holding their German patriotism high, the authors added, “It may be that friendlier beaches and a richer life will continue to draw most [naturalists] for a short time toward the south; we are summoned by the circumstances of our dwelling place near our native sea to sustained investigation of our own marine animals.” 31 The political implications of the possessive pronouns in 1865, when Prussia had recently seized Schleswig and Holstein from Denmark and was involved in complex and delicate negotiations over its permanent status, would hardly have been missed by the book’s readers. The volume is divided into two sections, one “general,” the other “special.” The longer, special section, which is clearly the work of Möbius alone, is a systematic and anatomical study of the Opisthobranchia, a taxonomic order of hermaphroditic snails with many genera living in the Kiel Fjord. Möbius paid particular attention to the anatomy of the mouthparts, especially their embryological development, which he studnow called the Kieler Bucht, usually rendered “Bay of Kiel” in English. Although Möbius used the phrase Kieler Bucht in his title, in his study he investigated only the fjord and its mouth. Nineteenth-century maps vary in their identification of these two connected bodies of water; all call the larger area the Kieler Bucht, but some also use the same term to refer to the fjord. 31. Meyer and Möbius, Die Fauna der Kieler Bucht (1865), viii.

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ied using delicate microscopic techniques. Although these parts were especially important for systematic diagnoses, Möbius was disappointed to report that he could not establish a fi xed relationship between them and the snails’ forms of food. Here he was doing just the sort of systematics that was in vogue among university biologists, establishing taxonomic groups on the basis of microscopic anatomical and embryological investigation and seeking to tie these morphological traits to the broader conditions of existence of the organisms. Like many of his contemporaries, he even discussed the development of races and intermediate forms, though without ever alluding directly to Darwin. 32 But if Möbius was adhering to the latest academic conventions in the second part of the work, the opening general part—which has come to be seen as the more significant one—broke with them. This section opened with a lengthy discussion of the depth, temperature, and salt content of the water, especially in comparison to other parts of the Baltic and North seas and as they fluctuated over the course of the year; the chemical and physical quality of the shore bottom (based on research mainly conducted by Meyer) was also submitted to analysis. This description was followed by a division of the fjord into five geographic “regions,” as Möbius called them—in modern terminology, we would call them “zones”—each characterized by a distinct combination of physical characteristics, bottom quality, plants, and animals. Thus, the sandy beach region, which supported “societies [Gesellschaften] of Jaera, Sphaeroma and Planaria” under its occasional stones, adjoined that of the green eelgrass, reaching down into a depth of three to four fathoms and characterized by a different group of invertebrates; next deeper came the level of the dead, decomposing eelgrass, which had numerous colonies (Gesellschaften) of snails but overall was not rich in its variety of species. The next region, extending from five to ten fathoms deep, was characterized by reddish brown algae, upon the branches of which nestled ascidians and colonies of soft corals and other invertebrates. The deepest region of the fjord, that of the black mud, had many species unique to it and also harbored many more individuals of the species that lived in the two higher zones. In addition to these five natural regions, Möbius also described in considerable detail the artificial “region” introduced by the mussel fish32. For an overview of academic zoological studies during the 1860s, see Nyhart, Biology Takes Form (1995), 168–81.

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figure 4.4. Mussel stakes, or “trees,” used for artificially cultivating edible mussels. From Karl Möbius, Ueber Austern- und Miesmuschelzucht (1870), 57. (Photograph courtesy of Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin.)

ers, who drove large wooden branches into the tidal mud in front of their homes, upon which they planted and then farmed mussels for eating. These mussel stakes also provided homes for many other invertebrates— sea stars, sea cucumbers, numerous worms, and other animals that used the stakes or the mussels themselves as their base (figure 4.4). After moving through a discussion of which fish and other floating creatures lived where in the fjord and the seasons when they were most frequent (attending especially to edible fish), the rest of the general part was devoted to a short discussion of the collecting techniques the authors and their hired fishermen used, and a longer comparison of the fauna of the Kiel Fjord with the fauna of other parts of the northern seas. Möbius and Meyer concluded that although they had found a great many more

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species than had previously been described, the area was still thinly settled. The relative sparsity of types, they argued, was due to the rarity of animals that could survive the extremely variable physical conditions of existence there, caused especially by the shallow depths of the sea, the low and fluctuating salinity of the water, and its extremes of temperature between winter and summer. Several features make the general part of Die Fauna der Kieler Bucht unusual. Though faunas were a common type of natural historical writing in the period, most concentrated on listing the animal species in a particular region. Möbius and Meyer went much further, heading toward a tighter connection between a particular set of physical and chemical conditions and the life-forms they supported. In this regard, the identification of so many different faunistic zones in such a small geographic area was innovative. Such connections of biogeographic disributions were not wholly unheard-of at the time—since the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Alexander von Humboldt had created his famous map of plant regions down the side of Mount Chimborazo, a number of Contintental and British authors had divided geographic areas into regions or zones; Möbius was familiar with the work of Humboldt and probably also of the British naturalist Edward Forbes, who had identified and described depth-related marine zones in the 1840s. However, with the exception of Forbes’s work, most discussions of geographic distribution in this period considered large regions of the earth; more local discursive mappings seeking to defi ne, for example, a peculiarly “German” or “European” fauna still normally covered a far broader range than the microlevel regions attributed to the Kiel Fjord. 33 A second peculiarity was the inclusion of the artificial environment of the mussel stakes— something one would not normally expect in a faunistic discussion. Möbius was well aware that his questions, interests, and approach did not conform to the usual German academic standards, which emphasized morphological studies. Yet he wanted to gain recognition from uni33. See Rehbock, The Philosophical Naturalists (1983), esp. 141–49. Forbes used language very similar to that later employed by Möbius in Forbes, “Report on the Molluscs” (1843), see esp. 173. The key passage is quoted by Egerton, “Studies of Animal Populations” (1968), 210–11. Möbius does not cite Forbes, but it seems not unlikely that he had read the latter’s work, given that Forbes was specifically working on mollusks. Certainly Möbius read English well enough, thanks to his early intensive study of Shakespeare. My thanks to Jane Camerini for her help on the larger picture of studies of geographic distribution in this period.

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versity researchers, not just museum naturalists and lay readers. In 1868 he complained to Wilhelm Hartwig Peters, the Berlin zoology professor, that “some reviews of our Fauna have indicated that anatomy and embryology are lacking. But fi rst the necessary basis of the species description must be there before things can be taken any further. By the way, we already have material for embryological studies in our preliminary work, but we do not want to sprinkle them in fragments in the fauna; they will be published later. . . . Do we not suffer enough from hastily pushedout fragments of histology, embryology, and anatomy of animals, which later researchers will then have to waste their time to rectify? ” 34 Rather than strongly defending his own divergent approach, Möbius used this letter to reassure Peters that he was in fact competent in embryological research and planned to conduct it, at the same time suggesting that he was holding himself to a higher, more scholarly standard than would have been the case had he already hurried into print with his embryological work. Such concerns had grown particularly important to him by the time of this letter, in February 1868, when he was in the running for the newly open professorship of zoology at the University of Kiel. Three years earlier, when volume 1 of Die Fauna der Kieler Bucht appeared, it may not have seemed so necessary to Möbius to shore up his academic credentials, for he probably had little expectation then of moving out of his position as a high school teacher. Indeed, the very things that made Die Fauna so unusual from a scholarly standpoint—the introduction of microlevel regions and the inclusion of an artificial region with the geographic ones—served him extremely well in his other activities in Hamburg, where he used them to structure his popular newspaper writings (which probably extended his income as well as his exposure to Hamburg’s reading public). Just after Die Fauna appeared, Möbius published a series of lengthy articles in the newspaper Hamburger Nachrichten, under the title “An der Ostsee” (At the Baltic Sea); each article took for its subtitle one of the biogeographic zones he described in Die Fauna. In the fi rst article, “On the Beach,” he strolled with his reader along the shore, overturning rocks and digging into holes to see what beach creatures lived there; then, as if descending a Humboldtian mountain, in each subsequent article he described the next lower region and the peculiarities of the animals living there. His mussel stakes discussion in Die Fauna had appeared previously as an article for the newspaper 34. Möbius to Peters, 20 February 1868, in Möbius correspondence, MfN Berlin.

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Das Neue Hamburg; part of it also appeared in a letter to the zoo journal Der Zoologische Garten. This article included a vivid description of the variety of forms living in the branches of the mussel tree, where, for example, “sea stars with hundreds of sucker-feet slowly creep around and eat the mussels fresh from the tree,” turning their stomachs inside out to engulf the entire mussel, pulling it inside and then ejecting the empty shell. 35 Following the literary tradition made prominent by such naturalists as Humboldt and Darwin, and increasingly common in general interest periodicals of the nineteenth century, Möbius often served up stories from his research in the waters around Kiel in popular form. The romantic tale of one springtime trip described for newspaper readers not only many marine organisms but also the island harbors the scientific sailors put into, as well as the midnight struggles of exhausted but driven shipboard zoologists to stay awake over their microscopes, to identify just one more new worm. 36 Many of the insights that he shared with his scientific audience also found their way into these publications. His vivid, almost lurid descriptions of the interactions of the organisms with each other and their environment, which appeared in a more scientifically cleansed form for specialist audiences, suggest how much his thinking may have been shaped by his orientation toward popular writing. In researching the fauna of the Kiel Fjord, Möbius had found a field that yielded a rich harvest for both generalist and specialist writings, allowing him to satisfy both his local audience in Hamburg and the scholarly community in which he also sought to make a name.

From Hamburg to Kiel Although he rose rapidly to the pinnacle of natural history in Hamburg, Möbius’s life there was not completely happy. His intense ambition ap35. “An der Ostsee,” Hamburger Nachrichten, unpaginated clippings from 4 July, 13 July, 5 August, and 6 September 1865, and one undated; “Ein Muschelpfahl der Kieler Bucht,” undated clipping from Das Neue Hamburg; all in “Kleine Aufsätze und Vorträge von K. Möbius,” in Zoologisches Museum der Christian-Albrechts-Universität Kiel, Archiv, Karl Möbius Nachlass. Passages identical to some in the “Muschelpfahl” article appear in Möbius, “Ostseeaquarien” (1862), 167. 36. “Feuilleton: Eine zoologische Pfi ngstreise,” Das Neue Hamburg, 17 July 1863, unpaginated clipping in “Kleine Aufsätze und Vorträge,” in Zoologisches Museum der Christian-Albrechts-Universität Kiel, Archiv, Karl Möbius Nachlass.

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peared ill mannered to some of his contemporaries and earned him some bitter enemies. The Johanneum was a multiservice school, containing within its walls both a Realschule, serving students who would go on to practical careers in business and trade, and a humanistic Gymnasium, or Gelehrtenschule, which was the normal route of access to the university and more prestigious learned careers that university education opened up in theology, medicine, law, the higher branches of the civil service, and Gymnasium teaching. Möbius was hired at the Realschule and taught a few additional hours a week on contract at the Gymnasium, but he longed for the more prestigious official position of natural history teacher at the Gymnasium. When that post opened up in late 1860, he campaigned hard for it. He appears to have been oblivious to the fact that the previous inhabitant of the post had been a botanist—in fact, the director of the botanical garden—and many of his colleagues saw it as a botanical position that should continue to be tied to the directorship of the garden. Moreover, his whirlwind of activities clearly disturbed the comfort of a number of older men who had previously controlled the natural history institutions of the city. Two of Möbius’s friends (neither of them naturalists) actively lobbied through the newspapers to replace the museum commission with an individual directorship, for which Möbius would be the obvious candidate. This was a slap in the face to “those very men who created this institute and brought it to a truly astounding level by 1854, before Möbius’s name was even known around here.” 37 Möbius did not receive the post. He felt intensely that he had been conspired against because of his class background, and judging by his journal entries, his sense of injustice lingered for years. The denial of the Gymnasium position meant that he would not receive the outward recognition he craved as a research scholar. Over the next several years he privately expressed increasing distaste for what he saw as an overweening emphasis on social standing in Hamburg, accompanied by a lack of appreciation of the life of the mind. It frustrated him that the parents of his best students removed them from school at the age of fourteen or fi fteen to send them into business. He made social errors with his colleagues that could not be recouped, and he worried darkly in private that he would never be good enough for those who ran the social game.

37. Joachim Steetz to Wilhelm Hartwig Peters, 4 November 1860, in MfN d. HUB, HBSB, Sig. SII: Museum Hamburg, Bd. I, 1849–1899. See also Weidner, Bilder aus der Geschichte (1993), 128–29.

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Depressed by his social situation, he found solace in his research and his natural history organizing activities. Even as he admonished himself to keep his expectations low, to seek happiness in the life he was given, he built a portfolio that would make it possible for him to escape it. 38 In 1868 he received his reward. The University of Kiel, recently brought under German control from the Danes, had established a new professorship of zoology, and Möbius won the position. Little information has survived to tell us why he received the job. It probably did not hurt that he and Meyer had dedicated the fi rst volume of their magnum opus to the university on the occasion of its five hundredth anniversary in 1865. And it appears likely that the ministry and the university were looking for someone with the organizational skills to build up a zoology museum collection from the small foundation established by the departing professor of anatomy and zoology Wilhelm Behn. 39 Möbius had demonstrated his possession of those skills through his work with the Hamburg museum. But surely at least as important as these considerations was Möbius’s knowledge of Baltic and Atlantic marine organisms, for the Prussian government was eager to capitalize on the many new miles of coastline it had acquired with Schleswig-Holstein, and eager to stimulate the economy of the fisheries through science. Möbius’s previous publications included not only Die Fauna der Kieler Bucht but also a ninety-page pamphlet on the human and natural histories of pearls as well as numerous articles on Baltic fishes, marine invertebrates, and aquarium keeping. These demonstrated him to be uniquely qualified as a researcher of the oceans closest to Germany and a scholar interested in practical matters.40 Victor Hensen, Kiel’s professor of physiology, was already actively promoting science as a means to improve the fishing economy in the province; indeed, during his brief stint as a member of the Prussian legislature in 1867–68, just before he was appointed professor at Kiel, Hensen had lobbied hard and successfully to establish a state commission to improve the fisheries,41 and Möbius’s appointment may have been related 38. See Weidner, Bilder aus der Geschichte (1993), 123, 128–30; and Möbius diary, entries for 1861–63. 39. On the history of the zoology collections before Möbius’s arrival in Kiel, see Hacker, Vom Kuriositätenkabinett zum wissenschaftlichen Museum (1984). 40. See esp. Möbius, Die echten Perlen (1857); and Nyhart, “Civic and Economic Zoology” (1998), 616–19. 41. Porep, Der Physiologe und Planktonforscher Victor Hensen (1970), 56–57.

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to this push. Indeed, when Wilhelm Hartwig Peters, Lichtenstein’s successor as professor of zoology at Berlin, drafted his report in February 1868 to the minister of culture concerning Möbius’s candidacy for the Kiel zoology professorship, he specifically mentioned that he thought Möbius was “the man” to help out with the national economic questions of fisheries that had recently been discussed in the Reichstag.42 Less than a month later, Möbius could write Peters to say that “the greatest wish of my life” was about to be fulfi lled.43 Möbius did not relax into his new position as university professor, but continued relentlessly to prove himself. He immediately jumped into the small circle of scholarly naturalists in Kiel, participating actively in the Association for Geography and Natural Science, which had been founded in 1867 by the physicist Gustav Karsten and the physiologistcum-marine-biologist Hensen to promote the exchange of knowledge between geographers and natural scientists. In 1872 he helped to engineer the union of that society with a more popularly oriented one, the Association North of the Elbe for the Dissemination of Scientific Knowledge (founded 1855); he served with Karsten as founding copresident of the newly formed Natural Scientific Association, born of these two institutional parents.44 At the same time, he continued to send in letters and articles to Der Zoologische Garten relating his fieldwork in the North and Baltic seas, describing local zoological curiosities and reporting on his fi ndings on artificial cultivation of oysters on the seacoasts—all in keeping with the broad mandate of that journal.45 In many ways, then, he continued the work of organizing and communicating that he had undertaken so successfully in Hamburg, spreading the word of natural history. But now he was a professor. At the university, he worked steadily and hard on his teaching, building his lecture class sizes and taking on an in42. Wilhelm Peters, draft report to J. Olshausen, Berlin, 21 February 1868, in Möbius correspondence, MfN Berlin. 43. Möbius to Peters, Hamburg, 18 March 1868, in Möbius correspondence, MfN Berlin. 44. See “Einleitung” (1873). The opening issue included excerpts from the unpublished minutes of earlier meetings of the geographic and natural science association (7–28). 45. E.g., Möbius, “Der Kieler Hafen im Winter” (1870); Möbius, “Ein Besuch des Schleswig’schen Wattenmeeres” (1870); Möbius, “Ein Besuch auf der Insel Sylt” (1871); Möbius, “Über die neuere Austerzucht” (1871); Möbius, “Nordeney” (1872); Möbius, “Die faunistischen Untersuchungen in der Ostsee” (1872); Möbius, “Wale in der Kieler Bucht” (1874); Möbius, “Der gestreifte Delphin” (1874); Möbius, “Mageninhalt der Häringe” (1875); Möbius, “Die äusseren Lebensverhältnisse de Seethiere” (1877).

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creasing number of advanced students to conduct research in his laboratory. He worked equally hard at building the zoology collections, making use of his many contacts in Hamburg and establishing new ones across Schleswig-Holstein and Germany to expand the collections. He was sufficiently successful that already in the early 1870s his annual reports began to complain about a severe lack of space hindering the acquisition, display, and study of zoological specimens, and he agitated with characteristic persistence (and success) for a new museum, which opened in 1881.46 In this new setting, his own research flourished as well. During his nineteen years in Kiel he would investigate many biological questions, concentrating especially on marine biology. He realized a long-wishedfor dream by spending six months on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean in 1874–75.47 He published work after work, on flying fish (they don’t); on phosphorescence in the oceans (for lay readers); on scientific experiments using aquariums to establish how deep-sea animals got their food; on the species concept; on the fishes of the Baltic, the Atlantic, and the waters around Mauritius. He weighed in on Eozoon canadense, a peculiar Canadian geological fi nd that its discoverer claimed was a giant fossil foraminifer (Möbius established soundly that it wasn’t); he published on coral reefs and their inhabitants.48 Threaded through this variety was a continuing research strand on the fisheries question. In 1870 the German Fisheries Union and the Prussian agricultural ministry established the German Commission for the Scientific Investigation of the Sea, based in Kiel (and therefore known as the “Kiel commission”). Möbius would conduct research under its auspices for years, cooperating closely with the commission’s other members, who included his Kiel Fjord coauthor H. A. Meyer, his physiologist colleague Hensen, and Kiel’s physics professor, Gustav Karsten. As part of the Kiel commission, Möbius participated with Meyer and two or three other scientists in the widely publicized expeditions of the research steamship Pommerania, which charted the marine life and physicochem46. See the annual reports of the Zoologisches Museum Kiel, in “Chronik der Universität Kiel,” in Schriften der Universität Kiel (1856–81), pt. V, 1870–86. 47. The Pommerania expeditions also provided the source for another important ecological concept—the plankton cycle—developed by his colleague, the physiologist Victor Hensen. On Hensen, see Porep, Der Physiologe und Planktonforscher Victor Hensen (1970); and Mills, Biological Oceanography (1989), 9–42. 48. A fairly complete bibliography of Möbius’s works may be found in Dahl, “Karl August Möbius” (1905), 9–22.

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ical conditions of the North and Baltic seas in the summers of 1871 and 1872. And almost immediately upon his appointment, he began, also at the request of the Prussian agriculture ministry, a major study of the artificial cultivation of mussels and oysters, with an eye toward improving the economic life along the coasts. Over the decade following his appointment, he became Germany’s foremost expert on oyster culture, a position sealed in 1877 with his publication of a groundbreaking monograph, The Oyster and Oyster-Culture.49 This monograph marked a climax in Möbius’s long-standing interest in practical natural history. But it also represented two new directions for his work. In Hamburg, Möbius had practiced a practical and popular brand of natural history very much in keeping with that represented in the pages of Der Zoologische Garten and Philipp Leopold Martin’s writings. He had investigated questions that would interest a general audience, such as how oysters form pearls or how the animals and plants along the coasts of the Baltic were clumped into characteristic, recognizable groupings. He had written popular, even romantic, descriptions of his fieldwork; he had developed and improved museum exhibits; and he had helped to bring living nature into the view of urban dwellers through his aquarium work, both at the Hamburg zoo and at the Johanneum. In Kiel, with the backing of the state, the practical side of Möbius’s natural history expanded to include economic zoology. Still very much within the range of practical interests captured by Der Zoologische Garten, with its many articles on acclimatization, domestication, and cultivation of economically significant organisms, this explicitly economic orientation aimed at improving the fisheries was new for Möbius. His 1877 monograph on oysters and oyster culture was immediately recognized as a landmark in that field, offering new scientific guidance to practical questions concerning the artificial cultivation of edible oysters. 50 49. On the Kiel Commission, see R. König, “Karl Möbius” (1981), 9; Mills, Biological Oceanography (1989), 12–42; Porep, Der Physiologe und Planktonforscher Victor Hensen (1970), esp. 97–103. Möbius, Die Auster (1877). A facsimile reprint of the oyster monograph, with useful introductory material, has recently been issued: Möbius and Potthast, Zum Biozönose-Begriff (2006). The work soon became well known to English- speaking fi sheries scientists through its 1883 translation for the U.S. Fish Commission, Möbius, “The Oyster and Oyster-Culture” (1883). This in turn was reprinted in 1977 in Egerton, Early Marine Ecology (1977), which has helped make it known to English-language historians as well. 50. Möbius, Die Auster (1877). For a historical overview of the biocoenosis concept from a German perspective, see Reise, “Hundert Jahre Biocönose” (1980).

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But Möbius was not just seeking to solve an economic problem with science. He was now a professor, sanctioned to conduct innovative theoretical work, and the oyster monograph represented not only a selfconscious application of science to the problem of the oyster fisheries, but an innovation in theory as well. For the fi rst time in his life, Möbius mustered the courage to introduce a major new theoretical concept, the living community, complete with a Greek-based neologism for it: Biocoenose (biocoenosis). It is this idea that gained Möbius lasting fame as a pioneer in ecological theory. The idea was not completely new with his 1877 work: after all, Die Fauna der Kieler Bucht and the newspaper articles describing the “Gesellschaften” or societies of animals in the Kiel Fjord already went a long way toward the theoretical concept of the Lebensgemeinschaft. But as we will see, they were not exactly the same as the new concept. The oyster monograph presented the concept as a theoretical contribution, not a descriptive fact, as he had used the term Gesellschaften in the earlier work; and, although Die Fauna contained much quantitative material regarding the patterns of temperature and salinity in the fjord, the oyster monograph introduced significant new quantitative dynamics into the picture, especially concerning the difference between the number of oyster eggs produced and the number of oysters surviving to maturity. These innovations set up Möbius’s work as an exact, quantitative science that was distinct from an older, descriptive, taxonomically oriented natural history and was closely allied instead to the physiological approach of Möbius’s colleague Victor Hensen. In other words, although Die Fauna was clearly a significant intellectual step toward the Lebensgemeinschaft, the context of academic zoology at Kiel provided Möbius with both the resources and the incentive to move from practice to theory. We do not know, of course, what would have happened had Möbius remained in Hamburg, but it is reasonable to speculate that he might never have developed the living-community concept had he stayed there. The pressures in the civic realm in which he mainly operated did not urge its participants particularly toward innovative scientific theorizing. They tended, instead, toward the production of collections and their diagnoses, and toward the sorts of natural history likely to interest the nonspecialists who made up the bulk of the community: the study of the living world around them, the contemplation of individual specimens brought from overseas, and the study (and explanation) of the beautiful, the exotic, or the humanlike. When Möbius made the jump from Hamburg

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schoolteacher-naturalist to Kiel professor, one of the things that changed was that he had a clear mandate to theorize, and it is not surprising that it was in this setting rather than in Hamburg that he developed his important new concept of the biocoenosis. To this idea, and its embedding within the larger practical task of analyzing oyster cultivation, we shall now turn.

The Oyster and Oyster-Culture Möbius’s living-community concept is often given a nod by historians of ecology, and its defi nition is sometimes even quoted in part, but the passage and book from which it derives have rarely been the subject of scholarly analysis. 51 As a result, the concept often seems to exist in some ideal space of ecological thought. In fact, however, the term and its definition are closely integrated into the work of which they are a part: a recommendation Möbius made to the Prussian agricultural ministry concerning the commercially valuable oyster-production along the coasts of Schleswig and Holstein, where the size of the annual oyster-catch was dropping precipitously. The passage is worth quoting at length: “Every oyster-bed,” he wrote, is a community of living beings, a collection of species and a massing of individuals, which fi nd here everything necessary for their growth and continuance, such as suitable soil, sufficient food, the requisite percentage of salt, and a temperature favorable to their development. Each species that lives here is represented by the greatest number of individuals which can grow to maturity subject to the conditions which surround them, for among all species the number of individuals which arrive at maturity at each breeding period is much smaller than the number of germs produced at that time. . . . Science possesses, as yet, no word for a community where the sum of species and individuals, being mutually limited and selected under the average external conditions of life, have, by means of transmission, continued in posses51. The English-language works I have seen are particularly thin on Möbius. For the “passing nod” approach, see, e.g., Egerton, “Studies of Animal Populations” (1968), 211. Reise, “Hundert Jahre Biocönose” (1980), 329, provides a lengthy quotation but omits a significant clause. A longer summary of the oyster work appears in Deléage, Histoire de l’Ecologie (1991), 71–74. The most sustained analysis of Möbius’s conception is Kölmel, “Zwischen Universalismus und Empirie” (1981).

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sion of a certain defi nite territory. I propose the word Biocoenosis for such a community. Any change in any of the relative factors of a biocoenosis produces changes in other factors of the same. If, at any time, one of the external conditions of life should deviate for a long time from its ordinary mean, the entire biocoenosis, or community, would be transformed. It would also be transformed, if the number of individuals of a particular species increased or diminished through the instrumentality of man, or if one species entirely disappeared from, or a new species entered into, the community. 52

This defi nition served two slightly different rhetorical purposes within the larger work. As we shall see, it reinforced several specific points of Möbius’s argument, uniting them under a single concept; simultaneously the defi nition served more generally to underline his authority as an academic scientist, one who identified new truths about nature that then could be applied to certain specific cases. As presented in this initial defi nition, three things are especially notable about Möbius’s community concept: it emphasized both the physical conditions of existence and the relationships among different organisms; it stressed the difference between the number of eggs and the number of mature individuals that the community could sustain; and it insisted that the community existed in a delicate balance that could change through any of a number of factors, including human intervention. All of these aspects of his defi nition entered into his recommendations to the agricultural ministry. Möbius had only bad news to report. Although recent innovations in oyster farming in France and England made it seem as though improvements could be made in Schleswig and Holstein as well, he noted that French and English methods of artificial cultivation did not in fact improve production greatly; moreover, their cost worked out to an actual investment of more than fi fty English pounds sterling per oyster. He also pointed out that the particular conditions of temperature, salinity, water flow, and sandiness that produced the delicious Holstein oysters were limited to a very few shoals and suggested that fishermen would be hard pressed to reproduce such conditions artificially. 53 Thus his emphasis on the physical conditions as an element essential to community mainte-

52. Translation adapted slightly from Möbius, “The Oyster and Oyster-Culture” (1883), 41. All quotations are from this translation, unless otherwise noted. 53. Ibid., 21ff.

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nance was closely connected to an argument designed to persuade the agricultural ministry and oystermen that artificial oyster culture was not the solution to improving the oyster yield. Möbius had still worse news. He diagnosed the main cause of the shrinking harvests as overfishing, a practice based in part on the industry’s faulty understanding of the oyster’s life cycle. Oystermen and biologists were familiar with the vast production of oyster eggs and larvae during the summer breeding season, when larvae briefly swarmed in countless numbers before falling to the sea bottom. Indeed, by Möbius’s own estimates, a single mature oyster could easily spawn a million eggs. 54 But even under the best of circumstances, he explained, only a few of these would take hold on the shoal and survive the three or more years needed to reach reproductive maturity and a size suitable for eating. Thus, one could not judge the potential size of the catch directly from the vast number of eggs (a mistake that had been made in the early, optimistic French and English estimates for artificial oyster production). As he put it most directly in a speech to the German Fisheries Union just before The Oyster and Oyster-Culture appeared, “The sacrifice of a vast quantity of young seeds is the means by which nature ensures that a few will reach maturity.” 55 His emphasis on “the greatest number of individuals that can grow to maturity” in defi ning the biocoenosis, then, was carefully worded to stress the inherent limits on the number of mature— that is, reproductively active—individuals, rather than simply looking at the total number of eggs, in estimating the potential size of the catch. Once the number of oysters in a bed had been reduced below a certain threshold, it was difficult to reestablish them, for the biotic conditions had shifted—the balance of the community had gone over to cockles and mussels, which now appropriated all the foodstuffs needed by the oyster. 56 Here, then, was the “living” aspect of a living community: not only physical conditions but also other life-forms conditioned the numbers of any given species within the community. The basic elements of Möbius’s biocoenosis concept together lent scientific weight to his arguments regarding the oyster beds, to help render persuasive the unpalatable view that artificial culture was bound to be unsuccessful. To the extent that he developed the concept beyond 54. Ibid., 13–14. 55. Möbius, “Was ist für eine dauernd einträgliche Austernwirthschaft zu thun?” (1878), 60. 56. Möbius, “The Oyster and Oyster-Culture” (1883), 39.

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the case of the oysters, it was primarily to drive home the point that the oyster was in danger of being overfished and replaced by less commercially valuable cockles and mussels. The wild buffalo of North America had been replaced by horses and cattle; the dodo had gone extinct on Mauritius because the introduction of swine and other animals had “disturbed the biocoenosis of the island”; and the Greenland whale and the beaver were also on their way out, thanks to human intervention in their biocoenoses. 57 Möbius went so far as to point out that such interventions had expanded the human biocoenosis well beyond its original territory, through artificially increasing the territory of the other organisms upon which it depended. 58 Although such artificial cultivation had been spectacularly successful in many cases, it would not work with the oyster. “The delightful hopes of bordering the entire German sea-coast with fruitful oyster-beds, and of seeing German oysters as food upon every table, must . . . be given up. The nature of our waters, as well as the nature of the oyster itself, forces us to do so.” 59 Möbius sent the same message much more briefly and starkly in his speech at the 1877 annual meeting of the German Fisheries Union, with the direct title “What Is to Be Done to Ensure a Lasting, Productive Oyster Industry, Especially on the German Coasts?” In the speech, aimed at an audience primarily of those responsible for making policy concerning fisheries at the national, state, and local levels, Möbius addressed the practical issues in clear and straightforward terms. After briefly outlining many of the same points as in the monograph (but leaving out his scientific neologism and his discussion of the effects of other organisms on the number of oysters), he concluded that the only truly effective measure would be to regulate the market so that the proportion of mature oysters in the population never fell below the number needed to reproduce themselves. Invoking the long-standing German tradition of maintaining public forests for sustainable yields, he concluded, “It is a good thing that the oyster banks of Schleswig-Holstein are the property of the state. If their fishing were opened up, they would be quickly exhausted. If they are to remain productive for the good of the entire population of the state and for the particular advantage of the coastal 57. These comments, it will be noted, are resonant with many made by other practical naturalists in the period in Der Zoologische Garten, to which Möbius, as we have seen, was a frequent contributor. See chapter 3. 58. Möbius, “The Oyster and Oyster-Culture” (1883), 44–46. 59. Ibid., 31.

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dwellers, the yearly amount of the fishing must be determined not by the height of the oyster-price but solely by the amount of growth.” He concluded The Oyster and Oyster-Culture in nearly identical words, adding, “The preservation of oyster beds is as much a question of statesmanship as the preservation of the forests.” 60 In this work, then, which marked the culmination of nearly a decade of research,61 Möbius both furthered a theoretically oriented scientific program and simultaneously took on a new role for himself, acting as an expert in the service of the state by using his scientific knowledge to advise on a matter of economic and political importance. From “practical zoologist” working within civic institutions and the quasi-public institutions of civil society, Möbius now slid into a somewhat different practical role just gaining widespread visibility in the newly unified Germany, in which modern science would be harnessed to the rational and economic goals of the state.62 As a new role, the scientist working in cooperation with the modernizing state embodied a somewhat fragile authority.63 To be sure, as an expert on coastal marine life, and particularly a specialist on mollusks, Möbius swung some real weight in the discussions concerning the oyster industry. But it was mitigated by the competing views of men wielding 60. Möbius, “Was ist für eine dauernd einträgliche Austernwirthschaft zu thun?” (1878), 62 (emphasis in original); Möbius, “The Oyster and Oyster-Culture” (1883), 65. On the history of German forestry, including the tradition of foresting for sustainable yields, see Lowood, “The Calculating Forester” (1990); Radkau, “Wood and Forestry in German History” (1996); Hüttermann, “History of Forest Botany” (1987); and Jansen, Schädlinge (2003). 61. See, e.g., his report to the Prussian agricultural ministry, Möbius, Ueber Austernund Miesmuschelzucht (1870). 62. The two most famous scientists to develop this role were the physicist Hermann von Helmholtz and the pathologist Rudolf Virchow. Helmholtz was instrumental in establishing the Physikalische-Technische Reichsanstalt (but see Cahan, An Institute for an Empire [1989], for the complexities of its founding). For the complexities of Helmholtz’s own views on science and state power, see Cahan, “Helmholtz and the Civilizing Power of Science” (1993). Virchow was everywhere, active in parliament, helping found one commission after another, and proselytizing with his speeches—see, e.g., Virchow, “Die Aufgaben der Naturwissenschaften” (1871). See also Goschler, Rudolf Virchow (2002). Such a role had long existed in France, though it was also just emerging in the same period in England and the United States. In Germany, a somewhat different tradition placing science in the service of the state already existed in the development of cameralism in the early modern period and its transformation into Staatswissenchaft in the nineteenth century. Lindenfeld, The Practical Imagination (1997). 63. David Cahan makes much the same point in cautioning against overestimating Helmholtz’s historical importance in his essay “On Helmholtz” (1997).

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other—generally more powerful—forms of authority. For example, at the very same meeting of the German Fisheries Union where Möbius sought to persuade his audience of the natural limits of the oyster supply, Georg von Bunsen, a political representative to the Reichstag and member of the union’s ruling council, opened the proceedings by extolling the “inexhaustable” ocean fisheries and proclaiming the need to fi nd ways to bring more fishermen into the industry. Whereas Möbius blamed the railroads for increasing the demand for oysters beyond their sustainable limits by making them accessible to inland city dwellers, the preceding speech, delivered by another representative to the Reichstag, culminated in the proud announcement that the union had successfully negotiated with the private railroad owners to lower the freight costs of bringing fish to those very inland city markets.64 And no matter how vehemently— or “scientifically”—Möbius argued for the likely failure of efforts at artificial introduction and cultivation of oysters along the coasts of the North and Baltic seas, his arguments hardly stopped individuals from making those efforts.65 In serving the practical ends of economics, then, the scientist himself was bound up in a web of competing claims and interests that limited his claims to speak authoritatively on the issues. The union of practice and theory that Möbius achieved with the oyster monograph was of a particular kind, developed out of his longstanding experience in making his work speak to multiple audiences. The science that made the monograph useful to the fisheries interests was one already cultivated for general audiences in Die Fauna der Kieler Bucht, with its communities of animals; now, this science was enhanced by a quantitative approach that spoke the “hard” language of numerical yields that would have been familiar to those working in agriculture and forestry and seeking to apply these approaches to fisheries. At the same time, the community concept provided a novel theoretical term for sci64. To be sure, Bunsen was concerned about the need to regulate the limited supply of freshwater fi sh, and to protect migratory fi sh during their journeys upriver to spawn, but in his view the oceans were inexhaustible. See opening speech (untitled) by Bunsen in Circulare des Deutschen Fischerei-Vereins im Jahre 1877 (Berlin: W. Moeser Hofbuchdruckerei, 1878), circular no. 3, 41–42; and von Behr-Schmoldow, “Ueber Fischzuchtbestrebungen in den Vereinigten Staaten von Nordamerika und in Deutschland,” ibid., 43–54. Möbius made the same point about the railroad in Möbius, “The Oyster and Oyster-Culture” (1883), 48. 65. Throughout the 1870s and into the 1880s Möbius was called upon to comment on proposals for artificial oyster cultivation, which he nearly always criticized on the same grounds: that they were doomed to fail for not following nature’s laws. See, e.g., the “Schlusswort” in Möbius, Ueber Austern- und Miesmuschelzucht (1870), 48; and the Circulare des Deutschen Fischerei-Vereins, 1870–1882, passim.

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entists, a more concrete way of expressing ideas about the “balance of nature” that had been floating among naturalists (especially those concerned with forests) for some time. It also attended to the ways in which that balance could change, possibly permanently—something that many earlier balance-of-nature theorists had denied.66 What tied the theoretical and the practical together was the functionalism of Möbius’s analysis. To create a sustainable yield for practical purposes, one needed to understand accurately the components that produced that yield and the possible causes of change, including the effects of one component on another. While the biocoenosis was a qualitative concept, it called attention to the functional relationships among animals and between animals and their physical environment in producing a particular stable community. The relationships central to the analysis here, then, were ones concerning the interactions of organisms—not the traditional zoological relationships of systematics, which involved similarity, difference, and relatedness. In both its theoretical and practical consequences, the living-community concept concentrated on a zoology that was in its essence a science of functional relations.

Conclusion: Social Mobility and Ecological Theory On February 27, 1863, Möbius wrote in his diary: When the son of a craftsman in a small town has come so far through his own work that he is counted among the more capable teachers and research scholars in a large city, he should act content if he is not granted a wished-for highest scientific position. He may keep working on with the accustomed effort, on the side of his practical profession, so that he never forgets his heritage. It is easy for us to consider ourselves more independent of the whole than we are. But our being follows on all sides from our birth, childhood, and course of development. We only want to be taken by others as we are in the present, and yet they always see, as well, how we got here.67 66. On the balance of nature, see Egerton, “Changing Concepts” (1973); Schramm, “Gleichgewicht” (1983); and Jansen, Schädlinge (2003), 94–110. On the quantification of forestry and agricultural science, see Jansen, Schädlinge (2003), esp. 40–57, and references therein. 67. Möbius diaries, 27 February 1863.

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This passage suggests a psychological key to Möbius’s production of the Lebensgemeinschaft concept. His desire to be taken for what he had achieved for himself, and the inability of his social circle in Hamburg to accept him on this basis, made him acutely aware of the extent to which any individual is bound “to the whole” by broader ties not of his own making, just as individuals are in nature. Although there is no reason to suppose Möbius pursued a conscious parallel between his own situation and his views of nature, it is reasonable to speculate that his wish to be known only for his contributions and not by reference to his past led him to seek a picture of nature in which the relationships of functionality— ones that take creatures as they are in the present, based on their “own work”—overshadowed those of ancestry or heritage. Thus, although systematics and evolution, with their then-prominent goal of establishing the “family tree” of nature, formed a part of Möbius’s work, this approach to zoology generally stayed in the background. The foreground was fi lled with the working relationships of ecology and geographic distribution, manifestations in the fi rst instance of functional, interactive relationships among animals and between animals and their physical environments, and only secondarily (for Möbius) manifestations of history. Moving outward from Möbius, we might consider whether the rejection of taxonomic science by Martin and other low-status practitioners of “practical natural history” in the 1860s and 1870s in favor of an emphasis on the functional, living animal might benefit from a similar reading. That is, in rejecting systematics as the main goal of natural history, they rejected not only what they viewed as a dusty, hyper-learned Wissenschaftlichkeit, but also a science in which the relationships of ancestry were most important. Conversely, they embraced a natural history focused on the interactions and activities of the present—one in which a self-made man (or other creature) might flourish. This explanation should not be understood as the only way in which socially upwardly mobile, self-made zoologists at the time could project their situation onto nature. Evolution, too, could readily be interpreted in a progressive way compatible with this situation, such that the movement toward the present consisted in “rising above” the past.68 And indeed, as we will see 68. Gustav Jaeger, a practical naturalist who was also an outspoken advocate of evolution, fits this characterization well. A progressive orientation toward evolution was already popular in pre-Darwinian versions: see Desmond, The Politics of Evolution (1989). Robert J. Richards has argued that accounting for progress was the raison d’être of Darwin’s own

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in later chapters, evolution lurked as a hidden theme behind much of the later biological work in museums and secondary school texts. But the community concept offered another way to deal with the problem of ancestry, by de-emphasizing it in favor of an emphasis on present-day functionality. The community concept, then, might be understood to embody a great tension dominating German society (and indeed most modernizing Western societies) in the nineteenth century: between the strictures of a social order whose rules derived from a dying system of estates (then rapidly becoming transformed into a class system), in which people were identified by where they came from, and the vision of a modern, liberal society with greater social mobility, in which individuals might be judged on their own achievements. The lasting power of the living community as a scientific concept did not derive primarily from Möbius’s use of it in the oysters monograph, nor from his tying it to the presumed power of state-sponsored research. Rather, I would argue, the concept took hold because of its social resonances: it simultaneously captured both the importance of functional relationships (rather than those of heredity) central to a liberal meritocracy and a recognition that these functional relationships form a larger system of dependences binding individuals into relationships that, though not strictly fi xed, are exceedingly difficult to change. The nature of those relationships, and their flexibility with regard to individual autonomy (and especially social mobility) were very much up for grabs in Germany in the 1870s and 1880s. Möbius’s community concept did not simply jump into public consciousness, however. Its broad resonances came to be heard only as he and his followers promoted it over the next thirty years. As it traveled across Germany through the overlapping communities associated with schools, public museums, and university research, the living-community concept would develop new forms consonant with their different concerns. As we explore the views of nature developed in these different settings in the rest of the book, the shape-shifting character of the livingcommunity concept will become evident.

theory: Richards, “Darwin’s Theory” (forthcoming). See also Hopwood, “Producing a Socialist Popular Science” (1996). I thank Nick Hopwood for calling my attention to the importance of this popular progressive evolutionism in Germany.

chapter five

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F

rom the late 1880s to the second decade of the twentieth century, the community concept and the biological perspective spread across German society, via reform movements in the classroom and the public museum. Reformers in each realm viewed their institutions as appropriate settings for spreading the modern functionalist view of nature encapsulated by the community concept. At the same time, the different agendas of the two movements endowed the community concept and the biological perspective with new attributes beyond those that Möbius had originally developed—the biological codependence of organisms, the adaptation of organisms to their environment, and the three-way fit among an organism’s mode of life, its anatomical structures, and their functions. Setting aside development in public museums for later chapters, this chapter traces how the biological community concept moved into and through the primary and middle schools. Natural history and pedagogical reform were already live issues in the teaching community in the early 1880s, but they gained a common new focus when the Kiel schoolteacher Friedrich Junge (1832–1905) introduced Möbius’s community concept to teachers. Junge, head teacher at the Second Girls’ Free School in Kiel and an avid self-taught naturalist, had taken an evening course Möbius offered to teachers in the late 1870s, where he had learned about the living-community concept. With his professor’s encouragement, in

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1885 Junge published Natural History in the Primary School: The Village Pond as a Living Community (Naturgeschichte in der Volksschule: Der Dorfteich als Lebensgemeinschaft), a radical proposal to reform natural history teaching that placed the biological community concept at its center.1 The Village Pond (Dorfteich), as it became known, became the core around which a cluster of pedagogical reforms precipitated, which by the early twentieth century would transform the teaching of biology in German schools. It immediately aroused hot discussion at teachers’ conferences, and beginning with Junge’s own classroom, schoolchildren between the ages of ten and fourteen in an increasing number of schools across Germany learned about nature in a new way, viewing animals and plants not exclusively from the perspective of their place in a classificatory system but increasingly as part of a biologically, physically, and geographically determined web of relationships. Although this functionalist, ecological approach never fully overthrew the traditional taxonomic one, it successfully challenged the latter’s hegemony. Junge’s curriculum thus fed into powerful struggles over curricular and pedagogical reform, which I outline in the fi rst part of this chapter. Junge’s curriculum became a major vehicle by which the biological perspective, especially as focused through the lens of the community concept, spread out into the German population. As presented through Junge’s curriculum, however, the community concept took on overtones not present in Möbius’s original idea, linking it, as I show, to the prominent pedagogical goals of education for character building and citizenship. By joining nature to ideals of citizenship, Junge’s curriculum provided a strong grounding in nature for civic identity. At the same time, through this pairing of nature with citizenship, the living-community concept would develop in parallel with, and often in conjunction with, the Heimat movement, which cultivated German identity based on connections to an idealized “homeland.” The connections between Junge’s natural history curriculum and Hei1. Junge, Dorfteich (1885). The second (1891) edition had the title shortened to Naturgeschichte. Both editions were typically referred to as Dorfteich (part of the sutitle). I am using the second edition, which differs from the fi rst in only insignificant ways, such as the expansion of the table of contents, the addition of Latin names for organisms, and the inclusion of an index. It would be wonderful to know more about the relationship between Möbius and Junge; however, I have been able to discover no contemporaneous information about it, only retrospective accounts.

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matkunde, or “homeland studies,” are significant not only for our understanding of the spread of the biological perspective but also for our understanding of German identity and the ways it was tied to place. As Celia Applegate, Alon Confi no, and others have insightfully explored, the term Heimat, meaning “homeland,” was a concept made powerful by its creative slippage between local, regional, and national forms of identity and culture. The living-community concept shared this attribute of flexibility of scale, and, like the Heimat movement, it also helped its users to negotiate the difficult social, political, and environmental confrontations between modern and traditional society that were at the forefront of social tensions at the end of the nineteenth century. 2 While historians have acknowledged the centrality of nature to the Heimat concept, they have devoted relatively little attention to nature study as an aspect of Heimatkunde, focusing more on its manifestations in beautification and nature protection, local history, and studies of folklore and folklife. Yet the connections across nature study, education, and Heimatkunde were closely drawn. Teachers were probably the largest group of avocational naturalists in Germany, at least if judged by their membership in voluntary associations. After the Stuttgart schoolteacher-naturalist Karl Gottlob Lutz founded the Teacher’s Union for Nature Study (Lehrer-Verein für Naturkunde) in 1887, membership rapidly swelled, growing to some eleven thousand members by 1899 and to over thirty-eight thousand by 1915. 3 Moreover, associations such as the Verein zur Pflege der Natur- und Landeskunde in Schleswig-Holstein und Hamburg (Union for the cultivation of studies of nature and the region in Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg) were also heavily subscribed to by self-improving teachers.4 Significantly, such teachers were increasingly likely to center their curriculum around Heimatkunde at the primary level, where subject matter was less rigidly separated than at the 2. Applegate, A Nation of Provincials (1990). See also Confi no, The Nation as a Local Metaphor (1997); and Klueting, Antimodernismus und Reform (1991). 3. The fi rst figure is cited in a letter from Lutz to Friedrich Junge in honor of his retirement, quoted in “Die Junge-Feier im Kieler Lehrerverein” (1899). The second figure comes from “Lutz, Gottlob,” Württembergischer Nekrolog für das Jahr 1919, reprinted in Deutsches Biographisches Archiv, N.F. (hereafter DBA NF), fiche 842, frames 56–59. 4. See Christiansen, “Die Heimat” (1980), which discusses the central role of schoolteachers in the Verein. (Die Heimat was the journal produced by the Verein zur Pflege der Natur- und Landeskunde in Schleswig-Holstein und Hamburg.) Unfortunately, after acknowledging the importance of nature in the pages of Die Heimat, Christiansen chooses not to analyze this aspect of the magazine.

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upper levels, using its characteristic combination of local geography, nature, history, customs, and stories to instruct children about the world around them. 5 Historians have differed over the significance of Heimatkunde in the school curriculum. Cultural historians have tended to play down its role before 1920, when new regulations made it a central feature of the new national schooling system. Yet as historians of German education have shown, Heimatkunde had been part of elementary classrooms in the German-speaking states since the middle of the previous century, incorporated into the movement for visual and tactile education under such difficult-to-translate rubrics as Anschauungsunterricht (perceptual instruction), Realienkunde (material culture studies), and Sachunterricht (object-based instruction) and serving as a preparation for geography and history. Though often not formalized in state regulations, Heimatkunde was already very much present in the schools of the 1880s and 1890s.6 Junge’s curriculum, I suggest, was one of the leading means by which the links between nature and citizenship, so important to Heimatkunde, were forged in the classroom. The reception and interpretation of Junge’s curriculum has to be understood in relation to the pedagogical reform movements that encompassed both nature study and Heimatkunde. Whereas Junge’s teaching innovations connected to the progressive end of the pedagogical spectrum, his Village Pond curriculum also spoke to more conservative social ideals of “character education.” Through these links to ideas of child development and education for citizenship, the living-community idea itself came to be embedded in a web of pedagogical ideas that gave it strong resonance in the educational community, even in the face of objections to its radical restructuring of the natural history curriculum. By the time of Möbius’s death in 1908, the Lebensgemeinschaft concept and the bi5. For analyses of primary school texts that show the centrality of Heimat, see Kennedy, “A Nation’s Readers” (1997); and Kennedy, “Visual Representation and National Identity” (2000). 6. Applegate claims that “Heimatkunde made scant appearance in school curricula until the Weimar period,” in Applegate, A Nation of Provincials (1990), 154. Confi no, The Nation as a Local Metaphor (1997), 107–8, argues on the basis of historical sections of textbooks that Württemberg classrooms fi rst started talking about Heimat in 1895. But there were already dozens of books on Heimatkunde for teachers and pupils by the mid-1880s. See Winzer, “Zur Heimatkunde” (1884). See also Kennedy, “Regionalism and Nationalism” (1989); Goebel, “Der Heimatkundeunterricht” (1991); Williams, “ ‘The Chords of the German Soul’ ” (1996); and Green, Fatherlands (2001), 300–304. For an early historical overview, see Bason, “Study of the Homeland” (1937).

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ological principles associated with it were standard elements of school curricula across Germany. German children were widely taught that they were part of a complex web of nature; that an organism’s place in nature was determined by its functional adaptations to its geographic and ecological locations; and that nature’s laws were unyielding—including those governing the relationships of give and take, of dependence and service, that fundamentally constituted social and economic relations.

Natural History and School Reform Junge’s Village Pond curriculum drew from and played into a number of existing reform aspirations among schoolteachers. To understand why it gained such attention, we need to understand more about how schooling worked in Germany, and where natural history fitted with respect to three key aspects of reform: structure, curriculum, and pedagogy. Structurally, schooling in Germany by the 1880s was complex. Even after the founding of the German empire in 1871, schools in Germany were still officially run by each state; in the larger states, especially, there were enormous variations in the structure of education from province to province, from urban to rural school districts, and from city to city. Small rural primary schools could be divided into as few as three grade levels; urban schools could have as many as eight. Local confessional practices and politics also played an important role, since nearly all were run as either Catholic or Protestant schools. (Efforts to develop a secular type of school in the 1870s, though a significant feature in the reform landscape of the period, did not succeed in upending the confessional schools).7 Because Prussia provided the statutory framework for Junge’s work, I focus here on that state, and especially on Kiel, Junge’s local school system. Like many urban school systems around Germany, the one in Kiel was profoundly class based. The boys’ and girls’ free schools, or Volksschulen, where Junge taught, were intended for the poorest segment of Kiel’s society; they entailed no fees, taught only the most basic subjects, and had the largest class sizes, mandated not to exceed eighty pupils per class. The Bürgerschulen (one each for boys and girls, founded in 1861) charged a modest tuition, had a broader curriculum and slightly 7. Kuhlemann, “Niedere Schulen” (1991), 180–83.

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smaller classes. The “higher” Bürgerschulen, also founded for both boys and girls in 1861, were intended to serve Kiel’s better citizens (though not those boys who were university bound). In keeping with Kiel’s relatively liberal educational policy, the fees of the higher Bürgerschulen were kept unusually low to open up access to the lower orders, amounting to eight to sixteen taler as a child rose through the grades—about twice the cost of the normal Bürgerschulen. Nevertheless, they sought primarily to compete with private schools for the sons and daughters of the propertied class, offering instruction in a wide assortment of modern subjects, including two modern languages, and holding class sizes to a maximum of fi fty in the lower grades and forty in the upper ones. For girls, public education stopped at about age fi fteen, at the end of the higher Bürgerschulen. Boys with the right educational background, by contrast, could reach the pinnacle of the system—the Gelehrtenschule, or humanistic Gymnasium, which prepared them for the university and the futures opened up by it. Elsewhere in Germany this system was replicated, with school fees largely determining the options open to different families. Other school types gained in importance in the imperial period: Realgymnasien, which prepared students for university but incorporated more “modern” subjects; Oberrealschulen, which did not include Latin and prepared boys for technical colleges; and “middle schools,” a category created in Prussia in 1882, which blended Bürgerschulen with some Realschulen. (See table 5.1.) Because of the different curricular structures across schools, once a child was placed in one kind of school, it was often difficult to jump to a different kind.8 Teachers, too, were segregated by educational background, and thus to a great extent by class and gender. As we saw with Möbius, to teach in the secondary schools normally required a university degree as well as a state license obtained through an examination. Primary school teachers such as Junge (and Möbius as a youth) participated in an entirely separate educational system, organized around teaching seminaries that it was possible to attend without ever having completed a secondary school.9 A seminary education qualified one to teach only in the 8. Wulf, “Kiel wird Grosstadt” (1991); Mohr and Konarske, Die Volksschule in Kiel (1992), 60–64; Hansen, Schule—Spiegel ihrer Zeit (1986), 24–31. On structural reform as a vehicle for social change, see Becker and Kluchert, Die Bildung der Nation (1993), 1–28. See also Lamberti, “Radical Schoolteachers” (2000). 9. Tews, “Lehrer an Volksschulen” (1895–99), 371–73.

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Table 5.1. Grade designations in German school types, ca. 1890

Age of Students 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7

Secondary Schools (Gelehrtenschulen, Gymnasien, Realgymnasien)

Middle Schools (Bürgerschulen, Realschulen)

OI UI OII UII OIII UIII IV V VI

1 2 3 4 5 6

Primary Schools (Volksschulen)

8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Note: Italicized numbers represent the years covered by Junge’s curriculum. Grades in the secondary schools were numbered starting from the oldest and running down to the youngest. The top three grades—“Prima” (I), “Secunda” (II), and “Tertia” (III)—were each divided into two years, so that a student moved from “Untertertia” (UIII) to “Obertertia” (OIII), then up to “Untersecunda” (UII), followed by “Obersecunda” (OII), and fi nally, “Unterprima” (UI) and “Oberprima” (OI). Middle schools typically imitated the higher schools in their numbering from the oldest grade down, though their top class age was typically 15. Primary schools counted their grades in the opposite direction, beginning with fi rst grade (typically, age 7) and extending through eighth grade. However, many primary schools, especially in rural districts, had fewer distinct grades.

primary and middle schools. Women teachers formed a small portion of the overall public school teaching workforce, and nearly half of these taught at the primary level, since they were not eligible to receive university degrees until 1908.10 Overall, the educations, salaries, and lack of legal privileges of primary school teachers put them at or below the bottom end of the middle class.11 It is not surprising that the primary and 10. On educational opportunities for girls and women teachers up to 1901, see Bäumer, “Geschichte und Stand der Frauenbildung” (1902); Wilbrandt and Wilbrandt, “Die deutsche Frau” (1901); and Titze, “Lehrerbildung und Professionalisierung” (1991), 364. 11. An indication of this standing for Junge is the employment situation of his children at his retirement in 1899. His eldest son, who had had some university study, was a teaching candidate; his second had worked as a gardener before his health gave way and was then studying to be a bookbinder. The third son worked as a primary school teacher. The older daughter, having fi rst studied to go into household service and then to become a physical education teacher, was living at home; the second daughter, who had worked as a child care provider in a private home, was at the time studying to be a seamstress. “Bericht des Rektors Junge in Kiel über seine persönliche Verhältnisse,” 27 June 1899, p. 48 in Personal-Akte des Lehrers (Hauptlehrer) Rektors Johann Hinrich Friedrich Junge (1 Oct. 1899), Stadtarchiv Kiel (hereafter Personal-Akte Junge). In addition to his efforts to improve natural history education for students in the Volksschule, Junge was also active as a volunteer in a local society to aid the poor—the families of the children he taught. See

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middle schools produced from their midst a continual pool of reformers who sought to improve both the education available in the schools and the prospects for social mobility for both teachers and pupils. Whereas some reformers worked to change the structure of the school system, others concentrated on curricular and pedagogical innovations, which were often closely intertwined. Junge was among these. Traditionally, the primary schools had emphasized reading, writing, arithmetic, and religion. Within this schema, natural history barely made an appearance—understandably, since the teaching seminaries also paid little attention to the sciences, concentrating instead on pedagogy, basic skills, religion, and instruction in auxiliary skills, such as organ playing, that were likely to be required of a parish schoolteacher.12 Already in the 1860s and 1870s, however, reformers had succeeded in introducing subjects considered “modern.” In Prussia, new school regulations in 1872 had dramatically increased the hours primary teachers were expected to devote to the so-called Realfächer, the subjects that concerned factual knowledge of the world (the natural sciences, geography, and history), which reformers viewed as essential for the modern citizen. The new guidelines for natural history teaching at the primary level show the emphasis on a practical orientation, with a mandate to cover the structure and function of the human body; native minerals, plants, and animals; of the exotic [animals] the large predators; the animal and plant worlds of the Orient and those cultivated plants from which the products come into our daily use (e.g., cotton plant, tea bush, coffee tree, sugar cane). Among the native objects those ones are to be brought into the foreground that awaken particular interest either through the service they render unto “Vorschlags-Nachweisung zur Verleihung des Königlichen Kronenordnens IV. Klasse an den evangelisch-lutherischen Rektor der 1sten Mädchen-Volksschule zu Kiel Johann Hinrich Friedrich Junge in Anlaß seiner Emieritierung zum 1. Oktober 1899,” in PersonalAkte Junge, pp. 43–44. On the general situation, see Becker and Kluchert, Die Bildung der Nation (1993), 92–109. 12. In his autobiography the natural history reformer Otto Schmeil described his request to teach in a city school rather than a village school so that he would not have to take up the position of organist, “which was tied to the school post in most villages.” Schmeil, Leben und Werk (1986), 174. Other church duties, such as bell ringer or cantor, were also typical. Tews, “Lehrer an Volksschulen” (1895–99), 376. By 1901, teaching seminaries were mandated to give some instruction in Naturkunde, but in this context, this term typically meant general science rather than natural history. Thus, the translation in Bason of ‘Nature study” as a required subject in Bavarian teacher-training institutions is misleading; see Bason, “Study of the Homeland” (1937), 21.

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humans (e.g., domestic animals, birds, silkworms, grains and textile plants, fruit trees, salt, coal) or through the harm that they do to humans (poisonous plants), or through some kind of peculiarity of their life and their way of life (e.g., butterfly, trichina, tapeworm, bee, ant).13

At higher educational levels, too, the development of Realschulen and Realgymnasien as modern alternatives to the classics-oriented humanistic Gymnasium marked a pronounced challenge to classical education, involving major and protracted battles in the field of secondary education.14 Reformers hoping to expand coverage of natural history still further faced a major obstacle in the long-standing association of biology with materialism, antireligious sentiment, and political radicalism, an association reinforced by Darwinism since the early 1860s. Their claims to curricular time were not helped by Germany’s most famous Darwinian, Ernst Haeckel, who in 1877 notoriously argued for replacing religious instruction in the schools with instruction in evolution. Nor were they aided by the scandal extending from 1876 to 1879 over Hermann Müller’s teaching Darwinian theory to his high school class. This widely publicized event led Prussia’s cultural minister to announce that teachers were not to teach evolution in their classrooms, and when new curricular guidelines came out in 1882, biology had been entirely removed from the upper grade levels of the Prussian Gymnasium, a stricture subsequently labeled the “ban on biology” (Biologieverbot).15 For the next twenty-five years, natural history instruction in Prussia was confi ned to the lower and middle school grades. The struggles over the content of education were not, of course, merely about how many hours of what subjects should be covered in which grades. At a deeper level, they were about what sort of individuals the schools should be developing, and in the decades following German uni13. Prussian “Allgemeine Bestimmungen,” 1872, paragraph 34, reprinted in Schöppa, Das Mädchenschulwesen in Preussen (1909). 14. On school reform, especially at the lower and middle levels, see Becker and Kluchert, Die Bildung der Nation (1993); and F. Meyer, Schule der Untertanen (1976). For analysis of the reform movement at the higher school levels see Albisetti, Secondary School Reform (1983); and Albisetti, Schooling German Girls (1988). More generally, see Berg, Handbuch (1991). 15. Haeckel, “Über die heutige Entwicklungslehre” (1877), 14–20. On the Müller affair, see Depdolla, “Hermann Müller-Lippstadt” (1941); Scheele, Von Lüben bis Schmeil (1981), 99–101; and Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung (1998), 72–74.

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fication, those ideas of development focused considerably on ideals of citizenship, and on who would control the paths of citizen formation. From the 1870s on, reformers vied with one another to demonstrate the potential of different subject matter, organized in different ways, to develop not only the sorts of knowledge but also the moral and ethical characteristics required of the good German citizen.16 The intensity of these claims would reach a peak after 1889, when the emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had ascended to the throne the previous year, weighed in with his own agenda: schools should educate students toward “fear of God and love of the fatherland,” and away from communistic and socialistic ideas.17 There followed in 1890 a major national school conference and in 1892 new Prussian regulations, in which modern history, geography, and physical education—all aimed at building the spirit and body of the nation—were to take on new prominence, while attention to the exigencies of modern practical life came in the form of expanded attention to drawing, modern languages, and natural sciences (excluding biology).18 The overall trends in education, toward more “modern” pragmatic dealings with the surrounding world and toward “fear of God and love of the fatherland,” readily incorporated two preexisting pedagogical orientations into which Junge’s curriculum would also tap: Anschauungsunterricht and character-building education. Preparing children for

16. Thus, in 1884 a teacher at the annual provincial teachers’ meeting in Silesia argued that a main task of the elementary school was to instill in children the sense of joy in work and desire for it (“Lust an der Arbeit”), while in 1885, the same year Junge’s Village Pond appeared, a teacher at the annual meeting of the national teachers’ association could ask in the title of a speech, “What Must the School Do to Fulfi ll the Moral Task of Natural History Instruction?” Physics teachers argued that the proper teaching of such scientific concepts as physical “work” could reinforce respect for work in the sense of labor as well; a scientific understanding of “law” would teach students the limits of opinion. Proponents of particular subjects ranging from art to economics, from mathematics to geography, Heimatkunde and, of course, natural history, all made pitches for the moral, ethical, and/or practical value of their special fields. Olesko, “The Politics of Fin-de-siècle Physics Pedagogy” (1998). On the art education movement, see Fishman, “Alfred Lichtwark” (1966). On economics, see the discussion of Oskar Pache’s speech in Meyer-Markau, “Der 7. (siebente) deutsche Lehrertag” (1888). On mathematics, see Schubring, “Die Mathematik” (1989). Examples of essays touting the value of individual subjects and how to go about teaching them abound in the pages of journals such as the Deutsche Blätter für erziehenden Unterricht. 17. “Erlaß Wilhelms II. zur Bekämpfung sozialistischer und kommunistischer Ideen” (1975). 18. Becker and Kluchert, Die Bildung der Nation (1993), 74–79.

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modern life meant moving beyond reading and writing to develop a different set of the child’s sense perceptions and mental faculties—those visual, tactile, and mental operations suited to understanding the material world around him. Educators had long taken the combination of observation and intuition known as Anschauung as essential to elementary education and a necessary fi rst step to developing higher levels of comprehension, and instruction in Anschauung, especially in the fi rst few years of school, focused on the material world immediately around the child.19 In the context of educating for modernity, Anschauungsunterricht gained new momentum. Nature study and Anschauungsunterricht had long been closely associated among pedagogical reformers. Indeed, the famous early nineteenthcentury natural history pedagogue August Lüben, whose books (fi rst published in the 1830s and 1840s) were still being used in the 1880s, had advocated many of the methods of visual and hands-on instruction associated with this form of pedagogy, and liberal reformers such as E. A. Rossmäßler touted the same principles in the 1850s and 1860s (though apparently to little effect, since the need for reform remained).20 Thus, studying nature out of doors was commonly understood to be a direct application of instruction through Anschauung, with the further benefit of getting children out into fresh air and natural surroundings. Back at school, living plants and animals might be represented and studied in aquariums, terrariums, and school gardens, all of which had numerous advocates in the pedagogical literature in the 1880s. The development of classroom aids did not depend on the creativity of individual teachers: beginning with the foundation of the German empire in 1871, a rapidly growing school supply industry offered preparations of insects and other animals with nests or burrows in cross section for science classrooms and school museums. 21 Visual instruction also expanded through the use of wall charts and picture books (despite some controversy among primary 19. Deussing, Der Anschauungsunterricht (1884); Harder, Handbuch für den Anschauungsunterricht (1891). Attention to the history of ideas about Anschauung has been increasing in recent years. See, e.g., Mehrtens, “Mathematical Models” (2004); and Nyhart, “Science, Art, and Authenticity” (2004). 20. Junge, Dorfteich (1891), 3. On Rossmäßler, see Daum, “Science, Politics, and Religion” (2002); and Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung (1998), 61–63, 138–67, and passim. For a broad overview of natural history curricular reform in Germany, see Scheele, Von Lüben bis Schmeil (1981). 21. Köstering, Natur zum Anschauen (2003), 193–97.

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school teachers over whether the Realfächer, including natural history, should be taught using pictures or using only objects.)22 Along with maps and other visual aids for geography and history, collections of plates drawn from well-known natural history books such as Brehm’s Animal Life might be posted on the wall or made available for use by individual students. 23 Textbooks, too, gradually reflected these changes by offering increasing numbers of illustrations, though such presentations would really take off only in the late 1890s. 24 Junge’s curriculum, as we will see, tapped easily into the movement toward visual and tactile instruction that was already underway by the early 1880s. If such pedagogical techniques were understood to help hone the child’s senses and understanding, another educational movement aimed at developing the child’s moral foundation, through erziehenden Unterricht, or “character-building education.” 25 Led by the theorist Tuiskon Ziller, following the precepts of the earlier educationist Johann Friedrich Herbart, this movement took the conservative view that the object of primary education was to direct the developing will of children toward moral virtue, so that the child would be “enabled independently to take his part in the work of the people.” 26 According to Herbart, developing the will to know, or deep-seated “interestedness” in the world, was an essential element of this education toward virtue. In the 1860s and 1870s Ziller reoriented Herbart’s program more explicitly toward religious and moral education, combining it with another popular midcentury curricular novelty known as “concentration.” This approach sought to center instruction on one goal, such as a topic or a mode of thought, and then structure different formal and disciplinary aspects of instruction, such as writing, reading, visual instruction, and natural history, all around it. Applying the concentration idea to the goal of developing moral character, Ziller took the view that all instruction must be moral and religious instruction, and many of his followers argued that the teaching of reading, writing, history, natural history, singing, drawing, and so forth, 22. See, e.g., Kruse, “Reallesebuch und Lesebuch” (1887), and the lengthy discussion following. 23. See, e.g., Scheller, “Anschauungsmittel” (1884). On wall charts more generally, see Bucchi, “Images of Science” (1998). 24. Kennedy, “Visual Representation and National Identity” (2000). 25. For a discussion of the political complexities of this movement, and its opposition to the more liberal Pestalozzians, see F. Meyer, Schule der Untertanen (1976), 136–37. 26. “Er soll befähigt werden, an der Arbeit des Volkes an seinem Teil selbständig Anteil zu nehmen.” Rein, “Erziehender Unterricht” (1895–1911), 4.

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should be “concentrated” on Bible stories or other lessons in Christianity. 27 Although many educators found this position extreme and developed less one-sided classroom approaches, the Herbart-Ziller goal of character education nevertheless had a profound impact on pedagogy in the elementary schools. This movement was especially influential in Germany’s Protestant schools and grew in prominence in response to the increasing threat of socialism. Together with the trend toward visual and hands-on instruction, it provided the predominant pedagogical milieu for Junge’s program. Junge’s success derived from creating a natural history curriculum that could be used for both the conservative social ends of the character educators and the progressive pedagogical ends of the hands-on educators, through its focus on the “living community.”

Friedrich Junge and The Village Pond Friedrich Junge was in many ways a typical German self-taught teachernaturalist. 28 His biography resembles Möbius’s in some critical ways, and his story suggests the kind of life Möbius might have had if he had not been able to attend the university. Raised in extremely modest circumstances in the Holstein town of Oldesloe by his mother, widow of the shoemaker father he never met, Junge was taken on at the age of sixteen by his primary school teacher to prepare for the teaching seminary and subsequently attended the three-year course in the nearby town of Segeberg. Between 1854 and 1873 he worked at four different primary schools around Holstein; in 1873 he moved to Kiel, where he taught at three different girls’ free schools. After becoming director of the Second Girls’ Free School in 1878, he would move over to lead the First Girls’ Free School in 1890, where he would teach until his retirement nine years later. When The Village Pond appeared in 1885, Junge had been a school director for seven years. 29 27. See Schubert, “Konzentration” (1895–1911); and Rein, “Erziehender Unterricht” (1895–1911). 28. Unless otherwise noted, all information on Junge’s background comes from “Friedrich Junge,” in DBA, fiche 615, frames 37–50, which includes an autobiographical sketch. 29. See “Personal-Blatt” for Friedrich Junge, in Landesarchiv Schleswig-Holstein, Bestand des Regierungspräsidenten zu Schleswig, Abt. 309 Nr. 38087; and Mohr and Konarske, Die Volksschule in Kiel (1992), 203–5.

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Like most primary school teachers, Junge learned his science largely on his own, fi ltered through the existing pedagogical and popular science literature. At his teaching seminary, he had received little formal training in natural history, but he and his classmates had been inspired by Friedrich Adolf Diesterweg, the prominent liberal school reformer of the 1830s–1850s, to read the newly founded popular magazine Die Natur. From there he was led to obtain further botanical books authored by the magazine’s coeditor, Karl August Müller, including his Humboldt-inspired Book of the Plant World.30 To earn money on the side, Junge began taking photographic portraits with a borrowed camera. Out of these funds he was able to buy himself a microscope, which he then used to study plant development and to moonlight as a “trichina inspector” (presumably inspecting pork), which in turn earned him enough money to buy his own camera. He thus bootstrapped himself into considerable scientific and technical knowledge, experience that undoubtedly strengthened his conviction that every teacher could, indeed, be a scientific researcher, as Diesterweg had argued. Only in the late 1870s did Junge take a formal scientific course, attending the public zoology lectures for teachers held by Karl Möbius in the evenings and working with Möbius’s assistant Friedrich Heincke in the Kiel University zoology laboratory. It was directly from Möbius, then, that Junge learned about the living community, or Lebensgemeinschaft, which would become the key to his pedagogical program. (Though Junge briefly introduced Möbius’s technical term biocoenosis his pedagogical work favored the much more accessible term Lebensgemeinschaft.)31 The Village Pond set out from a simple but radical idea. Instead of organizing the teaching of natural history around taxonomic categories, Junge proposed organizing it around Lebensgemeinschaften, groups of organisms that lived in a particular physicochemical setting and were dependent on that setting and on one another for their survival. 32 As he elaborated in the programmatic essay that opened the book, “The Goal 30. The full title of Müller’s work was Das Buch der Pfl anzenwelt: Botanische Reise um die Welt: Versuch einer kosmischen Botanik; kosmisch here is almost certainly an allusion to Humboldt’s Kosmos. On the influence of the latter work on popular and amateur naturalists in the mid-nineteenth century, see Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung (1998), 138–67, 273–86; and Daum, “Science, Politics, and Religion” (2002), 119–21. 31. Junge, Dorfteich (1891), 32. 32. As he put it, “A Lebensgemeinschaft is a totality of beings that live together in accordance with the internal law of maintenance [Erhaltungsmässigkeit] because they exist under the same chemical-physical influences and, moreover, frequently depend on one an-

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and Method of Natural History Instruction,” this radical shift away from taxonomic categories to those of the community and its members had numerous pedagogical benefits. He started off from the familiar, material world surrounding the children. The example he worked out most thoroughly in this book was, of course, the village pond, but he emphasized that whatever was local to the children was the place to start. This meant that the teacher could not blindly follow Junge’s model but would in most cases have to create his own curriculum—something for which Junge was often criticized, but which appealed to other populist naturalists. A second, closely related precept was that the teaching should take place at least in part in a natural setting. Field trips outside the walls of the school, to learn about nature in nature, were an essential element of the curriculum. Students were then to bring back elements of that place to study in the classroom, perhaps using aquariums or terrariums (for which Junge provided directions). But the experience of nature in situ was crucial, keeping the instruction concrete and familiar, on the assumption that children are most interested in that with which they have daily contact. As we have seen, these pedagogical methods and principles were not radical in themselves. What gave Junge’s plan its novelty was his proposal to jettison the traditional principles of taxonomy as the essential underlying structure in favor of the community concept. Junge offered numerous reasons for this extreme move. “The elementary school is an institution for general education, not for scholarly [wissenschaftliche] education. By contrast, . . . the [taxonomic] system is a scholarly instrument, which cannot be an end in itself for the school.” Scientists needed it, as did teachers, to help them order the enormous volume of facts of nature, but most people did not. Junge argued that an emphasis on systematics would never help schoolchildren appreciate the unity of nature—the primary aim of natural history instruction. Children (and even many teachers) could not gain an overview of the entire system because it was too large and complex; dipping into the system to study a few examples could yield only a picture of unconnected fragments. Moreover, the emphasis on the logical unity of the taxonomic system, according to Junge, required tearing apart things that belonged together in nature: living beings and their settings, form and function, the united character of the whole. The separation of systematics from physother, in any case on the whole, and also have an effect on one another and on the whole.” Ibid., 34.

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iology and the study of anatomy and physiology based on dead, anatomized bodies made it impossible to study the phenomena of life in any natural way and would yield only broken, separate shards of knowledge, not an understanding of life as a whole. Finally, children studying systematics quickly became bored with the subject and uninterested in pursuing nature study any further on their own. In sum, the traditional structure of teaching natural history through systematics was “unnatural,” with respect to both nature and the child. 33 In criticizing existing natural history instruction as “formal,” “unnatural,” and overly dominated by taxonomic memorization, Junge articulated for the school context the very arguments that Philipp Leopold Martin had been making for museum displays and adult visitors since 1870. In the context of contemporary educational reforms, this stance took on a new set of connotations, aligning Junge with the populist and modernizing opponents of “classical” education. As we have seen, this debate was simultaneously one over social class, subject content, and developmental psychology, and Junge’s proposed reform fed into all of these issues. In particular, his criticism of traditional natural history as based too much on the logic of the taxonomic system would have been associated by his contemporaries with educators’ critiques (especially prominent among secondary school reformers) of the overemphasis on rational or formal learning within classical education, in which the study of mathematics and Greek and Latin grammar and the practice of memorization were understood to develop the logical faculties. Junge’s reformist approach to nature, focusing on hands-on learning and on organisms in situ, would develop much more strongly the child’s observational acuity, which educational reformers advocated further developing through increased instruction in drawing, measuring, weighing, and counting—skills well suited to a future in a real world less rarified than the university-based professions. 34 But Junge’s reform program was by no means aimed mainly at turning out precision measurers and counters for a modern capitalist world; it had loftier aspirations. The unity of nature formed a central concept in his program, represented especially through the heroic figure of the scientist Alexander von Humboldt, who sought not only to bring all of nature into one broad view, but also to unify the scientific and aesthetic ap33. Ibid., 3 (quotation), 7–8. 34. Keferstein, “Anschuungsunterricht” (1895), 92.

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proaches to appreciating nature. Junge referred to Humboldt repeatedly, and he used the latter’s statement “The richness of science no longer lies in the abundance of facts but in their linkage” as an epigraph both for a chapter of The Village Pond and for the book as a whole. 35 Junge brought specificity to the broad concept of a unified nature in two ways, through the Lebensgemeinschaft principle itself and through a separate set of “laws” or principles of living nature. The Lebensgemeinschaft principle demonstrated that the manifold connectedness of nature can be found in unities at many levels. One was not required to study all of nature at once to understand its unity and connectedness; rather, these features could be found in individuals and communities. Every organism was a unit made up of coordinated parts that contribute to the whole, and similarly, organisms in a community both depended on and contributed to the maintenance of the whole. Thus, by studying individual organisms and their composition into a community, it was possible to illustrate the principle of a whole connected system in a relatively simple, direct, and concrete way. These various modes of connectedness could also be described in the form of regularities, or “laws of nature,” governing the maintenance of life, which gave order and specificity to what might otherwise be a chaos of connections. Drawing on a list previously compiled by the Viennese zoologist Ludwig Schmarda, 36 Junge proposed eight laws that he thought should guide the teacher and—when appropriate—the students. First among these was the “law of maintenance [Erhaltungsmäßigkeit],” which asserted the adaptive correspondence among an organism’s place in nature, its mode of life, and its anatomico-physiological organization. Here Junge undoubtedly drew not only on Schmarda but also on Möbius, who had used the term Erhaltungsmäßigkeit in an effort to fi nd nonteleological language to describe the ability of organisms to maintain them35. “Die Reichtum der Naturwissenschaft besteht nicht mehr in der Fülle, sondern in der Verkettung der Thatsachen.” Quoted in Junge, Dorfteich (1891), fi rst title page and on p. 8. 36. Schmarda, Zoologie (1877), 207–15. It should be noted that Schmarda had quite a few more laws that did not make it into Junge’s list, such as the law of chemical composition, the law of conservation of energy, the law of nutrition (every animal requires protein), the law of connection of parts, and various “laws” of form. Although Junge later professed to have derived his laws from Schmarda (DBA, fiche 615, frames 37–50, on frame 40), similar principles may be found in the works of Rudolf Leuckart from the early 1850s on. See, e.g., Bergmann and Leuckart, Anatomisch-physiologische Uebersicht des Thierreichs (1852).

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selves in relation to their surroundings. Junge followed this with the “law of organic harmony: ‘every being is a link in the whole.’ ” His third law, “accommodation,” stated that organisms could adapt their modes of life and even their anatomy and physiology “to a certain degree” to accommodate to changed conditions. This he viewed as a special case of the fi rst law. His fourth law was the “division of labor and the differentiation of organs. . . . The more the work of the whole is divided among individual organs, the more perfectly will the work be carried out.” Among the rest of the laws, the eighth and last was probably the most significant; Junge called this the “law of economy [Sparsamkeit] in space and in number.” Examples of economy of space included the “folding of leaves in the bud, of wings in the insect’s pupa”; as an example of the economy of number, Junge offered the statement “The more intensive the care of the offspring [Brutpflege], the smaller the number of eggs.” 37 These biological precepts had been promulgated by professional biologists since midcentury and would have come as no surprise to any advanced student of zoology. In the context of school teaching, however, the list took on normative dimensions that would have been far less visible in a university-level scientific textbook, for Junge explicitly sought to use his biological laws as models of lawfulness for schoolchildren. Teaching that the world is a unified whole and that all its members, including humans, are parts of the whole, Junge stated, would give the child an answer to the most burning question of all: “Who am I in this diversity?” The answer is, “You are a link [Glied] in the whole, you receive and give, you are dependent and have an effect.” In case this was not clear enough, Junge elaborated in a footnote: “If a person recognizes himself as a member [Glied] of a community, there follows directly from this realization his rights but also duties toward the other members—thus here toward one’s fellow humans.” 38 Elsewhere, Junge found occasions to compare the natural and the human worlds, with the goal of emphasizing harmonious mutual support in the service of a larger whole. A married couple, for example, form a kind of community, because each helps out the other to maintain the household as a whole. A city, too, can be viewed as a living community: each member, through working to maintain himself, will contribute to the health of the city as a whole. Conversely, when a citizen works directly 37. Junge, Dorfteich (1891), 10–13. 38. Ibid., viii.

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for the city, this contributes back to his own well-being. A state is a yet more complex community, in which the forms of dependence are more intricate and less visible. Here, too, the same is true: “give and take, the rendering of service and the dependence of the individual.” 39 Thus, although he did not press the point further here, it seems pretty clear that in learning that the laws of community were natural, inescapable, and benevolent, children were also supposed to apply those laws to themselves, to practice harmonious adaptation to their circumstances (even when they changed), to understand their occupations as part of a natural system of division of labor, and to exercise thrift in their daily lives. In light of the later intensified subordination of the individual to the state in Nazi ideology, it is tempting to view these prescriptions as profoundly undemocratic and even antimodern. In the context of middleclass fears of radicals advocating the revolutionary overthrow of the state in the 1880s, however, these messages were more ambiguous, teaching instead a tempered, conservative approach to understanding the responsibilities of citizenship. Nonetheless, even at the time, his program lent itself to different sociopolitical readings, as is evident from its reception, to be discussed later in this chapter. Indeed, its openness to multiple readings itself must be seen as crucial to the program’s success. Junge’s programmatic essay on teaching reform was just the fi rst part of The Village Pond. The rest of the book showed how such a program might actually be carried out, beginning with a sketch of a lesson plan for Kiel covering five years of natural history teaching. This started in the fourth school year with an overview of four local living communities— a tidal pond, the moor, a field, and woods—and ended in the eighth (and highest) grade with a unit on “the earth as a living community.” In the body of the book, Junge showed in detail how one might teach about one particular living community, the village pond. He opened this part of the book by leading the reader on a mental walk around the pond, describing it physically and sketching out how it would change over the course of the seasons, in the style of much popular natural history writing of the time. Hardly a neutral model, the village pond evoked a scale of life and a sense of tradition still perhaps present for many German dwellers, but notably not for the children of Kiel and other rapidly growing cities. By linking the community concept in biology in the fi rst instance to a village-sized sense of human community (no matter how far 39. Ibid., 33.

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the concept might be scaled up or down in theory), Junge set a tone of traditionalism that would persist and that would readily link his version of the community concept to the nostalgic aspects of Heimat. Following this brief section, he launched into a detailed discussion of the individual members of the community, beginning with the duck and proceeding through twenty-one animals, then summarizing through comparative analysis their physical place in the setting, their food and structures for food acquisition, sensory apparatus, mode of movement, and development; fi nally, he re-presented the animals as links in the whole. He then did the same for nineteen plant forms, moving on more briefly at the book’s end to the nonliving aspects of the pond. An appendix offered supplementary stories that could be told in connection with one or another organism as well as suggestions for setting up classroom terrariums and aquariums to enhance the lessons. Junge’s discussions of the frog and newt offer a sense of the sorts of information and values he sought to convey. His section on “place of life and movement” of the pool frog (Rana esculenta) began: “We leave the meadow for the edge of the pond. There before us hops a frog in 11– 2 meter-long jumps. See how he squats on his hind legs, so that his upper leg, lower leg, and foot are folded together like a carpenter’s measuring stick, and he supports himself on front legs that turn out sideways. Suddenly he extends the hind legs with great force to their entire length— they are longer than the rest of the frog’s body—and the entire body is sped forward.” Junge then discussed its modes of feeding and the organs that supported it, its sensory organs, its structures for breathing, its reproduction and development. He summarized by considering “the frog as a member of the community,” with particular regard to its dependence on other parts of the community (its use of fl ies and spiders for food), the services it rendered to the community (especially as food for other creatures), and its comparison with other kinds of frogs.40 The next chapter, which used the great crested newt (Triton [now Triturus] cristatus) to represent the larger category of salamanders, was structured identically, attending fi rst to the anatomy and physiology of the newt in relation to their functions in their setting. Under “The Salamander as a Member of the Community,” Junge noted that the animal’s movements on the land did not correspond to our sense of beauty. However, he pointed out, when it was in its proper element (water), it was 40. Ibid., 85.

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much more beautiful. The lesson here was that “we can only properly get to know a being when we can observe it in its [natural] domestic conditions (compare [sic] with human situations), and then it can awaken in us entirely different interest from what we imagined. We must only observe without prejudice.” At the end of the newt chapter, Junge posed comparative questions: “To what extent are the frog and salamander aquatic animals? . . . To what extent land animals? What similarities and differences appear in their body structures with regard to the organs of movement, of feeding, of the sense—of breathing, of development? What is this connected to? (See Law of Maintenance!)” 41 The messages of connectedness, of service to and benefit from the community, and of community self-maintenance, or Erhaltungsmäßigkeit, were repeated in every chapter, as was the importance of learning through direct observation for cultivating the child’s skills of observation and judgment. In The Village Pond, then, Junge blended a number of important ingredients: an emphasis on the biology of the living organism in relation to its organic and inorganic surroundings (as opposed to focusing on formal characteristics and the memorization of taxonomic names and relationships), a pedagogy that took children away from book learning to living nature, a sustained vision of organic harmony mediated through the subordination of parts to a larger whole, and a commitment to education as a moral enterprise with the goal of raising children into upright members of society. Each of these programmatic elements struck a chord with other members of the broader teaching community.

The Spread of the Village Pond Gospel Junge’s program circulated with lightning speed through the ranks of schoolteachers in the 1880s. Some evidently encountered his initial presentations in three articles in 1883, while others read The Village Pond itself after its publication in 1885.42 Many more learned about it through 41. Ibid., 92–95, quotations on 94–95. 42. The articles were Junge, “Sollen Gesetze” (1883); Junge, “Das Gesetz der Erhaltungsmässigkeit” (1883); and Junge, “Was soll naturgeschichtlicher Unterricht in der Volksschule?” Eriziehungsschule, vol. 7(1883). I have not been able to locate the last of these sources, which is not in any German library database I can access, but the article was reviewed together with Junge’s very fi rst lecture on the topic, to the Schleswig-Holstein Teachers’ meeting in Altona in 1882, in Scheller, “Naturkunde” (1883).

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the well-developed conferences of teachers’ associations. Already in 1885, a teacher from Kiel was showing the natural science section of the Schleswig-Holstein Teacher’s Association how to shift one’s natural history examples from a systematics-dominated presentation to one oriented toward living communities.43 In 1886 and 1887, Junge’s book was discussed at meetings of local, provincial, and national teachers’ organizations, and in 1893 at the second annual meeting of the German Women Teachers’ Association, Helene Sumper, its Munich-based cofounder, delivered a talk extolling the value of the Lebensgemeinschaft reform idea.44 As early as September 1887, news of Junge’s program had reached perhaps the most prestigious site for teachers in the higher schools, the annual Meeting of German Scientists and Physicians, where schoolteachers rubbed shoulders with university professors. At the section for science education there, a schoolteacher from Strasbourg gave a lecture advocating Junge’s community-oriented pedagogical structure, which was then taken up by the secondary educators’ review literature.45 The pedagogical press amplified the impact of Junge’s book and its program, carrying discussions of it to those unable to attend the teachers’ meetings, reviewing books in light of their conformity or opposition to it, and publishing lesson plans derived from it. This held true for journals directed at all levels and kinds of schoolteachers. The Deutsche Blätter für erziehenden Unterricht (German pages for educational instruction), a conservative character-education journal for primary school teachers, called it “a milestone in the development of natural history instruction.” 46 The secondary school pedagogical review journals Jahresbericht 43. Kleeman, “Systematik und Lebensgemeinschaften” (1885). Junge, in the audience, praised his colleague’s approach—how could he not?—but criticized his examples as likely to be unfamiliar to children. 44. “Die neuere naturhistorische Volksschulliteratur im Leipziger Lehrerverein” (1886); Grabs, “General-Versammlungen” (1886), especially his discussion of the lecture by Seminaroberlehrer Waeber [Liegnitz], “Ist der Unterricht in der Naturbeschreibung in der Volksschule einer Reform bedürftig?” Hoffmann, “Ein Besuch der Jahresversammlung” (1887); Bösel-Artern, “Der naturgeschichtliche Unterricht in der Volksschule” (1887); Sumper, “Der naturkundliche Unterricht” (1893). For the broader context for women teachers, see Westenholz, Der Allgemeine Deutsche Lehrerinnenverein (1936), 147–48. 45. “Bericht über die Verhandlungen der 60. Versammlung deutscher Naturforscher und Ärzte” (1888), 66. For further discussion, see also Loew, “Naturwissenschaften” (1888), B230–31, 241–44. 46. Scheller, review of Der Dorfteich (1885). Book reviews that referred to Junge’s work included (among others) Scheller, review of Naturgeschichte, vol. 1 (1887); Scheller, review of Der gesamte Lehrstoff (1889); and Fack, review of Naturgeschichte II (1891). For exam-

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über das höhere Schulwesen (Annual report on the higher school system) and the Zeitschrift für mathematische und naturwissenschaftliche Unterricht (Journal of mathematical and scientific instruction) discussed it, the editor of the latter penning an essay on its merits titled “A New Gospel of Natural History Instruction.” 47 In 1889, a jaded reviewer referred to the Lebensgemeinschaft principle as having “instantly become a kind of dogma.” 48 By 1894, nine years after the publication of The Village Pond and eleven years after Junge’s ideas fi rst saw print, an advocate of his program could afford to skip over the meaning of Lebensgemeinschaft, since he was sure his readers already knew it.49 Within a decade of its appearance, then, The Village Pond had succeeded in capturing the attention of teachers at a wide variety of school types and locations, from Kiel in the north to Munich in the south, from Strasbourg on the western border to the Silesian town of Sagan in the east. Indeed, in its second edition of 1891, Junge’s book title omitted its reference to the primary schools, reading simply Naturgeschichte to acknowledge its broad audience. 50 What made this book such a lightning rod for discussions of reform was the strong preexisting currents within the educational community. One aspect of this interest, largely absent from the content of the discussions themselves but present in their very existence, was the opportunity it gave teachers to weigh in publicly on matters of reform. In a system in which the numbers of class hours, curricular guidelines, and even sanctioned behavior were mandated from above, reform-minded teachers seized at opportunities provided by meetings and journals to assert ples of classroom lessons associated with the Lebensgemeinschaft idea, see, e.g., Wendt, “Der Urwald als Lebensgemeinschaft” (1889); Gentsch, “Heimatskunde” (1889); Groth, “Wasser an und in den Pflanzen” (1892); and Groth, “Tiere an und in den Pflanzen” (1892). The articles by Groth identify him only as “Lehrer Groth in Kiel” and do not give a fi rst name. They are probably by Hans Hinrich Groth, who taught at the First Girls’ Free School in Kiel starting in the 1870s. Some notes on Groth are included in Junge’s personnel fi le in Stadtarchiv Kiel: Personal-Akte Junge, pp. 16–17. 47. E. Loew’s review came in Loew, “ Beschreibende Naturwissenschaften” (1886), 277; Hoffmann, “Ein neues Evangelium” (1889). 48. Ernst Loew’s comments on “dogma”are in Loew, “Naturwissenschaft” (1889), pt. XI, 36–37. The discussion extended to yet other school types: in 1887 Otto Frick, leader of the movement for unified schooling, opened his series Schriften des Deutschen Einheitsschulvereins with a monograph that advocated Junge’s Lebensgemeinschaft as the best approach to teaching nature study. Loew reviewed Frick’s book in Loew, “Naturwissenschaft” (1887), B231–33. 49. Lutz, “Für die Schule” (1894), 73 n. 2. 50. See “Foreword to the Second Edition,” in Junge, Dorfteich (1891), xii.

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their independence and their right to shape what went on in the classroom. 51 For those seeking to improve the status of natural history, another prominent appeal of Junge’s program lay in his effort to enliven the subject by moving it away from memorizing names and taxonomic categories to presenting it as a science of living nature. His curriculum provided a new organizing principle around which to structure visual and hands-on learning in natural history, and some teachers readily took the initiative. As early as 1892, at the annual meeting of the General Saxon Teachers’ Association, a group of Dresden teachers displayed an exhibit that exemplified how to use visual aids to teach about Lebensgemeinschaften, using the river Elbe near Dresden as its key model. A similar exhibit took place in 1894 at the seventh annual meeting of the German natural history teachers’ association, this one focused on the forest community. 52 But the biggest appeal lay in the ways that the living-community concept could serve moral education. In the 1880s and 1890s, schoolteachers sought especially to cultivate students’ sense of patriotism, their sense of Germanness in what was still a new nation, and, in the wake of the rise of socialism, to educate them away from antistate activities. And here Junge’s ties to the Herbart-Ziller school are important. Early in his work on The Village Pond, Junge was encouraged in his reformist views by Eduard Scheller, one of the main supporters of the Deutsche Blätter, a leading Herbartian journal, and Junge would publish numerous articles in this journal during the 1880s. 53 In 1883, he concluded his “Sketch for a Syllabus for Instruction in Natural History for the First Girls’ Bürgerschule in Kiel,” published in the Deutsche Blätter, with the rousing statement that his curriculum organized around Lebensgemeinschaften showed how “natural history can be viewed as a main branch of moralreligious instruction.” 54 Nature study could support moral instruction in many ways. One drew on a deep epistemological and ethical claim that direct observation of nature could supply children with a solid moral foundation in a world fi lled with superstition and misinformation. Thus, G. Bergemann wrote 51. For a more detailed argument on the role of teachers’ professional status in relation to Junge’s reform curriculum, see Nyhart, “Teaching Community via Biology” (2002). 52. Mißbach, “Eine naturkundliche Ausstellung” (1892); Lutz, “Für die Schule” (1894), 74–75. 53. “Friedrich Junge,” in DBA, fiche 615, frames 45–46. 54. Junge, “Entwurf eines Pensenplans” (1883), 271.

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in 1885, the same year Junge’s Village Pond was published, that natural history education was often mistakenly blamed for spreading materialism in the schools. To the contrary! The bedrock of natural history was observation, which kept thought in “strict discipline,” formed the foundation of “correct judgments,” “suppresses superstition, and promotes the sense of truth of the youth.” Contact with nature, moreover, had “a moderating effect, it dampens the passions and supports calm and clear judgments about ourselves and our near and dear.” 55 Junge clearly shared this view. Even more resonant with the program of character education was Junge’s emphasis on teaching the child the need to accept limits on personal freedom necessary to be a productive member of society. More starkly than in The Village Pond, in an earlier article sketching out his reformed natural history curriculum in the Deutsche Blätter, Junge emphasized that “a properly conducted instruction in natural history shows the human, too, but not as a freely operating [freihändelnden] individual, but as a link [Glied] in a series of innumerable creations. To be sure, he stands at the top of the chain of being, but he also fi nds a physical world order and feels that he is subject to the same laws as every other individual; as a being in nature, he is dependent on nature as a whole and on her often minute parts.” 56 Here the shaping of the individual will toward the good of the whole, the education of the child toward a view of the self as both independent and yet also dependent, may best be understood in the context of Herbartian education. Junge taught this lesson not only through the content of natural history teaching but also through instructional practices. In another early article in the Deutsche Blätter on field trips, he discussed how they could be used to underline the necessity of subordinating the individual to the group. “Give children rules of behavior, but only the most necessary ones, and avoid any appearance of imperative arbitrariness; rather show them the necessity of these measures.” He advised teachers to teach unruly students to think about the disorder that would result if forty or fi fty others followed their lead. Children must “learn the necessity of recognizing the factual limitation of personal freedom,” and learn it in their very bodies, not just in their minds. Junge also advocated “cultivating a communal spirit [Gemeingeist]” such that when someone made mischief 55. Bergemann, “Was hat die Schule zu thun?” (1885), 536–40. 56. Junge, “Entwurf eines Pensenplans” (1883), 252.

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students would learn to think not “X did that,” but “You and you and I, we are all responsible.” 57 It is true that in a school situation in which a teacher typically had sixty or seventy children under his supervision in a single classroom, as Junge did, teachers had a strong practical incentive to induce their pupils to internalize such rules. Nevertheless, this was not merely an issue of classroom management. Junge’s emphasis on the subordination of the individual to the larger whole in both nature and the schoolroom reinforced one of the chief social virtues of German character-building education, Gemeinsinn, or the sense of community—a virtue valued by Germans across the political spectrum. An article on Gemeinsinn in the 1896 Encyclopedic Handbook of Pedagogy, for instance, started off by proclaiming, “Man can never be an absolute whole. What he is, even at the highest level of earthly perfection, he is thanks to—after God and his own efforts—society [Gesellschaft] in its widest sense, whose member [Glied] he is. . . . The greater the sense of community, the greater the common good.” Like other articles on various social virtues in this encyclopedia, the article went on to elaborate at length on how to “educate for the sense of community.” 58 Junge was hardly alone among teachers of natural history in projecting the social values of devotion to work, service to and benefit from the community, and economic interdependence onto the natural realm. Junge himself was quite restrained in how he did this, simply reminding children of the analogies between nature and human community values. In his exposition of the natural community and its members, his laws and their consequences stayed largely at the level of biological and biophysical relationships, with only pointers to “compare with human situations”;59 it was up to the teacher to make explicit the connections in the classroom—or not. Many Lebensgemeinschaft enthusiasts were less restrained, and wrote in much more anthropomorphic tones. The natural history textbook writer Odo Twiehausen, for instance, wrote that the starling acted as the

57. Junge, “Was ist zur Ausführung” (1884), 38–39. At this time in Germany, elementary school classes averaged well over 60 children per teacher; in Minden, the school district with the worst student-teacher ratio, nearly 71 percent of the schools had 120–200 students per teacher. See Kuhlemann, “Niedere Schulen” (1991), 195, 197. 58. Hug, “Gemeinsinn” (1896), 554–55. A subsection is titled “Erziehung zum Gemeinsinn.” 59. See, e.g., Junge, Dorfteich (1891), 95, on the newt.

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“policeman” of the garden and field, the bullfi nch was the “nobleman” among the fi nches, the sparrow the beggarman; Junge’s colleague Hans Hinrich Groth in Kiel described the woodpecker as a “carpenter,” the owl as a “night watchman,” the heron as a “fisherman,” and the domestic chicken as a “careful housewife.” Each lived in its own particular setting; each had its own job, for which it was equipped with appropriate tools (its body structures); and each received appropriate rewards (food) for its work. None could do the work of another: “How could the heron manage the work of a woodpecker and the hen do the service of the owl! . . . Among them it is said: he who doesn’t work, doesn’t eat. But he who works will have enough food for himself and his family.” 60 Junge’s program, then, could easily be used by those seeking to teach moral lessons about humans by turning nature into a field of parables, and it was likely a main feature of his appeal. But we must be cautious about viewing Junge himself as too completely a follower of the Herbart-Ziller school. Although he shared its goal of educating children toward a moral upbringing, Junge rejected a more extreme tenet associated with the school in the 1880s: complete concentration around religious subject matter. In the fi rst place, he wanted natural history instruction to maintain an independent place in the curriculum; his adaptation of “concentration” lay in combining botany with zoology and (to a lesser degree) the study of the inorganic aspects of the environment.61 In addition, he appears not to have wanted to alienate teachers who held more liberal world views. In a provocative footnote, Junge wrote that he was not surprised that some people had read into his earlier publications a bent toward materialism or pantheism. However, he continued, such people would be mistaken, for he was writing only about natural history teaching, “which as such has nothing to do with religious instruction. And here the results could certainly be used to justify a materialistic, pantheistic, darwinistic—and who knows, what else—world view, but also a deistic one. That depends entirely upon the teacher. But whoever maintains that my instruction must lead to religious error isn’t paying any attention [steht gar nicht in der Sache]; such a person can say anything about anything.” 62 Thus, Junge’s curriculum by no means ruled out its use by people who wanted to adapt it to a variety of ideological ends; 60. Groth, “Aus meinem naturgeschichtlichen Tagebuche” (1887), 112. On Twiehausen, see Loew, “Naturwissenschaft” (1889), pt. XI, 42–43. 61. Junge, “Entwurf eines Pensenplans” (1883), 271, 252–53. 62. Junge, Dorfteich (1891), 20.

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indeed, Junge’s statement suggests that in his view, as science the curriculum was neutral. This footnote offers an important clue to understanding Junge’s appeal: its reticence on the subject of evolution. Despite the importance of the context of moral education for Junge’s work, his silence regarding the causes of adaptation allowed it to move beyond the (already wide) circle of conservative, religious proponents of character education. Both those leaning toward theism and those leaning toward either a deist or a materialist understanding of evolution could embrace Junge’s program and teach it as they chose. So for instance, a progressive interpretation might note that his third law, “accommodation,” showed acceptance of change (perhaps even evolutionary change) to be part of nature. His emphasis on duty to others was balanced by another emphasis on individual development; his theory considered an individual’s striving for his own self-maintenance to contribute naturally to the good of the whole; and his idea that all individuals contributed to the welfare of the whole could be viewed as valorizing all kinds of work, including industrial labor and housework. In addition, his hands-on pedagogy aimed at teaching children that their own independent observation, tempered by logical judgment, was the key to secure knowledge.63 All of these ideas could serve a progressive orientation. Junge’s program, though existing comfortably within the context of conservative Protestant character-building education, thus provided a basis from which people might drive home quite different lessons concerning the ultimate causes of the regularities found in nature.64 Although Junge’s pedagogy resonated well with schoolteachers, his scientific principles met with more resistance. Many critics agreed that Junge’s concepts were simply beyond the reach of ten- to fourteen-yearolds. One writer, though announcing in the subtitle of his 1887 textbook that he was “following the new methodological principles” of “Lebensgemeinschaften,” actually found Junge’s community concept too hard for children (and perhaps for teachers) and simplified it by group63. See esp. Junge, Die Kulturwesen (1891), v. 64. Andreas Daum has written of the “element of reconciliation” evident in popular natural history around 1900, arguing persuasively that a conciliatory interpretation of evolution, which emphasized the perfection resulting from evolution and deemphasized struggle and competition, was an important feature of the decades around the turn of the century. Daum, “Das versöhnende Element” (1996), 203–15. Junge’s program may be viewed as another kind of “biology of reconciliation”—one that made the reconciliation of worldviews possible through its silence on the subject of evolution.

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ing organisms according to their natural settings, such as the woods or the meadow. Similarly, Ernst Loew, a teacher at the royal Realschule in Berlin who was an expert on the relations between insects and flowering plants, reminded readers of the less rigorous and so more practicable principle he had already developed, which he called the “biocentric viewpoint,” in which organisms occupying the same setting would be studied together (for example, forest plants and animals) in situ. In such ways, Junge’s program was adapted and watered down such that by the 1890s many primary school teachers were using the term Lebensgemeinschaft, or choosing related words like Lebensbilder (life pictures), to refer to a nature study that de-emphasized systematics and that was generally oriented toward presenting organisms in their environment, but was not necessarily focused on the biological-functional relationships at the heart of Junge’s curriculum.65 A second objection focused more directly on Junge’s eight laws themselves. Despite Junge’s own clear interpretation that they would lead children to understand that laws were natural and therefore needed to be followed, some critics worried that the presentation of laws to immature minds would lead them down the primrose path of deductivism toward the dangerous terrain of “speculation”—a code word at the time for evolutionary theory.66 Following Haeckel’s advocacy of evolution in the schools, the Müller affair, and the exclusion of evolutionary theory from Prussian classrooms, many schoolteachers were skittish about departing from facts. Anything smacking of theoretical speculation, of knowledge not fi rmly grounded in facts, threatened to lead students into skepticism and wild philosophizing—ways of thinking that were clearly dangerous in the eyes of a religiously minded society and a politically conservative state. Indeed, Junge reported that his own school superintendent believed The Village Pond could be used to promote atheism and pantheism, and had therefore opposed it.67 65. Twiehausen, Naturgeschichte (1887); reviewed in Scheller, review of Naturgeschichte (1887). Loew occasionally used the term “biocentric” in his annual reviews of scence pedagogy, explicitly defending his perspective in “Naturwissenschaft” (1887), B231, B241. On the more general criticisms and modifications of Junge’s program, see the annual reviews by Erns Loew: “Naturwissenschaft” (1887), “Naturwissenschaft” (1888), “Naturwissenschaft” (1889). 66. Loew, “Naturwissenschaft” (1889), pt. XI, 34. 67. The written records I have been able to examine by the school superintendent do not reveal any statements opposing Junge’s program, although he was required to report on Junge’s teaching annually as part of his review of all teachers in his district. The closest

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Junge protested that his own laws were made mainly for the teacher and should be conveyed to students only if and when the teacher thought they were ready, and then only in very simple language. In Junge’s view, natural history and speculation were mutually antithetical. Linking scientific “speculation”with “superstition” (often a code word for Catholicism in Protestant Germany, but by the 1890s possibly also used to refer to spiritualism), Junge wrote in 1891 that natural history “is no place for opinion—the superstitious opine that they have seen ghosts, which then disappear upon serious investigation. How many ‘scientific’ ghosts in recent times have gone up in smoke upon closer research, substantial observation!” 68 Natural history instruction based on direct observation, then, was a way of disciplining students’ thinking away from the dangers of speculation and superstition and toward the practice of sound judgment based on observation and induction—an essential skill in an age when the temptations of religious extremism, Darwinism, atheism, and socialism lurked around every corner.69 This view was clearly shared by school reformers who pressed for keeping natural history as descriptive as possible, and acted as a counterweight to the positive interpretation that Junge’s laws would teach the children the naturalness of law. Perhaps the most serious opposition to Junge’s curriculum, however, came from those teachers who were used to organizing their classes according to systematics, most often moving down an implicit chain of being from mammals (most familiar to children) to single-celled organisms. The organization of Junge’s curriculum around Lebensgemeinschaften seemed to preclude this approach and require a dauntingly complete reorganization of the lesson-plan. Although a few teachers were prepared to undertake such an overhaul on their own initiative, the less adventurous were more likely to await new educational regulations and textbooks before committing to such a change. As they were gradually reformed from the late 1880s through the early 1900s, many state and local educational guidelines did indeed prescribe greater attention to organisms’ relations to one another and to their surroundings, in ways that invited teaching around communities, thing to a criticism in the reports of the mid-1880s to early 1890s is the statement that Junge took an “independent path” in his approach to nature study instruction. Städtische Schulinspektor Kuhlgatz, Bericht vom 24. Mai 1886, in Stadtarchiv Kiel, Mittel- u. Volksschulen, 5, Akten betr. Jahresberichte über die Volks- u. Mittelschulen, 1886–1894 (15398). 68. Junge, Die Kulturwesen (1891), v. 69. “Friedrich Junge,” in DBA, fiche 615, frames 47–48.

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and some textbook-authors pressed home the invitation. Thus, in 1889, a decree in Breslau prescribed as instructional topics for natural history in one-room and half-day schools “deciduous woods and evergreen woods, meadow, field, garden, river and pond, house and yard, animals and plants of the torrid zone, animal world of the cold zone, man, mining and metal factories, overview of nature’s kingdoms. . . . In each of the relevant groups those plants and animals will be considered, which give [that group] its particular character and are of particular significance to humans.” Instruction was to emphasize “the adaptation of the mode of life, the organs, and the home of the individual being to its place in the household of nature and of man.” 70 Broader changes in the 1892 regulations for primary and middle schools in Prussia induced Ludwig Kahnmeyer and Hermann Schulze, coauthors of a highly successful textbook for the “realistic” subjects, to produce a new natural history textbook for middle schools (Bürgerschulen) organized “according to Lebensgemeinschaften and group pictures.” By 1904 the new Prussian school regulations mandated that “from the lowest level of instruction on, the attention of the pupil is to be turned to life-phenomena and the interconnections of life, including information on the geographic distribution of animals and plants.” In Berlin’s parish schools, the rules were even more pointed: the curriculum for the third class, for instance, called for studying “place- and livingcommunities with special attention to the landscapes in the surroundings of Berlin (field trips).” 71 Thus, at both the state and local levels, primary and middle school teachers in Prussia found formal encouragement to shift over to the more geographic and ecological approaches epitomized by Junge’s curriculum. It is difficult to know how many school districts actually took up Junge’s program, or to what extent. Certainly it appealed to many reforming teachers for its combination of liberal pedagogical methods, its contributions to homeland education, and the moral and social lessons that his emphasis on community could afford to future citizens. However, the program also came under strenuous criticism, largely for its too-stringent demands on both pupils and teachers. The Lebensgemeinschaft curriculum was therefore not fully embraced by either the teach70. “Verfügung der Regierung zu Breslau vom 25. Nov. 1889,” in Giebe, Verordnungen (1898), 627–28. 71. Both quoted by Matzdorff, “Über die Bedeutung des Begriffs der Biocönose” (1905), 625.

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ing community or the educational bureaucracy of the state before World War I. Yet crucial parts of it, especially those aspects that connected natural history instruction to a sense of local place, did become embedded in the curriculum, long before Heimat and community became formal centerpieces of the national educational policy of the Weimar republic.72

The Village Pond Curriculum as Heimatkunde In addition to its ties to education for character formation and appropriate social behavior, Junge’s program also dovetailed more concretely with contemporary efforts to develop patriotic sentiments through the study of Heimatkunde. Junge’s program, with its emphasis on studying local nature, was easily adapted by those seeking to develop children’s knowledge and love of their local natural and historical surroundings, especially through the use of field trips to study the local setting beyond the school. In urban areas, an added incentive was the ignorance displayed by many children of the most basic facts of nature. An 1882 book reported that of 1000 Berlin schoolchildren surveyed, only 364 had seen a forest or wood and only 167 recognized the song of a lark. These figures were repeated in later publications and were reinforced by later surveys of other urban children. Many teachers advocated using field trips to familiarize such students with nature and simultaneously to teach them to value local plants, animals, and natural places as part of the German heritage.73 The actual curriculum in Junge’s school district of Kiel suggests the ways in which the topics traditionally expected to be taught within natural history could be structured into the Lebensgemeinschaft curriculum, and how this in turn could work together with other subjects to provide a deeply geographically and environmentally deterministic way of viewing nationhood. In the spring of 1887, Kiel’s school superintendent 72. Kennedy, “A Nation’s Readers” (1997); Kennedy, “Visual Representation and National Identity” (2000). 73. For an example of how different topics were combined in a Heimatkunde curriculum, see Gentsch, “Heimatskunde” (1889). The statistics on ignorance of nature come from Piltz, Über Naturbeobachtung des Schülers (1882), as quoted in Bergemann, “Was hat die Schule zu thun?” (1885), 540. Another widely publicized survey in 1896 revealed that some 40 percent of 150 twelve- to fourteen-year-olds at an urban elementary school had never been in the woods; 56 percent had never heard a nightingale sing: Schmeil, Über die Reformbestrebungen (1897), 74–75.

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offered an overview of all the course curricula at the six lower schools under his jurisdiction. This overview indicates that all the schools had similar curricula for natural history, although generally the Bürgerschulen tended to cover certain topics earlier than the Volksschulen, and the boys’ schools were allotted some topics sooner than the girls’ schools. (In general, the curricula are similar, with the exception of the introduction of geometry and physical education for boys and “handwork” for girls.) The general course descriptions do not look particularly oriented toward Lebensgemeinschaften or toward geographic or ecological thinking, but rather fulfi ll the state’s curricular guidelines set out in 1872. So, for example, students in the third class of all the girls’ schools (and fourth class of the boys’ schools) were to study “representatives from all branches of the animal kingdom and the larger groups of the plant kingdom”; the second girls’ classes were to review the various branches of the animal kingdom; to study human anatomy, physiology, and health; and to review the material on plants from the previous year, with new attention to those natural objects especially important for humans, “or [echoing the guidelines] which are especially interesting on account of the peculiarities of their modes of life.” Only in the fi rst or highest girls’ classes did the geographic and ecological orientation come to the fore. In addition to reviewing all the material of the previous years, these classes were to study plants an animals with an emphasis on their “life activities” and geographic distribution; to learn something of the geological history of the earth and “the most important minerals”; and fi nally, to contemplate the “interconnections of nature’s kingdoms and their dependence on one another.” 74 A more detailed lesson plan the superintendent provided for the second girls’ Bürgerschule (not the second girls’ Volksschule, where Junge taught), shows that, in fact, considerable portions of Junge’s model curriculum were being taught. Thus, in the highest class, the detailed curriculum follows exactly the portion of Junge’s curriculum titled “The earth as a community,” summarizing the interdependencies of plants, animals, and inorganic materials on one another. For the second oldest class, the spring semester’s lesson plan included virtually all the items in the fi rst half of Junge’s model “third course” concerning plant physiol74. Undated overview chart of curriculum at the six Kiel schools, fi led with summer semester Pensenpläne for the II. Mädchenbürgerschule for summer semester 1887, in Stadtarchiv Kiel, Akte des Stadtarchivs, Feststellung der Lehrpläne in den Mittel und Volksschulen 1880–1887 (11348).

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ogy, plant communities, and cultivated plants, including three weeks at the end of the course on ecological plant community types (beach, moor and heath, fields, marshes and bogs). Elsewhere, even when the details of the curriculum are different, the dependence of living things on their inorganic substrate and the different types of landscapes around Kiel are emphasized. This combination of geographic and functional thinking about nature permeated courses in Heimatkunde, geography, and history as well. Following the venerable concentric-circle approach established by the midcentury Heimatkunde pedagogue Friedrich August Finger, tenyear-olds at the girls’ Bürgerschule had a course in the summer semester on Heimatkunde, which started literally at the schoolhouse and ventured ever further away, fi rst investigating the old city and its market, the church and castle, then the small body of saltwater downtown known as the “Kleiner Kiel.” Moving outward to other parts of the city, they then explored the woods and fields at the edges of town and the moors that characterized the landscape beyond, ending the year with a study of the inhabitants of Kiel. In the next grade’s geography class, students continued to expand outward, learning about Schleswig-Holstein, then the other Prussian provinces, Germany, Europe, and the continents and oceans, while in history they were studying the history of SchleswigHolstein, Prussia, and Germany. Thus, even if the eleven-year-olds’ natural history class, which focused on local plants, largely emphasized individual plants and only rarely coincided directly with these other courses (as in the week on soil types in both geography and natural history), the connections between geography, nature, and history were constantly being reinforced. By the time the children reached the top grade at age fourteen, they would have been fully prepared to learn the lesson that the earth as a whole was a biotic community in which plants, animals, and humans were all dependent on one another and on their local physical conditions of the earth. The Lebensgemeinschaft curriculum in place in Kiel thus contributed directly to a perspective that placed German schoolchildren at the center of a series of geographically and culturally nested entities in which the social place of an individual was intimately tied to his or her geographic and ecological place. This same lesson was pressed home at levels ranging from the most intimate—the family—up through the local community and outward to the nation and even the earth as a whole. The Lebensgemeinschaft concept thus offered a naturalized parallel and

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reinforcement of the idea of “Heimat,” the central useful ambiguity of which was that it referred simultaneously to the local setting, to the region, and to the nation.

Conclusion In adapting Möbius’s community concept to educational reform, Junge and his followers drew out certain aspects and played down others. Möbius’s quantitative emphasis, for example—so important for the way he explained how a community can lose its equilibrium—disappeared from Junge’s version. Junge’s version, moreover, was not as strictly causal as Möbius’s: Junge does not suggest that if you remove the stork or the frog from the village pond that anything much will happen, whereas in Möbius’s version, the members of the community are more tightly bound to one another in their dynamic connections. Möbius never made the community into a parable, positively inclined though he may have been toward Junge’s efforts. The uses of the biotic community concept in the classroom went far beyond Möbius’s more modest scientific aims, and the concept’s cultural power was vastly expanded even as its scientific rigor was diminished. Indeed, Junge’s reform curriculum contributed to a massive rethinking at the end of the nineteenth century about how German children should learn about nature. Caught up with confl icting concerns about citizenship, social mobility, fears of materialism, and a desire to reflect modern biological principles, school curricula provided a fertile ground for shaping how Germans would view nature and their relationship with it. These issues would remain potent in German education through the Weimar and Nazi periods, as ideas about community, citizenship, and nature would continue to be advanced explicitly through biology education.75 Junge’s curriculum and its modifications suggest that by the early twentieth century, many German children were learning two kinds of things about nature. First, nature was presented as a model for human behavior. In particular, the Lebensgemeinschaft was used to teach the priority of the community over the individual. This was presented as both a fact— there is a larger whole into which individuals fit—and a moral precept— 75. Weiss, “Pedagogy, Professionalism, and Politics” (1994).

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one must look beyond one’s own individual interests to understand the greater good. The Lebensgemeinschaft was the leading vehicle by which the message of subordination to the greater good was made explicit to schoolchildren as a lesson that nature has to offer humanity.76 But the relationship between nature and humans presented in schools was not merely metaphorical, nor did it consist solely of parables. In representing “the natural” to German schoolchildren, teachers presented nature as something of which humans were a part. The larger unity of plants, animals, and physical nature that formed the idealistic, higher perspective of Junge’s curriculum included humans. Humanity could shape nature, but was still part of it and would be affected in turn by the effects of human intervention into nature. Given the tight connection between the Lebensgemeinschaft idea and Heimatkunde, domesticated nature (in such Lebensgemeinschaften as the garden and farmyard) had as prominent a place as “wild” nature (woods, steppe, moor) in the Lebensgemeinschaft curriculum. Indeed, like Möbius’s original paradigmatic oyster bed, the eponymous village pond was not a purely natural place: dammed at one end with stones, in the shallows of the other end washerwomen scrubbed clothes and cows quenched their thirst.77 There is little sense of a “pure” nature separate from and untrammeled by humans that requires preservation from us, a sentiment that was beginning to be developed in the United States in the late nineteenth century (especially for the West). Partly this reflects real differences in the landscapes of the two countries. Whereas the United States still had vast tracts of land that appeared to its westward-moving, nonnative population to be wild and untouched by civilization, Germany’s forests had long been either logged over and turned into farmland or transformed into controlled spaces used for hunting, fi rewood, and/or harvestable wood production, its moors either used for peat and pasturage or drained for farming. There was precious little a German conservationist could turn to as a “primeval forest.” But it was not only the kind of nature available to Germans that made a union of “human” and “nature” so appealing. The context of nation- and citizen-building in Germany served to rein76. The Lebensgemeinschaft was certainly not the only biological concept through which such messages could be delivered—Otto Schmeil explained the body as a “cell state” in terms exactly parallel to those Junge and his followers used to describe the individual’s relation to the community. Schmeil, Lehrbuch der Zoologie (1912), 2–3. For more on Schmeil, see chapter 8. 77. Junge, Dorfteich (1891), 47.

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force the sense that nature and culture were inextricably bound together into a form that created a particular, environmentally shaped identity.78 In its turn, the Lebensgemeinschaft idea reinforced the naturalness of the Heimat concept because it was taught as embodying a set of relationships rooted in nature. Such a powerful source of identity also surely shaped the conceptualization of nature itself: German nature could hardly, under these circumstances, be a nature apart from humanity. Except, perhaps, partly, in a museum.

78. Lekan, Imagining the Nation (2004), offers an insightful discussion on these points, esp. his “Introduction,” 1–18.

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Reforming the Natural History Museum, 1880–1900

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n 2 December 1889 the natural history museum of the royal Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin opened its monumental new building to the public. For sixty-four-year-old professor Karl Möbius, the museum’s director, it must have been a moment of deepest satisfaction. In just two years on the job, he had successfully overseen the move of Germany’s largest and most distinguished natural history collection from its old, crowded quarters in the university’s main building on Unter den Linden to its spacious new building near the clinics and agricultural school, while simultaneously carrying out a far-reaching reform in the organization and intended uses of the collections. The pomp, the official celebration in recognition of “his” museum (as he privately thought of it), and the chance to escort the kaiser and his wife around the collections only added to the pride he must have taken in fi nally being able to carry out in full measure reforms he had been thinking about, one way or another, for nearly thirty years.1 The new museum reflected his biological vision of zoology. From an outside perspective, the opening of the new Berlin museum marked not a culmination but a beginning. Berlin’s natural history mu-

1. On “my” museum: Karl Möbius diary, p. 139, 11 März 1888, typescript copy in Zoologisches Museum der Christian-Albrechts-Universität Kiel, Archiv. On early ideas of museum reform in Hamburg, see below in this chapter.

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seum stood in the German vanguard of a museum movement of unprecedented intensity that swept across Europe and America in the decades before the outbreak of the First World War, producing a broad wave of building and reorganizing natural history galleries at the state, provincial, and local levels. 2 Museums were ubiquitous. Germany was caught up in the fever and by 1914 supported over 180 museums with significant natural history collections. 3 These constituted the most prominent public site for the production and display of a science-sanctioned picture of nature. The transformation of the museum landscape involved more than just building new buildings. It entailed a major change in the patronage and management of the natural history museum, a restructuring of the social relationships within the museum, and a shift in the intellectual content of natural history. All were aspects of the international reform movement known as the New Museum Idea, in which museums opened their doors for the fi rst time to a truly mass audience, producing major changes in the cultural standing of museums and their presentations of nature. The most conspicuous feature of the New Museum Idea was a new spatial organization, “dual arrangement,” which divided the mu2. The European museums are discussed from an architectural perspective in H. Wagner, “Museen” (1906). The U.S. National Museum, which opened in 1881, housed not only natural history exhibits but also exhibits of technology, arts, and history. Indeed, the natural history museum building boom in turn was part of a yet broader international museum movement that encompassed museums of art, arts and crafts, technology, ethnology, archaeology, and history, all of which increased their numbers dramatically in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By 1903, Germany could boast about five hundred museums. A. Meyer, “Das Bestreben der amerikanischen naturwissenschaftlichen Museen” (1904), 93. 3. The count of natural history museums and school museums comes from Köstering, Natur zum Anschauen (2003), appendixes I and II, 283–93. This number included some ninety museums devoted to zoology, botany, or natural history in general; another dozen devoted exclusively to the earth sciences (mineralogy, geology, and paleontology); thirty-one encyclopedic city or provincial museums that included separate galleries for zoology and botany in their combined local collections of art, history, folkways, and natural history; and over three dozen school museums with natural history exhibits. Köstering’s count includes a number of museums that could also be counted as Heimat museums; her criterion for inclusion is whether they had independent galleries devoted to natural history. See also Arndt, “Statistisches” (1930), 149–65, esp. 151. As Arndt’s article suggests, the majority of German museums were Heimat museums; it is unclear how many of these included local nature in their purview as well as local history. Another count of Heimat museums between 1871 and 1914 yields 371 museums, with the majority of new foundings taking place between 1890 and 1914. Cited in Confi no, The Nation as a Local Metaphor (1997), 134.

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seum into a limited set of displays aimed at the general public and a second, much larger collection available only to researchers.4 This reorganization marked a fundamental change in the natural history museum as an institution and the emergence of the form that would dominate during the twentieth century. 5 The story of museum reform in Germany plays a critical role in the argument of this book. First, museums were a leading means through which the biological perspective spread: like schools (and often in conjunction with them), the reformed civic museums brought the biological perspective to a mass audience through their new public exhibits, offering displays that ranged from the “biological group”—the visually lively form advocated by Phillip Leopold Martin and other practical naturalists beginning in the 1860s—to more didactic illustrations of functional morphology (also called “biological” displays, though not “biological groups”) showing how organisms performed the functions of life. Second, just as the practical naturalists were the key group in the early formulations of the biological perspective, and schoolteachers moved it through the primary education system (while adapting it to their own ends), in this setting, too, a particular group—curators—were critical to spreading the biological perspective in the museum setting in the 4. As Mary P. Winsor has noted, the historical use of the term “new museum idea” (sometimes also called just “the museum idea”) was imprecise. Sometimes it referred to the expansion of the museum mission to encompass a mass audience, sometimes to the creation of exhibits specifically for that audience, and sometimes to the division of exhibits into public and research collections. For clarity’s sake, I use the term New Museum Idea for the broader movement and “dual arrangement” specifically for the spatial division of collections. Winsor, “Natural History Museums” (2009). 5. Naturalia could be organized in other ways, of course. Since the late eighteenth century, comparative anatomy collections had also existed, which set up the skeletons and organ systems of different animals side by side in order to allow for ready comparison. When part of a research and teaching collection, these were usually housed separately from the systematic collection; at the Paris museum, which served as the European model for the fi rst half of the century, comparative anatomy was housed in a separate building from the natural history collection. See Bernard, Le jardin des plantes (1842–43). Similarly, at German universities in the fi rst two-thirds of the century, the comparative anatomy collection was usually under the control of the professor of anatomy, while the systematic collection was in the domain of the professor of zoology or natural history. Nyhart, Biology Takes Form (1995), chapter 2. To the pair of systematics and comparative anatomy collections, Louis Agassiz added a third type at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology in the 1860s: a collection organized geographically. Winsor emphasizes that Agassiz did not couple this division of collections with the idea of dual arrangement: Agassiz’s whole museum was simultaneously for research and display. Winsor, “Agassiz’s Notions” (2000).

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1890s and after. Curators constituted a newly professionalized, scientific group of men who forged the new social and scientific role of the “museum man,” which combined scientific research with public education in a way different from university professors, high school teachers, or earlier museum conservators. These men transformed the management of collections, research using them, and their public presentation from an avocation into a full-time scientific career. If practical naturalists undertook the sculpting of the biological group displays that began appearing in the new museums, it was the curators who controlled their spatial and conceptual fit into the overall design and message of the museum. That message, increasingly, was a biological one, not just a classificatory one. And because these curators were now mostly men with university degrees, well integrated into the professional networks of zoologists and botanists, they gave the biological perspective a scientific gravitas it had previously lacked. Finally, in Germany the transformation of museums involved the governmentalization of civic museums—their formal transfer by the voluntary associations that had founded them to cities and provincial governments. These museums thereby gained an official status that contributed to the mainstreaming of the biological perspective. This was more than a matter of lending governmental authority to biological public exhibits. By making museums into official sites for gathering and disseminating biological information, governmentalization contributed to a new emphasis in museums on aspects of the biological perspective connected to policy questions, especially those concerning the environment. Overall, then, the museum reform movement that took off in the 1890s marked a fundamental structural shift in both natural history and the status of the biological perspective. Through the museum movement, the populism of the early advocates of the biological perspective was transformed into something quasi-official, and the biological perspective gained a significant footing within the scientific community. The explicit emphasis on curators in this chapter departs somewhat from recent trends in museum history, in which scholars have striven to emphasize the role of scientific subalterns and publics in shaping the meaning of the natural history museum. This research is invaluable. Karen Wonders, Susanne Köstering, and Mary Anne Andrei, for example, have drawn much-needed attention to the role of taxidermists in constructing the dioramas and “biological group” mounts that became a characteristic feature of museums after the 1880s (especially in

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the United States).6 Köstering has also analyzed the variety of visitors to natural history museums, highlighting their active role in interpreting exhibits. Glenn Penny has gone further, arguing in his study of German ethnographic museums that we should consider “the audience as author.” Breaking this audience into four main groups, Penny argues that the international scientific community, patrons, local elites, and everyday lay visitors shaped the form the exhibits took in ethnographic museums. Their interests, he argues, profoundly shaped the directions taken by their exhibits, and the different local influence of each group accounts for many of the differences to be found across the museums he studied. His picture of museum development is deeply dynamic and a model for future studies.7 The situation for civic natural history museums was roughly similar, and there is no question that natural history museum curators also worked hard to satisfy the demands of their various publics. However, as I show in this chapter and the next, with the professionalization and governmentalization of curatorship, curators gradually gained unprecedented autonomy to shape museums to meet those demands while also advancing their own scientific agendas. The most successful curators were certainly those best able to orchestrate different demands (including those of taxidermists as well as outside audiences) into a satisfying overall scheme for the museum. My emphasis here on curators focuses our attention on a different point—on curatorship as a new way of making a scientific career8—and asks us to consider how this fundamental structural change, combined with the newly complex demands on reformed natural history museums, mediated the spread of the biological perspective. This chapter begins, then, with the professionalization of curatorship, followed by a discussion of the place of the new museum in the overlapping institutional landscapes of professional zoology and popular display. Dual arrangement, and its mode of incorporating bio6. Wonders, Habitat Dioramas (1993); Köstering, Natur zum Anschauen (2003); Andrei, “Nature’s Mirror” (2006). 7. Köstering, Natur zum Anschauen (2003), 245–74; Penny, Objects of Culture (2002), esp. chapter 4, “The Audience as Author,” 131–61. 8. In this way it resembles most closely the work of Victoria Cain, whose 2006 dissertation explicitly addresses the emerging category of “museum men” in American scientific and professional life (Cain, “Nature under Glass” [2006], esp. 58–72); and Kohler, All Creatures (2006), 205–15, where he discusses curatorial careers in the context of natural history field collecting.

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logical exhibits, then emerges as a response to these conditions, as does the increasing participation of museums in policy issues relating to the environment.

The Emergence of the Professional Curator The characteristic changes of the German natural history museum in the late nineteenth century—new buildings; the dual arrangement of collections, with their attendant new forms of exhibit; and the increasing prominence of the natural history museum in the overall cultural landscape—were made possible largely by the professionalization of curatorship and the governmentalization of museums, two intertwined aspects of a single process. This process was a long and gradual one that gained significant momentum in the later 1870s and the 1880s. Deriving from a convergence of circumstances in civic natural history associations, city and state governmental bodies, and universities, it resulted in a distinctive career profi le for museum men by the early twentieth century. “Professionalized” curatorship in natural history museums, as I am defi ning it, entailed three characteristics: the curator was university educated in science, he was paid full-time to run the collections, and he had significant autonomy in making fi nancial decisions concerning the museum. Some museums had long had paid curators: Württemberg’s royal collection, for example, supported a full-time curator beginning in the 1850s.9 More often, though, curatorial duties at state or princely collections would be combined with other jobs, most prominently teaching duties at a university or technical school.10 Museum collections owned by 9. The Stuttgart royal cabinet established two full-time curatorships in 1856. B. Ziegler, “Chronologie” (1991). 10. In Munich, Berlin, and Jena, university professors ran the state collections. Similarly, when Baden’s ducal natural history cabinet in Karlsruhe gained its fi rst curator in 1787, he also taught at the local lyceum. After his death in 1837, his successors would all teach at the Karlsruhe polytechnic, until 1902, when the zoology curator refused a call to teach there in order to devote himself full-time to the museum. In Dresden Ludwig Reichenbach ran the royal natural history cabinet from 1820, while also teaching at the medicalsurgical academy (and heading the local natural history association for thirty years). On Karlsruhe, see Trunko, “Vom fürstlichen Naturalienkabinett” (1985); and Angst, “Kurze Geschichte” (1985). On Reichenbach in Dresden, see Dresden Online, http://www .dresden_online.de/index.php3/3187_1_1.html?g=15; and Phillips, “Friends of Nature” (2003).

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universities and technical schools (all also state-run institutions) had professors to look after them as well. In these cases, curatorial duties might take up more or less time, depending on the inclination of the individual professor. Although university educated and holding significant autonomy, the professor-curator had many other duties to distract him from the museum. In contrast to the museums under state and university oversight, the museums run by civic associations had typically been controlled by unpaid volunteers—the men who owned the collections that constituted the museum. Over the course of the later nineteenth century, as the collections grew too cumbersome to be managed effectively on a volunteer basis, curators would be hired to look after them and the collections would eventually be turned over to a government body. Typically, at some point after managerial control was given over to the city or state, the position would be elevated from “curator” to “director,” signaling an increase in autonomy and decision-making power for the chief museum employee.11 This shift of day-to-day museum management away from the voluntary associations was possible only because of the willingness of states, provinces, and municipalities to take on the greater fi nancial burdens associated with supporting museums. Here we see the assertion of new interest at all levels of government in developing local, regional, and national pride. Thus, in 1880, as part of the reassertion of West Prussia’s status as a Prussian province, the West Prussian provincial museum in Danzig opened as an institution owned by the province and run by a full-time director. Similarly, in the late 1880s the provincial parliament of Westphalia cooperated with the province’s natural history association to fi nance a new provincial zoological museum.12 By the First World War, 11. The paths to this outcome differed: the associations themselves might hire a curator fi rst and only later turn the property over to the local or regional government; or they might fi rst turn their property to the local municipality, which then appointed a paid curator to manage the collections. In either case, associations often retained some measure of fi nancial or administrative control over the collections. For an overview of these relationships, see Köstering, Natur zum Anschauen (2003), 34–37. 12. Hermann Landois, director of the Münster zoo and the driving force behind the original provincial museum on the zoo grounds, which had been previously funded entirely by the association, was appointed the museum’s director—but on a volunteer basis. Only after he died in 1905, and the zoology professor at Münster’s university refused to take on the museum as a side job, was the province forced to hire a salaried director. Ditt, “Natur wird Kulturgut” (1992), esp. 7–14. On the West Prussian museum, see Conwentz, Das Westpreussische Provinzial-Museum (1905), 1–2.

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most such municipal and provincial museums had developed paid directorships, typically held by university-educated scientists with Ph.D.’s. In Germany’s largest museums, the expansion of the paid staff extended beyond directors to deputy curators and assistants as well, and the museums were able to fi nd qualified university-educated individuals to fi ll the positions. When Möbius arrived at Berlin in 1887, the museum employed four full-time curators, two half-time curators, and two assistants; by 1902, he supervised eleven curators and seven scientific assistants. Hamburg’s museum director had only two paid “assistant workers” (Hilfsarbeiter) in the mid-1880s; by 1900 he had four full-time scientific staff members.13 Smaller museums with research aspirations typically had to make do with a director, a single scientific assistant, and a preparator for their paid help, depending on volunteers and students for the rest.14 These broad trends are only outlines; to get a feel for the texture and significance of these changes, one must look at individual cases. The histories of the natural history collections in Bremen and Hamburg illustrate in detail the evolution of civic museums into professionalized and governmentalized institutions, and the accompanying evolution of the curatorial career. In Bremen, the natural history collections were the property of the long-standing Museum Society (Gesellschaft Museum), which by the mid-nineteenth century had become largely a social club whose members had little interest in the actual collections. These were supported instead by the Natural Science Association (Naturwissenschaftlicher Verein, founded 1864), which met separately from the Museum Society to present and discuss scientific topics but contributed books and specimens to the society’s museum.15 In the early 1870s, the Museum Society decided to divest itself of the collections and in 1875 donated them to the city. However, the Natural Science Association remained vital to the health of the collections. It continued to provide much of the funding to 13. Figures for Berlin for 1887: “Etats-entwürf für die zoologische Abtheilung des Museums für Naturkunde von dem kommissarischen Direktor K. Möbius,” dated 31 Mai 1887, fols.43–57v, in GSPK, Rep 76 Va Sekt. 2, Tit. X: Berlin Universitäts-Sachen, Abt. X, No. 127: Acta betr. die allgemeinen Angelegenheiten des Museums für Naturkunde bei der Universität Berlin. Figures for Berlin for 1902: Möbius, Führer (1902), 66–67. On Hamburg: Melle, 30 Jahre Hamburger Wissenschaft (1923), 62. 14. Köstering, Natur zum Anschauen (2003), 41. 15. Buchenau, “Zur Geschichte” (1889). See also Buchenau, “Die Bestrebungen des Naturwissenschaftlichen Vereins” (1889).

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support their use, paying for new acquisitions of naturalia, underwriting an assistant or two to work on particular collections, and subsidizing to a significant degree the scientific book collection of the city library.16 Thanks to the initiative of the Natural Science Association, the Museum Society had supported a “conservator” to look after the collections beginning in 1864; when the collections were transferred to city control, this post was converted into a “directorship,” now funded by the city of Bremen. From 1864 to 1878, this position was held by Otto Finsch, an autodidact ornithologist. Finsch, who learned his craft at the museum in Leyden, was a practical naturalist without university training, who gained respect among museum men (especially ornithologists) through his rapid expansion of the collection and his contributions to a number of classic systematic works on exotic birds.17 In 1878, Finsch left his post to undertake a long South Seas voyage. The city senate refused his request for a two-year leave of absence, having only two years earlier allowed him a lengthy leave to travel to Siberia with Alfred Brehm. Now the city needed to fi nd a new museum director. At this point, the Bremen city fathers set their sights not on a self-educated museum man but on a university-educated zoologist, and they acquired a recent Ph.D. with impeccable academic credentials, Hubert Ludwig. When Ludwig moved on to a university professorship in 1881, he was succeeded by another university-trained zoologist, his good friend Johann Wilhelm Spengel. Spengel would remain for eight years (though he was trying to leave for a university professorship the entire time), and when he fi nally gained a university professorship, he was again succeeded by a young Ph.D. zoologist, the Munich-trained Hugo Schauinsland.18 The shift from a conservator whose knowledge included much about stuffi ng and preserving higher animals and who lacked a university 16. For details, see the Jahresberichte des Naturwissenschaftlichen Vereins zu Bremen, bound with the Abhandlungen herausgegeben vom naturwissenschaftlichen Vereine zu Bremen (but separately paginated and not indexed in the Abhandlungen). For figures and comments on the Naturwissenschaftlicher Verein’s support of the city library in particular, see “Jahresbericht für das Gesellschaftsjahr vom April 1880 bis Ende März 1881” (bound with Abhandlungen, Bd. 7, 1880–82), 5–6. 17. Finsch’s most important ornithological works were coauthored with Gustav Hartlaub, a prominent citizen and amateur ornithologist who persuaded the Gesellschaft Museum to hire Finsch. See Abel, “Otto Finsch: Ein Lebensbild” (1967). 18. Finsch spent seven months traveling with Brehm. Abel, Vom Raritätenkabinett zum Bremer Überseemuseum (1970), 37–57.

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degree—in a word, a practical naturalist—to a series of universityeducated directors marked a change in the tone and expectations for the museum. It seems likely to have been a matter of civic pride, signaling an upgrading of the standards of the museum to a more professional level.19 However, this did not actually mean that the directors had the autonomy they hoped for. Both Ludwig and Spengel chafed under the micromanagement of the museum’s dilettante-fi lled oversight committee and found the atmosphere unconducive to scientific study. As Spengel put it, “The Bremen atmosphere is not meant for a man of science.” 20 Only when the next director, Hugo Schauinsland, came to the helm under changed circumstances in 1889 did he gain the autonomy to make the museum into something more substantial.21 In Hamburg the natural history museum underwent a similar shift in the early 1880s. Since the 1840s, it had been run by a coalition of natural history association men and state representatives who operated the museum as a committee of volunteers, each in charge of one taxonomic area within the collections. Like so much else in Hamburg’s cultural life, the museum was thus always a public-private enterprise run by a committee. 22 Under this arrangement, the collections developed differently depending on the energy, initiative, and donation-roducing power of the different committee members. Over the years, it became increasingly obvious that this arrangement was not promoting the overall interests of the museum. In 1880, the committee hired the museum’s fi rst full-time paid scientific worker, a “scientific assistant,” and in 1882, as part of a larger reorganization of the educational and scholarly institutions of the city-state, the museum gained a full-time director. In a remarkable coup, Hamburg succeeded in appointing Alexander Pagenstecher, who just a few years before had resigned as professor of zoology at Heidelberg to return to his native city to live and work as an independently wealthy scholar. Although Pagenstecher still answered to the state officials serving on the higher school board, in practice the board now acted as an ad19. See Scheele, “Zum Beginn der Professionalisierung” (1983). 20. J. W. Spengel to Ernst Ehlers, 18 November 1884 (28), in Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen Cod. Ms. E. Ehlers 1851. 21. See the further discussion of Bremen’s museum in chapter 7. 22. Indeed, the administration of government itself was to a remarkable degree voluntary: the senate and the committees that administered the different functions of the citystate were run part-time, by unpaid leading citizens. Evans, Death in Hamburg (1987), 26–27. On the weak role of the state and strong role of private initiative in Hamburg’s cultural institutions, see Jenkins, Provincial Modernity (2003), 41–51.

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visory body, and the new director was able to move forward on his own initiative. 23 Pagenstecher remained in his position for seven years, during which time he mobilized the city fathers to make good on their longtime promise of a new museum building. He also acquired a number of significant collections for the museum from private individuals—partly, it appears, on the promise of displaying them in the soon-to-be-built building. When he died in 1889, the city sought another established university professor to run the museum. Negotiations with Tübingen’s university zoologist Theodor Eimer, who initially expressed great enthusiasm for the position, ultimately faltered on questions of money and status—Eimer found the proposed salary too low to support his family in its accustomed manner, given the high cost of living in Hamburg, and indeed, insultingly “lower than that of a Gymnasium director”—certainly not the equivalent of a professor’s salary. 24 At this point, the immediate need for someone to run the museum (and do it for a lesser salary) took over, and the city quickly appointed a local talent. The man they chose was the natural history teacher at the Oberrealgymnasium, Karl Kraepelin, who was already active in the affairs of the museum as a long-standing member of the museum commission. Though not a university professor, Kraepelin at least had excellent scientific research credentials as a onetime Ph.D. student of Rudolf Leuckart at Leipzig, and he was known to the community as a successful public lecturer and natural history writer. Inherent in the professionalization of the museum directorships in Bremen and Hamburg, and critical to it, was a new relation to university science: these museums now looked to universities to supply their leadership in order to enhance their scientific status. In Hamburg, this was part of a larger effort among certain movers and shakers to cultivate the scientific institutes of the city in hopes of building their own university— an ambition achieved in 1919, following a gradual wearing down of resistance and building of support among those in power. In Bremen, the justification for getting professional scholars is more obscure in the records—it appears that Ludwig simply found out about the position, applied for it, and was chosen—and indeed the university-educated di23. Scheele, “Zum Beginn der Professionalisierung der Museumsarbeit” (1983), esp. 7–8. On Pagenstecher’s independent wealth see Theodor Eimer to Stammann, 21 Februar 1889, in Staatsarchiv Hamburg, Oberschulbehörde, Hochschulwesen I. Reg. Spez. C. IXa, Nr. 5, Bd. III. 24. Eimer to Stammann, 21 Februar 1889 (as in previous note).

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rectors were treated much more like paid administrative help than like scholars or institute directors, suggesting possibly an ignorance of the expectations of someone who came out of an academic environment. 25 But why were university-educated zoologists interested in jobs as curators—positions that hitherto had not been held by university scientists? The answer is simple: there were no university positions for aspiring young zoologists in the later 1870s and 1880s. Darwinism had spawned great interest in zoology since the 1860s. In the later 1860s and 1870s the German universities gained new, independent professorships in zoology and fi lled them with energetic young researcher-teachers such as Ernst Haeckel and August Weismann. Under the oversight of this new generation of zoology professors, the number of Ph.D.’s in zoology increased rapidly. Secondary school careers were limited, since zoology was barely part of the humanistic Gymnasium curriculum and had only a small role even in the much less numerous “modern” Realschulen and Realgymnasien. At the same time, the very youth of the professorial generation meant that their posts could be expected to remain fi lled for a long time, with few university professorships in zoology coming open across the nation. By the end of the 1870s there was a crisis-level overproduction of research-oriented zoologists. 26 For Ludwig and Spengel, the Bremen position was a way to stay in the zoology game and a chance to gain administrative experience, with at least a small amount of time to devote to research, while they waited for a university position to open up. These men were hardly the only aspiring zoology researchers to look outside the universities for a holding position other than secondary school teaching: when Ludwig moved on from Bremen in 1881, a dozen men applied for his position, among them four university Privatdozenten (private lecturers), two university laboratory assistants, and an extraordinary (untenured associate) professor. Similarly, after Eimer turned down the Hamburg museum directorship, the Munich zoology professor Richard Hertwig pushed hard for his student Theodor Boveri, then a Privatdozent at Munich who was already a 25. On the appointment of Ludwig as Finsch’s replacement in Bremen, see Staatsarchiv Bremen, fi le group no. 2-T. 5. p. 1: Naturwissenschaftliche Sammlung: Protokollbuch der Versammlungen der Inspection der naturwissenschaftlichen Sammlungen, Versammlung am 13. August 1878. The only other applicant was a Herr S. A[lbrecht] Poppe, who had previously assisted at the collections and whom Ludwig would subsequently hire as assistant for the ethnology collections. Upon discussing these applications, the committee in charge decided not to seek any more. 26. Nyhart, Biology Takes Form (1995), 193–95.

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gifted experimentalist but inexperienced in traditional museum work. 27 This would clearly have been a holding position for Boveri, but the university situation was desperate. Yet Eimer’s refusal of the Hamburg post and Ludwig and Spengel’s departure for university positions suggest that for an aspiring researcher-teacher, a museum might not be the ideal location. Museums were not lacking in the equipment needed for zoological research of the kind done at the university—an aquarium, a microscope, and appropriate fi xatives and staining materials would do. But there were other disadvantages. In addition to the lack of students, a major drawback was that the pay offered to museum directors and their assistants was consistently lower than that offered for other kinds of posts. Eimer’s moneybased refusal appeared arrogant to the Hamburg city officials, but the issues about pay were real. In Bremen, Spengel received no raise when he asked for one after four years at the same pay level, and he found it hard to support a family on his salary. 28 The case was worse for the gradually increasing number of curators employed by museums below the level of director. By the early twentieth century, the salary ceiling for museum conservators and assistants was significantly lower than that for secondary school teachers, to the point that university-educated scientists looking to their futures were likely to fi nd teaching at a secondary school a more viable fi nancial option than working in a museum. 29 27. Auszug aus dem Senats-Protokolle vom 25.III.1881, p. 145, in Staatsarchiv Bremen, B.4.M.3.a. No. 9: Senats-Registratur: Acta betr. dem Direktor der städtischen Sammlungen f. Naturgeschichte und Ethnographie Dr. phil. Joh. Wilhelm Spengel, 1881 März 18– 1887 März 18. On Boveri, see letters from Richard Hertwig dated 13 February 1889, in Staatsarchiv Hamburg, Oberschulbehörde, Hochschulwesen I. Reg. Spez. C. IXa, Nr. 5, Bd. I [1881–90]. 28. Spengel to [Senator], Bremen, 27 September 1885, in Staatsarchiv Bremen, B.4.M.3.a. No. 9: Senats-Registratur: Acta betr. dem Direktor der städtischen Sammlungen f. Naturgschichte und Ethnographie Dr. phil. Joh. Wilhelm Spengel, 1881 März 18– 1887 März 18. 29. Richthofen to Kultusministerium, 29 July 1902, fol. 135–39; Kultusministerium to Stahlberg, 30 Sept. 1902, fol. 144, both in GSPK, Rep. 76 Va Sekt. 2, Tit. X, Nr. 158a, Bd. I: Acta betr. die Beamten beim Institut für Meereskunde in Berlin. (Mai 1900–Sept 1904). In 1898 Kraepelin wrote to Möbius that he was “still fighting to put the scientific civil servants on the same level as the teachers at the higher state schools.” Karl Kraepelin to Karl Möbius, Hamburg, 14 March 1898, 15 April 1898, fols. 259–60, 262–63 in MfN d. HUB, HBSB, Sig. SII: Museum Hamburg Bd. I, 1849–1899. In Prussia the regulations had been changed in 1896 to bring the salaries of officials at “the larger university collections and the observatories” up to the level of higher school teachers, but few state officials seemed to know about this: Zentralblatt (1896), 193–95. On the more general situation, especially pertaining to Hamburg, see Hünemörder and Scheele, “Das Berufsbild des Biol-

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This gap meant that museum work continued to be open—at least occasionally—to men who lacked the educational requirements for an academic career. Paul Matschie (1861–1926) fi rst worked at the Berlin Museum für Naturkunde as a volunteer while he was a student in 1883, then got a paid job at the Berlin natural history supply fi rm Linnaea, where he learned preparation techniques. After Möbius became director, he hired Matschie as a scientific assistant to help fi rst with the packing and moving of specimens and then with setting up the public exhibits in the new museum. When Matschie returned to the university as a student, thinking to take a Ph.D. in zoology, the zoology professor Franz Eilhard Schulze refused to accept him for the zoology course, indicating that he would never succeed with the microscopic anatomy that was de rigueur for a Ph.D. But, as Matschie told the story, Schulze also said, “Don’t worry, you will someday get the title of professor. If I examine you, you will fail, and if you were to examine me [presumably, in systematics], I would not pass either.” Instead, Möbius hired him to a newly funded permanent assistantship at the museum. There he would work for the rest of his life, rising to the position of curator in 1895 and, two years before his death in 1926, associate director. As head of the mammals collection, he gained a dual reputation as a specialist in African mammals and their biogeography and as a popular natural history writer and editor. Catering to the widespread interest in the German colonies in Africa and to the interest in living animals, he worked closely with the director of the Berlin zoo to convey information about the mammals from the exotic colonies to a wide audience. 30 Other cases, though exceptional, can also be found of men who rose high in the museum ranks without full academic credentials. Rudolf Koch (1855–1927) was the longtime preparator at the Westphalian provincial museum in Münster; as a young man in the late 1870s he had drawn directly from P. L. Martin’s ideas to prepare some of the fi rst dioramas in a civic museum. The longtime secretary of the scientific association in Münster that ran the museum, during the First World War he was named the museum’s temporary (and honorary) director. Someogen” (1977), esp. 147–51. Similar issues of low pay plagued British museums as well. See William Henry Flower, “Modern Museums” (1893), in Flower, Essays on Museums (1898), 30–53, esp. 35–37; “General Notes” (1903), 373. 30. Pohle, “Paul Matschie” (1928). On Matschie’s work as a popularizer, see Angermann, “Anna Held, Paul Matschie, und die Säugetiere” (1994); Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung (1998), 367, 501.

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what less dramatic was the case of Hugo Conwentz (1855–1922). Having started on an academic career path as a botanist in the 1870s, he discovered to his shock that he would not be allowed to teach at a university because he had graduated from a Realschule (fi rst class) and not the required humanistic Gymnasium. Instead, in 1880 he was appointed as the fi rst director of the newly founded West Prussian provincial museum in Danzig, which he would direct for the next thirty years. 31 More typical were the career profi les of Karl Kraepelin (1848–1915), director of the Hamburg museum from 1889 to 1915; Kurt Lampert (1859–1918), director of the royal Württemberg cabinet in Stuttgart from 1894 through the First World War; and Otto Lehmann (1865–1951), director of the Altona City Museum from 1899 until his retirement in 1931. All of these men completed their university educations as zoologists. Kraepelin and Lehmann taught secondary school and were engaged as leaders among the volunteers in their civic museum communities before they gained their directorial positions; Kraepelin would continue as an activist in secondary school reform. Lampert had been an assistant at the zoology institute in Erlangen before being appointed fi rst scientific assistant at the collection in Stuttgart in 1884. Later in his life, he too would become active in secondary education, helping to found the fi rst girls’ Gymnasium in Stuttgart and teaching natural history there and, during the war, at two Gymnasien for boys. Like Matschie, Conwentz, and numerous other museum curators and directors, Kraepelin and Lampert both continued to carry out research while also producing popular books and magazine and newspaper articles on natural history. Lehmann was unusual in dropping his zoological research interests almost immediately in favor of museological and popular writing. Through these writings he helped to develop the new synthetic popularscience field of Heimatkunde, in particular using the study of historical clothing, household objects, and vernacular architecture to reconstruct the history and folkways of the Schleswig-Holstein region. 32 All of these men would be continually engaged in developing their museums as sites 31. Koch’s work as secretary of the zoological section of the Westfälisches ProvinzialVerein für Wissenschaft und Kunst is recorded in its annual reports (Jahresberichte) from 1892/93 on. On Koch, see Ant and Gries, Biologisch-ökologische Landeserforschung (1992), 37; and Hendricks, Festschrift (1992), 14. On Conwentz: Schoenichen, Naturschutz, Heimatschutz (1954), 178–79. 32. On Lampert’s and Kraepelin’s writings, see chapter 8. On Lehmann’s development of Heimatkunde at Altona, see chapter 7.

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of popular education in natural history, with an emphasis on local and regional nature, even as they ranged in their view of the museum as a site of research. Led by Möbius, the museum community’s elder statesman, these and other museum curators of the reform era collectively forged a classic profi le of the modern “museum man” as an entrepreneurial administrator, researcher, and popularizer of natural history—a “new type of scholarly worker,” as one reformer put it, “natures who could live out their lives only in unacademicized professions.” 33 The governmentalization and professionalization of curatorship in civic natural history museums had several important consequences for the development of the museum landscape. First, placing the museum in the hands of a single individual created significant efficiencies in the oversight of the collections. These individuals now tended to take a view of the museum as not simply the concatenation of individual collections but as a unified whole that needed to be rounded and shaped according to a synthetic vision of nature and close attention to the museum audience. Second, because these curators were now university-educated scholars—most often educated in zoology or botany—they tended to share with one another and with their university colleagues a view that the museum should be an instrument of scientific research and education, devoted to producing and disseminating knowledge in biology. Museum directors and curators took an active role in the professional associations for science such as the Gesellschaft Deutscher Naturforscher und Ärzte (GDNA, the Society for German Scientists and Physicians), the leading national scientific society, and the Deutsche Zoologische Gesellschaft (DZG, founded 1891). For instance, when the “Hamburg theses” on expanding secondary education in biology were drafted and discussed at the 1901 meeting of the GDNA, the committee formed to promote the theses across the nation included among its twenty-four members six museum curators: three from Hamburg’s natural history museum and the directors of the museums in Bremen, Lübeck, and Braunschweig. To take another example, not long after the founding of the DZG, its members decided to undertake a major review of zoological nomencla33. Lichtwark, “Museen als Bildungsstätten” (1904), 10. Earlier museum curators such as Württemberg’s Oscar Fraas had played a similar role, but it took the expansion of the population of professional museum curators to make this a recognizable, standard profi le. On museum men as one important group of popularizers, see Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung (1998), 408–9.

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ture and systematics—a project for which museum men were drafted together with university professors and assistants. Through such activities, museum scholars gained a significant and visible presence in the professional landscape of biology. The job of museum curator had one major component that was absent—or relatively minor—in the sphere of the university researchers: dealing with the general public. Indeed, the twin processes of governmentalization and professionalization made civic museums more fully public institutions than they had been before. Previously, the public quality of civic museums had resided primarily in a vaguely Enlightenment view that saw the community possession of collections with limited display opportunities as a civic virtue. But as states invested more heavily in these museums, they expected more: a more consistently scientific approach to the collections, and more attention to educating and otherwise serving a broader public. This latter expectation, more than anything else, was what made the new niche of the museum curator most different from that of the university professor and lent the career profi le of the museum man its distinctive cast. If the curator had one foot in the professional world of the scientist, the other was fi rmly planted in the world of popular natural history, and especially, the institutional landscape of natural history display. This encompassed a spectrum from university research museums with only token connections to the public to commercial wax museums and zoos, and it is to this variegated landscape that we now turn.

The Institutional Landscape The new museum curators and directors of the 1880s faced pressures from all sides. Their jobs were huge and multisided: collecting representatives of all animals, cataloging the diversity of nature and seeking to understand its patterns, and educating the public. At the basic material level, the collections themselves were outgrowing their spaces. At the same time, within the university community, the intensification of laboratory-based research called into question the role of collections of skins and bones for zoological research. And in the world of display, traditional natural history museum exhibits appeared the most stolid and boring among an increasingly lively range of presentations of nature available for public viewing.

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Overcrowding was the most common problem, one shared by all varieties of collection-based institutions, whether run by private associations, governmental bodies, or universities. After decades of gifts from generous travelers and collectors left museums stuffed beyond capacity, it typically took decades more to generate the momentum and resources necessary to create new buildings. The pattern was similar whether it began early in the century or later. The Württemberg royal cabinet in Stuttgart, a museum that grew earlier than most, gained a new wing and doubled its space in 1864; though complaints about overcrowding began again in the 1890s, it would be 1919 before a further expansion would be completed. 34 In Frankfurt the sumptuous museum of the well-endowed private Senckenberg Naturforschende Gesellschaft, built in 1821, was expanded in 1830–32 and again, by adding a story, in 1842. This would suffice until the 1890s, when agitation began to grow for a new building; support from the joint pockets of the Gesellschaft and the city was such that the planning and building was relatively speedy, and a new building opened in 1907. 35 In Hamburg, where the natural history collections had been housed since 1843 in the same large building that contained the city library and the Gymnasium, complaints about space mounted in the 1860s; by the mid-1870s these had turned into bitter jokes. One naturalist recalled a space-saving suggestion made in the newspaper “to use the hollow interiors of the large animals to house smaller pieces, and to light them up for this purpose”; alternatively, visiting researchers could demonstrate their competence in gymnastics (a popular sport among young men) by damaging neither themselves nor the objects as they leapt and climbed among them. By the later 1880s, the museum was using every inch of space available on the ground floor and basement of the Gymnasium—space that had to accommodate not only the collections themselves but also desks, records, work areas for those studying the collections, and areas for preparing specimens. To make room for these necessary activities, many of the larger items were moved to a large shed on the grounds of the zoo for temporary storage. 36 Negotiations over a 34. Rauther, “Rückblick” (1940), 19. 35. See Senckenbergische Naturforschende Gesellschaft (Frankfurt) Archiv, fi le 138: “Projekt Museums-Umbau 1891–1903.” 36. Rudolf Timm, quoted in Weidner, Bilder aus der Geschichte (1993), 187. A description of the collection space from the 1840s to the 1860s is on 258–62. The description of the 1880s is from Heinrich Pagenstecher, “Dermalige Verhältnisse des Naturhistorischen Museums,” 1887, in Staatsarchiv Hamburg, Oberschulbehörde, Hochschulwesen I. Reg. Spez. C. IXa, Nr. 5, Bd. I [1881–90].

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suitable location, architectural competitions, and agreements on financing all had to be settled before ground could be broken for a new museum, which fi nally opened in 1891. Buildings devoted entirely to zoological collections were possible only for the largest such collections, usually in big cities. Local and provincial collections more often formed part of a larger museum complex, usually including ethnographic artifacts, mineralogical, geological, and paleontological objects, and items from local prehistory; very often the same buildings would also house exhibits of local history and folk culture. (High art was less typically part of the mix, more often getting calved off to a separate space.) Pressures on space thus came from the expansion of all of these areas, not just natural history, and support for new public buildings in smaller towns typically represented many different cultural interests at once. For university natural history collections, too, the expansion of space for the individual disciplines of natural history (mineralogy and geology, zoology, and botany) was often tied to the needs of other institutes. Scientific institutes were a prime beneficiary of the rapid expansion of the universities in the later nineteenth century, and the natural history disciplines profited from the overall building boom. 37 In zoology, as in botany, agitation for more space for their institutes was not primarily tied to the needs of their traditional museum collections, however. Although the collections often continued to expand, the greater perceived need lay elsewhere than in collections of skins and bones. In seeking to modernize, most university zoology institute directors focused on expanding laboratory space and facilities, outfitting them with microscopes, microtomes, and the other equipment necessary for comparative anatomical and histological research. Developing collections of slides of tissues and embryos generally took precedence over expanding the collections of animal skins or of mounted animals; opening up window space to supply natural light for microscopy tables was often 37. At Leipzig, for example, the new zoology institute and museum that opened in 1880 were part of a building site that also included new buildings for the mental hospital, the botanical garden and institute, and the institute for agriculture. At Heidelberg, the zoology collections were shifted and split up not only to gain space for their expanding size but also to accommodate the anatomy institute; by the time a new zoology institute and museum were built in 1893, the collections were splintered among three locations and had been closed to the public since 1884, as overcrowding had made them too dangerous for casual visiting. Chun, “Das Zoologische Institut” (1909); Bütschli, Zoologie (1886), 26–27; Bossert, “Die fi nanziellen Verhältnisse” (1921), 81–83.

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a higher priority than upgrading the storage or presentation of the museum collections. Thus, in the course of building new zoology institutes at Göttingen in the mid-1870s and Freiburg in the later 1880s, the zoology professors reassigned to lab teaching space that had originally been designated for the museum collections. 38 And when the university in Halle opened its new museum and institute in 1886, it was clearly understood that the museum’s systematic collection, considered “largely complete,” was mainly to be used as demonstration material for teaching. New material was to be collected for the systematic collection only where there were gaps “in especially interesting and important groups.” 39 The result of these university trends was to align university laboratory institutes of zoology with research and their museums with education, both for university students and for the public. Signs of this split could be seen in the ever more frequent distinction between university zoology “institutes” and “museums,” even though both were usually directed by the same person. The division between museum and lab was incomplete: researchers in both universities and public museums would continue to use museum collections for their research, and systematics remained a basic part of the research of both museum- and lab-based zoologists. But the characteristics of their research did tend to diverge. Institute researchers tended to work more on lower invertebrates and on the processes of development, which depended on the careful slicing up and analysis of thin sections. Researchers in public museums tended to work on organisms that also held potential for display—such as vertebrates and insects—and on problems that a large collection could elucidate, such as geographic distribution. While museum directors might cast this split as a necessary step in the division of scientific labor, the rhetoric of reform and modernity among institute directors seeking to expand their laboratory space helped to cast museum research—both within the university and in civic museums—as old fashioned and outdated. By the late 1880s curators of museums with long traditions of scientific collecting faced both challenges and opportunities. The chief challenge was for the natural history museum to maintain a place for itself as a research institution in the face of the manifest changes in the biological sciences wrought by Darwin’s theory, microscopic anatomy, and ex-

38. Ehlers, Göttinger Zoologen (1901), 81; Koehler, “Die Zoologie an der Universität Freiburg i. Br.” (1957), 133–34. 39. Taschenberg, Geschichte der Zoologie (1894), 131.

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perimental physiology. At the same time, as university zoology institute directors began to see their museum collections as research dross, good only for teaching, curators at museums—especially civic museums—had an opportunity to take advantage of this new division of labor to refashion their museums to reflect the most modern and up-to-date research questions of natural history, those relating to evolution, biogeography, and ecology. Those museum curators who recognized this opportunity also saw that they had an especially valuable resource not at the disposal of their laboratory-based counterparts: a direct connection to the public. The dependence of museum collections on donations connected the museum as an institution to the broader world of travelers and explorers. The transformation of the meaning of systematics by evolutionary theory lent new potential interest to museum collections themselves as providing the materials for arguments over the nature of evolution. Both evolution and exploration were topics that had considerable potential for public appeal, as the illustrated newspapers and literary magazines showed. Civic museums had long traded on their role as institutions that educated the public, but there was still plenty of untapped potential. Many museums had had rather limited opening hours for casual visitors— typically several hours in the middle of the day two days a week, perhaps with longer hours on the weekends—and the ideal museum user for most of the century seems to have been a fairly serious student of nature who wanted to compare his specimens with those of the collection.40 Beginning in the 1880s, an increasing number of reformers began to set about making the museum a more inviting place for the casual or lay visitor. This turn to the public paralleled and drew on efforts in other cultural sectors to educate the masses. The movement for adult education was gaining in momentum, spearheaded since 1871 by the Society for the Diffusion of Popular Education, which aimed to steer the masses 40. For example, in 1878 the royal cabinet in Stuttgart was open to the public daily, without charge, from eleven to twelve o’clock and two to three o’clock (on Wednesdays and Saturdays until four); in summers additionally on Sundays and holidays from eleven to one o’clock and two to four o’clock. The museums in Braunschweig and Lübeck were open to the public on Sunday and one weekday for limited hours. Beginning in 1862 the Hamburg museum was open without charge on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays from eleven to one o’clock and Sundays until two; Thursdays were reserved for paying visitors. Krauss, “Das k. Naturalien-Cabinet in Stuttgart” (1878); Blasius, “Das Herzogliche Naturhistorische Museum zu Braunschweig” (1878); Lenz, “Die Sammlungen” (1900), 10–11. For other examples, see Köstering, Natur zum Anschauen (2003), 38–39, esp. 39 n. 60.

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(especially those newly eligible to vote) through the Protestant liberalbourgeois channel between the Scylla of socialism and the Charybdis of Catholicism. In 1891 the existing voluntary associations were joined by Prussia’s semigovernmental Central Office for Institutions for Workers’ Welfare, which took an active part in adult education and had similar aims.41 The adult education movement and museum education movement would touch one another frequently, with natural history museums taking a leading role in the movement for popular education.42 Anyone seeking to broaden the audience for natural history museums had to acknowledge stiff, even overwhelming competition for the attention of the casual visitor. Even if we set aside most leisure time entertainments and confi ne ourselves to opportunities for viewing and learning about nature, the choices were wide open. Many towns and villages had networks of hiking trails that led out into the surrounding woods and hills; larger communities also had public gardens and parks with green spaces for enjoying nature. Cities offered still more alternatives, all of which had much more dramatic appeal than staid rows of pigeons in profi le or pickled worms in glass jars. Zoos and aquariums offered the visitor animals that lived, moved, ate, and reacted to one another and to their audience.43 In Berlin, Hamburg, and Munich, wax museums or “panopticons” included natural history exhibits of various stripes among their encyclopedic offerings to sensation seekers. In Berlin’s PassagePanoptikon in 1889, for instance, sensation and drama were the watchwords: scenes representing great moments in history, famous fairy tales, and Bible stories followed one after another. The latter culminated in a series of “realistic” scenes of the Flood, in which animals “balled together in knots” were depicted being carried off by the rushing waters, “crocodile and tiger, shaggy steers, gigantic pachyderms and stags struggling with the waves,” amid lightning and lava bursting from volcanoes in the background. A mammoth battled two lions, one hanging on his neck, the other lifted high in his trunk (figure 6.1). (The Leipziger 41. Kuntz, Das Museum als Volksbildungsstätte (1996), 26–27, 31–32; Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung (1998), 171–77. 42. The two came together most prominently in the 1903 conference sponsored by the central office, titled “Museums as Sites of National Education,” which featured reports by fi fteen directors of museums devoted to natural history, local history, and arts and crafts, discussing museum innovations aimed at mass education in Germany, Scandinavia, England, and America. Die Museen als Volksbildungsstätten (1904). 43. Kraepelin, “Die Bedeutung der naturhistorischen, insonderheit der zoologischen Museen” (1888–89).

figure 6.1. Mammoth struggling with lions, a group display from the Flood Panorama at Berin’s Passage-Panoptikon, 1889. Illustration by B. Schwanicke of a model by M. Baumbach (after a concept of A. Bergmeier), accompanying Fendler, “Das berliner PassagePanopticum” (1889), 283.

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Illustrirte Zeitung emphasized the “true-to-life” presentation of these animals, claiming they represented the pinnacle of modern artistry.)44 Such sensational features of the panopticon could even be combined with the appeals of viewing living creatures: the Munich aquarium, founded in 1881, offered not only grottoes with fish tanks, seals, and crocodiles on its ground floor but also an ape-and-bird pavilion upstairs, along with a hall of mirrors, a waxwork gallery, and theater halls for touring human curiosities (including conjoined twins, the “elastic man,” dwarves and giants, ethnographic groups, and a “foot violinist”).45 Traveling shows like those that stopped at the Munich aquarium offered still other presentations of nature and the relation of humans to it. Freaks of human nature provided the spectacle of the abnormal; traveling animal or animal-and-people shows, including ethnographic groups, offered other images. Although the traveling menagerie was no longer the only way to see exotic animals after the advent of the public zoo, new animals still needed to be transported from their ports of entry to their new homes, and performances or exhibitions along the way could help animal merchants offset the high costs of importation. One of the earliest performing ethnographic groups in Germany—a group of Laplanders—was brought in to accompany the reindeer being delivered to a series of zoos, and later ethnographic performers were often accompanied by “native” animals, a practice that bracketed animals and nonEuropeans together as primitive “natural” forms.46 Circuses and traveling menageries toured with their wild cats, bears, horses, and elephants, demonstrating over and over again another relationship to nature: the bending of animal nature to human mastery. Especially titillating were the female lion tamers, who with their décolletage and whips subdued snarling beasts in a cross-species dominatrix fantasy.47 Finally, there were exhibits of opportunity. In Berlin in March 1889, 44. Fendler, “Das berliner Passage-Panopticum” (1889). 45. Bauer, Münz, and Graf, Münchener Aquarium (1982). 46. Anthropological scholars visited touring ethnographic troupes at the panopticons to study their human body types; it would be worth investigating to what extent zoologists still did the same thing with traveling menageries, though zoos had made living exotic animals more readily available for study in many towns. On traveling ethnographic groups, see esp. Bruckner, “Spectacles of (Human) Nature” (2003); Rothfels, Savages and Beasts (2002), chapter 3, and on the Laplanders esp. 82–83; and Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism (2001), chapter 1. 47. On lion taming, women lion tamers, and the “lion bride,” see Kaselow, Die Schaulust (1999), 84–105.

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figure 6.2. Outdoor whale display, 1889. Engraving after a “drawing from nature” by E. Hosang. From Leipziger Illustrirte Zeitung, March 1889, 279, accompanying the article “Ein Riesenwalfi sch” (1889).

for example, as Möbius and his staff were laboring to install the public exhibits slated to open the following winter, an entrepreneur had placed on display, outdoors in a public square, a gigantic fi n whale, reported to be twenty meters long and five meters high. Preserved whole using modern (though not entirely successful) means, the whale lay on a platform, its mouth open so that visitors willing to brave the stench could inspect its baleen (figure 6.2).48 How long it lasted there is not clear from the available sources. For museum reformers seeking to draw in and educate a broader lay public, the questions were plain. How could museums compete for the attention of natural-history-minded visitors when botanical gardens, zoos, and aquariums now offered to a much wider public the living organisms themselves? How could they attract the audiences that might instead seek other kinds of display-based entertainment, espe48. “Ein Riesenwalfi sch” (1889).

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cially the immensely popular and spectacular wax musems? And how could they do so while maintaining their dignity and their status as research institutions? The system of dual arrangement seemed to provide the answer.

Dual Arrangement Dual arrangement had fi rst been proposed in the early 1860s by J. Edward Gray of the British Museum. The traditional organization of the museum had been unified: all the specimens were mounted in cases and drawers available for viewing by researcher and casual visitor alike. Under the new idea, the collection would be divided into two parts. A selection of the collection’s highlights would be formed into a special exhibition collection for the public, while the vast majority of the specimens would be warehoused behind the scenes, available by invitation only to students and serious researchers. Thus, the research and display functions of the museum would be sharply separated.49 The leading German advocate of dual arrangement was Karl Möbius. As early as 1866 he was involved in a decision in Hamburg to divide the zoology collection there according to these precepts (though the museum commission was unable to gain the funding and new building site to carry out this plan for another twenty-five years). 50 More recently, as professor of zoology at the University of Kiel, he had carried out such a division in the new zoology museum there (opened in 1881) and had written about its advantages. 51 When Möbius was appointed director of the Berlin Museum für Naturkunde in 1887, then, he was already known for his interest in reaching out to a broad public and was known to be an advocate of splitting zoology collections into public and 49. Winsor, “Natural History Museums” (2009); Gray, “On Museums” (1864), 283–97. 50. Meeting of 7 December 1866. Excerpts from minutes of the meetings of the museum commission in typescript by E. Titschack, “Zur Geschichte des Naturhistorischen (Zoologischen) Museums in Hamburg: Die Zeit der Museumskommission 1843–1882,” in Universität Hamburg, Zoologisches Institut und Zoologisches Museum, Sig. Da ZIM 2a. The excerpt reads in its entirety, “Auf Grund der Arbeit von Professor Gray wird beschlossen, eine Trennung von Schau- und wissenschaftlicher Sammlung vorzunehmen” (On the basis of the work of Professor Gray it was decided to undertake a division of the exhibition and scientific collections). The original meeting minutes were destroyed in the bombing of the zoological institute in World War II; these typescript notes, made in preparation for a history of the museum, are all that remain. 51. Möbius, “Rathschläge” (1884).

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research collections. As head of Germany’s most prestigious natural history museum, he was in a prominent position to demonstrate the power of dual arrangement. Möbius’s appointment as the Berlin museum’s director closed an awkward gap. His predecessor Wilhelm Peters, the zoology professor and museum director then overseeing the plans for a new museum, had died in 1883. When Franz Eilhard Schulze was appointed professor of zoology in 1884, he refused to take on the museum, and for the next few years, the museum’s curator of mollusks acted as interim director. Meanwhile, ground for the new building had been broken and construction was proceeding at the new site on the Invalidenstrasse, near the medical school complex and next door to the agricultural college (but not very close to the main university building or the downtown tourist area). The building under construction was the result of a decade of wrangling between Peters and the cultural ministry. Peters had objected both to the move away from the main campus, where the zoology teaching had hitherto taken place, and to the ministry’s proposal to divide the collections between public viewing and research, on the grounds that hiding the main research collections removed them from general use and was therefore undemocratic. Finally made to understand that he could not stop the move, Peters stuck to his guns on the organization of the collections, and the monumental three-story building under construction when he died was designed to house a single, unified collection fully open to public access (figure 6.3). 52 Möbius’s fi rst move upon arriving in Berlin was to declare the upper stories of the building off limits to the public, despite the already-built elaborate staircases and monumental ceiling heights designed to awe. The public exhibit area would be confi ned to the ground floor, and the upper two stories of the museum would house the research collection. 53 The main advantages of this division for the scientific staff and other researchers were three. One, which was always stated, was that it saved 52. Susanne Köstering provides a detailed history of the confl ict between Peters and the architectural and ministerial advocates of a divided museum: Köstering, Natur zum Anschauen (2003), 43–53. See also I. Jahn, “Der neue Museumsbau” (1989), which also discusses Möbius’s museum concept. 53. Protokolle der 1. Conferenz, 3 Mai 1887, 1, in MfN d. HUB, HBSB, Sig. SII: Acta betr. die Protokolle der Sitzungen der wissenschaftlichen Beamten, Vol. 1: 1887–1892.

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figure 6.3. Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin. Architectural cross section through the front portion of the building, showing its monumental staircase. Design by August Tiede. From Zeitschrift für Bauwesen, 1891, 41: atlas, 3.

space. Without the requirements associated with display—broad aisles and mounted specimens—the main collection could be kept compactly in drawers and cases and moved closer together. This was a significant advantage, considering that the museum contained over one and threequarter million specimens around 1890 and was continually acquiring new ones. 54 A second advantage, which went unstated, was that at a time when natural history was often denigrated by laboratory scientists as a haven of amateurs, it undoubtedly enhanced the curators’ professional status to be sharply divided off from nonspecialists. Third, the removal of most of these specimens from the public exhibits was understood to benefit lay visitors as well, since an epitome of the collection would represent the outlines of the system of nature far more clearly than the entire collection did. In fact, one of the main reasons to separate out the research collection from the public collection was to spare the more casual visitor the boredom of looking uncompre54. Möbius, “Über den Umfang” (1898), 364.

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hendingly at thousands of similar specimens. As Möbius put it in a complaint that echoed earlier statements by Philipp Leopold Martin and J. Edward Gray, and that would itself be echoed time and again by reformers, “What does someone gain who has spent a few hours walking past a mass of larger and smaller animals of different classes? He will have been amazed by some rare forms and diverted by the bright colors of birds, butterfl ies and shells. But since he fi nds one case after the next fi lled with dense rows of closely related forms, he will rapidly tire, and when he fi nally leaves the museum, completely exhausted, he will take home with him, along with the memory of a few individual items, . . . at most the feeling of astonishment that there are many more different animals on land and sea than he had previously imagined. Isn’t that a most pitiful outcome, after wandering for hours through priceless collections? 55 Surely the visitor could come away with something more. But to make that happen, one had to think about both the visitor and the exhibit differently than before—to decide that the museum’s public properly included more than experts and students who would already know how to study the collections, and to reconceptualize the displays to address this new, wider audience’s ignorance. At the same time, the public exhibit area needed to remain a place of learning, in no way to be confused with the sensationalism of the wax museum. In designing his new public displays, Möbius borrowed successful display concepts from other museums, combining them with novelties developed by himself and his curators in Berlin to create a new style of natural history museum aimed at educating a broad public. In keeping with the serious educational tone of the museum, Möbius’s central metaphor for conceiving the exhibits was reading—still viewed as the basic activity of learning, despite Möbius’s own long-standing pedagogical emphasis on visual accessibility. Exhibit cases were positioned in the galleries so as to be “read” from upper left to lower right, like a page in a book, and the cases were organized serially, also like pages in a book, beginning on the leftmost side of the entrance and working their 55. Möbius, “Die zweckmäßige Einrichtung” (1891), 354. J. E. Gray, who is credited with initiating the division of public and research collections in the 1860s, put it even more succinctly: “To such a visitor, the numerous species of rats, or squirrels, or sparrows, or larks that crowd the shelves, from all parts of the world, are but a rat, a squirrel, a sparrow, or a lark; and this is still more especially the case with animals of a less marked and less known type of character.” Gray, “On Museums” (1864), 285.

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way clockwise around the hall. (This plan was not novel—an early director of the museum, Martin Hinrich Lichtenstein, had explicitly organized the exhibits in the old museum in the university building this way, and his museum guide had explained that one was to “read” the cases “as one reads a page.”)56 In the center of the long halls, exhibits were organized according to the “fishbone” system of display, with “ribs” sticking out from a central “backbone” of cases. Each “rib” case was divided by a central panel to create two back-to-back display spaces. This not only was an efficient use of cases but had the additional advantage of confi ning the visitor’s eye to the U-shaped section in which he or she stood. This arrangement allowed for contemplative study of the objects in the case, undistracted by the other visitors. 57 The new exhibits could be read more literally as well, through their newly informative labels. In contrast to earlier museum collections, where labels usually consisted of an untranslated Latin scientific name and the location where the specimen had been found, a visitor to the Museum für Naturkunde could now spend plenty of time literally reading the exhibits as well as looking at them. Labels could run from the specification of anatomical structures, as in the case of the seagull that was part of the “German Birds” exhibit (figure 6.4), to entire paragraphs describing and explaining the similarities among the structures of related animals (figure 6.5). Although Möbius did not quite advocate the famous axiom of the American museum reformer George Browne Goode, that a proper exhibit consisted of “a collection of instructive labels, each illustrated by a well-selected specimen,” there is no doubt that he thought the specimens could not speak for themselves. 58 For those who wanted more information than was available on the signs, Möbius wrote up a guide to the collection, in which he gave further detail on certain exhibits to enhance the visit. In the guide, Möbius invited those who would like to 56. Lichtenstein, Das Zoologische Museum (1816), 14. The natural history collection at Braunschweig was reorganized this way in the late 1870s, with the added feature that the cases were consecutively numbered and pegged to a guidebook. Blasius, Die Neuausstellung des Herzoglichen Naturhistorichen Museums zu Braunschweig (1879), 5. 57. Möbius, “Die zweckmäßige Einrichtung” (1891), 357–58. For a detailed analysis of the psychology of the contemplative reading of exhibits, as developed by Möbius and others, see Köstering, Natur zum Anschauen (2003), 183–93. 58. Goode, “Museum-History and Museums of History” (1991), 306. On the widespread view among nineteenth-century museum men that objects could “speak for themselves,” see Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life (1998).

figure 6.4. Seagull with labels. Photograph from 1893. From MfN d. HUB, HBSB, Zool. Mus., Sig. BIII/846.

figure 6.5. Display of limb preparations with tendons and ligaments. Photograph from 1893. From MfN d. HUB, HBSB, Zool. Mus., Sig. BIII/836.

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inform themselves yet further about the objects to return numerous times, bringing along with them one of several textbooks he listed for their convenience (including some that were two volumes long)—again, reading and viewing together. 59 Other kinds of reading could be practiced on a museum tour as well. Möbius updated an old feature Lichtenstein had used in his specimen labels, color coding their edges in a system that was keyed to maps showing the geographic “provinces” where the animal in question ranged. Here reading slid into educated looking—a kind of looking that younger visitors would have already practiced in their school geography texts.60 All in all, in many ways the public exhibits, in Möbius’s conception, were to form a kind of three-dimensional textbook of zoology. This textbook was to contain the most up-to-date ideas science had to offer, and prominent among them were those associated with the biological perspective. As Möbius wrote, the purpose of the public collection was to acquaint its audience with “the external forms, the internal structure, the mode of life, the geographic distribution, and the systematic classification of all classes of animal”—the very topics that secondary school textbook writers like Otto Schmeil would soon take up in their reform texts.61 All of these had long been important aspects of zoology. But under the old unified museum system, the natural history collection would not by itself have presented all of them. The research program of systematics demanded a rigidly taxonomic form of organization, in which representatives of each classificatory group were placed nearest those with which they had the closest affi nities (usually based on resemblance). Once the public collection was conceived of as a distinct didactic space, separate from the main systematic collection, it was much easier to create new forms of exhibit, displaying different kinds of knowledge. In the new public collection, museum visitors were invited to learn about all of these different aspects of natural history. As in the textbooks, systematics hardly disappeared from the pub59. Möbius, Führer (1902), “Vorwort,” 3. 60. Lichtenstein had pegged his color coding by continent: Lichtenstein, Das Zoologische Museum (1816), 13. The new system of global geographic provinces at the Berlin museum was arrived at after exhaustive discussions among the staff and represented a significant modification of Alfred Russell Wallace’s standard provinces, including the introduction of geographic regions in the oceans. MfN d. HUB, HBSB, Sig. SII: Acta betr. die Protokolle der Sitzungen der wissenschaftlichen Beamten, Vol. 1: 1887–1892. 61. Möbius, “Über den Umfang” (1898), 369–70. On Schmeil and reform textbooks, see chapter 8.

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figure 6.6. Architectural plan of the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin, ground floor. The large atrium (Lichthof) in the bottom center was bounded on left and right by galleries devoted, respectively, to the mineralogical and paleontological collections; the rest of the floor, above it on the diagram, belonged to zoology. The entire lefthandmost wing belonged to the university’s zoological institute, including a residence for the director. The galleries of the central “spine,” from left to right, contained the collections of German birds and mammals; mammals; and reptiles, amphibians, and fi shes. Stretching upward from the central galleries were those devoted to birds; invertebrates; and insects. Plan by August Tiede. From Zeitschrift für Bauwesen, 1891, 41: atlas, 3.

lic exhibits. The great majority of space in the public exhibit area in the Berlin museum and elsewhere continued to be organized along the old taxonomic lines, parallel to the research collection (figure 6.6). That is, officially, the main zoological galleries were devoted separately to birds; mammals; fish, amphibians, and reptiles; insects, arachnids, and crustaceans; and lower invertebrates. Only two galleries were organized differently. One was the atrium, devoted to what we might call “big skeletons”—a typical use of a large central space, designed to awe the viewer with the most dramatic specimens fi rst. Many German cultural history museums, including those in Berlin and Hamburg, put their whale skeletons here; after the turn of the century, more and more museums would follow Frankfurt’s Senckenberg Museum and the British Mu-

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seum in substituting a dinosaur skeleton.62 The other gallery to step away from the systematic organization was that devoted to German birds and mammals, which followed the precedent set much earlier by Stuttgart’s “fatherland” collection. In the same way that collections of local fauna were coming increasingly into vogue in the museums of smaller states and Prussian provinces, Berlin’s museum sought to defi ne a national group of German animals, beginning with those of greatest interest to the layman—birds and mammals.63 But even in the galleries that remained within the general classificatory structure, an extraordinary proportion of the exhibits were not “about” classification at all. The opportunity to move beyond the limits of classificatory display combined with the new emphasis on explanation to unleash an extraordinary burst of exhibitionary creativity, resulting in an eclectic mix of topics and forms of display. To focus on just one room, the insect gallery had, in addition to its taxonomic exhibits (themselves enhanced by drawings), one elucidating the phenomenon of mimicry; a round case placed by a window, containing iridescent butterfl ies set on a clockwork that gradually turned so the visitor could watch their colors change as the light hit them differently; and a presentation of the seasonal coloration of European butterfl ies, with an explanation (at least in the museum guide) of how the coloration was affected by temperature conditions that could be experimentally induced, as they were for these particular specimens. Among other novelties, the gallery featured an ant farm with living ants, showing their tunnels between glass walls.64 Thus, this gallery addressed recent knowledge with important theoretical consequences (mimicry, the physiology of coloration) at the same time as it offered exhibits with great visual appeal (iridescence, living ants). Systematics provided just one among many angles on the scientific interpretation of insect life. While overseeing the production of this variety of public exhibits, Möbius also used them as a forum for his own ecological and biogeographic orientation toward natural history. Most striking was his introduction of

62. The 1904 guide to Hildesheim’s Roemer Museum reported a “whale courtyard” as well. Allgemeiner Führer durch die Sammlungen des Roemer-Museums in Hildesheim (1904). 63. Köstering discusses the architectural innovation of the central atrium in Köstering, Natur zum Anschauen (2003), 63–73, and the importance of “biological” galleries devoted to homeland nature on 116–20. 64. Möbius, Führer (1902), 28–31.

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exhibits to illustrate his own major theoretical innovation, the Lebensgemeinschaft, or living community. Möbius’s exhibit of the oyster bank in the hall of lower invertebrates was modeled directly on the shoals off the coast of Schleswig-Holstein that he had studied in the 1870s and showed not only oysters, but also the snails, crabs, mussels, starfish, and other creatures that lived together in the community of the oyster bank. The existing photograph of this exhibit from the early 1890s is not very exciting: it looks mostly like a pile of shells (figure 6.7). But this exhibit was extremely innovative in scientific museums of the time in bringing together organisms from different taxonomic classes and representing them as living together. Elsewhere in the same hall with the oyster bank a similarly constructed case showed a coral reef, again identified as a Lebensgemeinschaft, and again deriving directly from Möbius’s own research (figure 6.8).65 It was not visually lively, either, and Möbius soon enhanced it by hanging over the case a “colorful picture of a reef painted after nature.” 66 Within a few years, Möbius’s Lebensgemeinschaft concept, especially as illustrated by the oyster bank and the coral reef, was reproduced elsewhere using much more artistic display methods—including an oyster bank exhibit in Hamburg (figure 6.9) and a dramatic coral reef display at the Berlin Museum for Ocean Studies (figure 7.5).67 Möbius made the Berlin museum a vehicle for his own interests in other ways as well. Drawing on his experience in practical economic natural history, together with his instincts for what might be appealing to visitors, he borrowed from agricultural displays the idea of pairing harmful insects with the plants they damaged (figure 6.10) and, going back to one of his earliest research projects in Hamburg, developed an exhibit on the natural and economic history of the pearl (figure 6.11).68 These exhibits were located within the galleries devoted to each taxonomic group—the pearl exhibit in the mollusk section, the harmful insects in the insect gallery. But they were clearly not about systematics at all: they were about the role of animals in human life. Overall, then, the novel kinds of exhibits at the Berlin museum fell into two broad kinds—displays that reflected the latest in evolutionary 65. The main scientific results of this research were published in Möbius, Richters, and Martens, Beiträge zur Meeresfauna (1880). 66. Möbius, Führer (1902), 60. The phrase is absent from the 1899 edition. 67. On the coral reef exhibit at the Berlin Museum of Ocean Studies, see chapter 7 below. 68. Möbius, Die echten Perlen (1857).

figure 6.7. Oyster bank Lebensgemeinschaft at the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin. Photograph from 1893. From MfN d. HUB, HBSB, Zool. Mus., Sig. BIII/856.

figure 6.8. Coral reef exhibit at the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin. Photograph from 1893. From MfN d. HUB, HBSB, Zool. Mus., Sig. BIII/130.

figure 6.9. Oyster bank exhibit at the Hamburg museum, from a series of “Lebensgemeinschaften vom Grunde der Nord- und Ostsee” (Living communities on the floor of the North and Baltic seas). From Kraepelin, “Das naturhistorische Museum” (1901), 138.

figure 6.10. Display of harmful insects with plants. Photograph from 1893. From MfN d. HUB, HBSB, Zool. Mus., Sig. BIII/848.

figure 6.11. The natural and economic history of the pearl. Photograph from 1893. From MfN d. HUB, HBSB, Zool. Mus., Sig. BIII/129.

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and ecological theory and those about animals that were significant for human use. That these two categories were easily mixed is suggested by the record of a meeting Möbius held with his staff soon after he arrived, in which he explained what the public exhibits were to do. The notes of the meeting list three categories of “group portraits” that the new public exhibition area should contain: comparative vertebrate morphology; comparative physiology; and, as the heading put it, “Biological Groups, Harmful and Useful Animals.” Under the last category were listed “insects with the plants they live on, human and mammalian parasites, mimicry, harmful insects, animals that impede travel in tropical places, edible animals of all classes, native market fish, commensalists [animals that use each other to live], variability of species.” 69 All of these were “biological,” whether they involved human judgments of utility or natural laws. Tying them all together at bottom (with the possible exception of variability) was the concept of functionality. The relationships that counted in these exhibits involved organisms (human or nonhuman) interacting with other organisms, not organisms’ similarities and differences or family relationships. Even exhibits of mimicry, which involved similarities in form, taught a functional lesson: mimicry was a protective adaptation. Correspondingly, the presentation of nature in the Berlin museum’s public exhibits could be read in at least two ways: through its taxonomic structure, which provided the main frame for all the exhibits; and through the more dynamic and functionalist representations of particular exhibits. As museums across Germany gradually reformed their exhibits over the 1890s and early 1900s, they would follow suit. While most maintained a systematic overview, they would add biological displays to their public exhibits. Virtually all provincial museums had a local faunal collection with exhibits of harmful and useful animals (especially insects and birds), and exhibits of mimicry and adaptive coloration were extremely popular. Catering to both museological and school-pedagogical trends, local and regional collections after about 1900 featured Lebensgemeinschaften or Lebensgruppen (life groups), which showed animals in their native habitats, life in the nest, or commensalist relationships.70 These 69. Protokolle der 1. Conferenz, 3 Mai 1887, 2–3, in MfN d. HUB, HBSB, Acta betr. die Protokolle der Sitzungen der wissenschaftlichen Beamten, Vol. 1: 1887–1892. 70. The Märkisches Museum in Berlin, for example, had exhibits of organisms from different habitats, intended to show “the connection among soil, climate, plant and animal worlds,” as well as useful and harmful plants and animals; in 1902 the provincial mu-

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“biological groups” would become the most prominent form of new biological exhibits in natural history museums. Among these museums, Hamburg was the earliest and largest to take up the new approach, opening its new building in 1891. As in Berlin, the building itself had been designed for a single, unified collection under one director—Alexander Pagenstecher—and then was completed under a new director—Karl Kraepelin, who promoted the system of dual arrangement. Because of the building’s design, however, it proved impossible to separate the public exhibits entirely from the research collection, and the main floor, in addition to its public exhibits, also housed the research collection of birds, including both the stuffed skins and the collections of birds’ nests, eggs, and skeletons. But in contrast to Berlin, systematics did not provide the general frame for organizing the galleries. The museum guide, which offered diagrams of the exhibit floors indicating with a red arrow the best path to follow, could not sustain a classificatory narrative for long. Instead, the picture was more frankly encyclopedic. The ground floor, like the central atrium in Berlin’s natural history museum, was dominated by gigantic whale skeletons. The main (fi rst) floor, which took the form of a wide gallery surrounding the central atrium, held not only the public systematic exhibit of “representatives of the animal kingdom from the reptiles to the primitive animals,” but also biological exhibits on variation, forms of animal protection (ranging from shells to adaptive coloration), development, nesting, and harmful and useful creatures. It also displayed various collections of local fauna, including a biological exhibit of native butterfl ies, local snails and mollusks, animals of the lower Elbe from mammals to sponges, and the animals of the Baltic and North seas. Like Möbius, Kraepelin made use of his special research knowledge for some of Hamburg’s museum displays. An exhibit on the animals of the lower Elbe region, for example, included a case on the organisms that could formerly be found in Hamburg’s water system. In 1885 Kraepelin had undertaken a study of the water system with an eye to understandseum in Graz would go one step further, with a vivarium room containing live native fish, amphibians, reptiles, and small mammals. In 1904, the Hildesheim museum displayed “biological suites” that exhibited “mimicry, dimorphism, silkworks, woodborers, gall wasps, geographic distribution, etc.” Führer durch das Märkische Museum (1908); Illustrierter Führer durch die zoologische, phytopalaeontologische und botanische Abteilung des Landes-Museum “Johanneum” in Graz, (1902); Allgemeiner Führer durch die Sammlungen des Roemer-Museums in Hildesheim, (1904). For other examples, see Köstering, Natur zum Anschauen (2003), 116–20.

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ing the differences between its fauna and that of the Elbe River. He had particularly hoped to fi nd evidence of blind fishes and crustaceans, as had been found in other settings lacking in light. This he did not fi nd— hardly surprising, he admitted, since the water system was only thirty years old and continually replenished from the river. But he did fi nd a distinct ecosystem (which he called a Lebensgemeinschaft) roughly resembling that of the depths of mountain lakes in Switzerland, which he attributed to similarities in the lack of light and the intense water pressure under which both communities lived. The system was dominated by its largest predators, the eels (which might occasionally slide out of a citizen’s tap). Following the cholera epidemic of 1893, a new waterworks and sand-based fi ltration system were developed, substantially reducing the traffic of both larger and smaller creatures through the water. Nevertheless, the sixty-odd zoological forms previously to be found in Hamburg’s water system remained on display until at least 1909.71 The biological displays that so strongly contributed to the encyclopedic, nonnarrative character of Hamburg’s exhibits also invited new ways to read them. The visitors with the greatest investment in thinking about how to read the collections were the schoolteachers who came to the museum in ever-increasing numbers with their classes. With a relatively short time to visit the museum, school groups often targeted a particular part of the collection, rather than trying to take it all in.72 This meant abandoning the traditional systematic narrative, which was to follow the animal kingdom from its “lowest” creatures to its “highest” ones, or 71. Kraepelin, “Die Fauna der Hamburger Wasserleitung” (1885); Führer durch das Naturhistorische Museum (Zoologisches Museum) zu Hamburg (1909), 71. Richard J. Evans discusses the development of Hamburg’s water fi ltration system, and its surrounding politics, in considerable detail, but of course from the perspective of the purity of the water system. Evans, Death in Hamburg (1987), esp. 147–50. This was not Kraepelin’s main interest; however, in a letter [to Kirchenpauer] of 17 April 1885, Kraepelin recommended installing a series of successively more fi nely meshed screens through the water supply system to reduce the population of larger organisms. Staatsarchiv Hamburg, Hochschulwesen: Dozenten- u. Personalakten I 37: Personalakte des Prof. Dr. Karl Matthias Friedrich Magnus Kraepelin, 1877–1915. 72. School groups increasingly became a prime audience for natural history museums, as evidenced by the visitors’ statistics, which increasingly broke out schoolchildren as a special category; in Bremen, museum field trips became a mandated part of the curriculum. Schauinsland, “Das Städtische Museum” (1904), 34. Teachers requesting school group visits to the Berlin museum often mentioned the desire to visit a particular gallery. See MfN d. HUB, HBSB, Akta betr. die Organisation, Öffnungszeiten, Besichtigungen durch Vereine etc., Vol. II: 1899–1926, 1931. See also Köstering, Natur zum Anschauen (2003), 255–58.

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from “highest” to “lowest,” over the whole museum. As one Hamburg curator (and former schoolteacher) put it, “If someone wants to learn a language, he doesn’t take a dictionary and memorize all the words from A to Z. He will ask himself what he needs.” 73 Similarly, he went on, visitors should consider what questions they want answered from a museum visit. Thus, one might inquire into the adaptation of the limbs of animals for life in the water. Answers are to be found in exhibits of “the marine mammals, the beaver, the otter, some insectivores, the duckbills, the penguins and all other seabirds, the tortoises, the sea snakes, the long series of water insects, etc.,” and one may seek out not only the modeled animals for inspection but also their skeletons, many of which are displayed as well. Indeed, the author continued, the number of questions one might ask of the exhibits is endless. “What weapons do animals have? . . . What rules govern coloration and markings? Of what does the animal skeleton consist? What are rudimentary organs? What structures enable plankton to move? What are the most important animals of the polar lands?” The list continues for a page. The teacher or inquisitive visitor could supply the questions; the Hamburg museum supplied the answers. In this author’s interpretation, the museum should not be read as a systematic narrative, but as a biological answer book, a resource for asking and answering the basic questions of biology.74 This distinction between the organization of the collections and the uses one could make of them extended beyond the public exhibits to the main scientific collection as well. The traditional, taxonomically organized, unified collection had served simultaneously as the material for investigation and the representation of knowledge resulting from that investigation. The correct taxonomic organization was the chief object of systematists’ research. Natural history was changing, however, and while 73. Hentschel, “Das Naturhistorische (Zoologische) Museum zu Hamburg” (1916). The author was a former teacher who had been working as a scientific assistant at the museum since 1908; in 1914 he had become head of the museum’s hydrobiological section. Hamburger Nachrichten, no. 161, Morgen-Ausgabe, 5 April 1914. Clipping in Staatsarchiv Hamburg, Zeitungsausschnitt-Sammlung, A 585: Zoologisches Museum u. Staats-institut; vormals Naturhist. Museum. The likening of a museum to a dictionary, and the impossibility of truly learning from “reading” its displays sequentially, was a criticism applied to art museums by Julius Langbehn in his enormously influential, originally anonymous tract Rembrandt als Erzieher (1900), 17. Langbehn, however, took the analogy in a different direction from the one in which Hentschel took it, arguing that artworks should be presented in a more “natural” fashion, organically connected to their surroundings, not that visitors should learn to study them differently. 74. Hentschel, “Das Naturhistorische (Zoologische) Museum zu Hamburg” (1916).

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scholars continued to work at rethinking the system, increasingly the research collection was also used to supply answers to other questions, such as those about geographic distribution, ecology, or functional morphology. The form of the collection itself no longer represented the unique or even primary solution to the task of the museum naturalist. Emblematic of this change was Karl Kraepelin’s 1888 characterization of the research collection of any large provincial museum as an “archive” containing the “records” of natural history, a characterization that he would repeat over the years. This striking description of the scientific natural history collection as a specimen archive represents the system of nature as simply a cataloging system rather than a primary object of intellectual striving. Just as the students learned to examine the public collections to answer specific questions, so, too, could the researcher treat the main collection as simply a conveniently organized repository of specimens, and not the object of investigation.75 The new dual arrangement of collections, then, signaled a break from the past in several ways. Most obviously, it separated the functions of research and display, removing the scientists’ working materials from public view and presenting new aspects of nature to the lay visitor. In doing so, dual arrangement also sharpened the divide between the professional and amateur users of the museum by making an in-between position more difficult to hold. If the public exhibits became a more dynamic visual space for lay visitors than the old unified museum with its boring rows of taxonomically organized specimens, they tended to put the visitors themselves into the position of recipients of knowledge rather than its makers. Susanne Köstering has put it well: “The educated, interested, but nonprofessional naturalist . . . then had to decide if he would visit the museum as a ‘layman’ or as an ‘expert,’ as someone who wanted to conduct scientific work, or who wanted to be educated.” 76 The two no longer readily overlapped. But the new arrangement signaled more, for the meanings of the collections for science were changing as well. The leading German research museums at the end of the nineteenth century, Berlin and Hamburg, pre75. Kraepelin, “Die Bedeutung der naturhistorischen, insonderheit der zoologischen Museen” (1888–89), 75. See also Kraepelin, “Naturwissenschaftlich-technische Museen” (1906), esp. 383. Chapter 9 discusses the research programs of several zoologists in Hamburg and Berlin. On the variety of nineteenth-century ways of archiving the world and the human presence in it, see Heesen, “Das Archiv” (1999), 114–41. 76. Köstering, Natur zum Anschauen (2003), 61.

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sented a newly biologized picture of nature and of zoological research, and lesser museums followed suit. In this picture, systematics still held an important place, but its role was fundamentally different from what it had been before, as it became one of several ways to express what was significant about nature. In the public collections this was made obvious by the many new exhibits devoted to topics other than systematics and by their disruption of the taxonomic form of organization. In the research collections, which continued to be organized taxonomically, the change was subtler. As Karl Kraepelin put it, “Systematics had to give up her dominant position to younger disciplines; from a mistress she became the serving girl.” 77 The systematic form of organization was no longer only an end in itself, but, as often as not, also a means for exploring new questions about function, ecology, evolution, and biogeography— the research questions of the biological perspective.78

The Museum as a Center for Biological Knowledge The social and cultural functions of natural history museums were not exhausted by their tasks of research and display: they also served as centers for gathering, dispensing, and exchanging biological information. This role has been cast into the shadows by the museum’s other tasks, but it was significant to the day-to-day life of museums, and it served the public good in different ways than did the research programs of individual staff members or the education of the lay public through displays. At one level, by providing meeting rooms for local natural science associations and the occasional regional or national meeting, public lectures in purposebuilt museum auditoriums, and tours to visiting scholars and dignitaries, museums helped to keep alive the tradition of nonprofessional cultivators of natural history. A museum director might mobilize interested laymen and local naturalists to help collect information and specimens, either through the local natural science association or through other networks, such as teachers’ associations. Conversely, when private individuals, organizations, and governmental bodies requested information and expert opinions from a museum’s director and staff, they shaped the

77. Kraepelin, “Die Bedeutung der naturhistorischen, insonderheit der zoologischen Museen” (1888–89), 75. 78. See chapters 8 and 9.

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workaday agenda of the museum. By attending to these activities, rather than just the objects and scientific documents produced in the museum, we gain insight into what aspects of nature counted among a broader spectrum of the museum’s public, and into the role of the museum as a participant in public affairs involving natural history. While curatordirectors did much to set the policy agendas of particular museums, these were also shaped by the needs of citizens and governments. At the most material level, of course, museums collected biological information by collecting specimens. Here Kraepelin’s characterization of the museum as an archive is apposite: like the warehouses of documents built up by the state, the museum provided a permanent store of specimens for consultation. In an assertion of the division of labor between the largest state museums and provincial museums, Kraepelin characterized the former as “central museums,” which sought to build global collections, while provincial museums cataloged local flora and fauna at a level of detail that no global museum could provide.79 This widely reasserted division was not merely descriptive but also carried political freight, with significant consequences for the acquisition and distribution of specimens. When Germany formally entered the colonial game in the 1880s, the imperial government authorized the Berlin Museum für Naturkunde to have fi rst choice of all the natural history objects collected on official imperial expeditions and by colonial officials on state business. The Berlin museum was certainly one of Germany’s most prominent “central museums,” but it was not the only one: several well-established German museums were in the same class. Given that the Berlin museum was a Prussian institution and not officially an imperial one, this regulation was extremely irksome to the museums of other states, since it severely hampered their receiving collections from the colonies, though their taxes contributed to imperial coffers. Kraepelin himself, who in the later 1880s would probably have characterized Hamburg’s museum as a provincial one, was extremely successful in building up the museum’s global collections through private donations. As Hamburg became increasingly identified with the official colonial movement (with the founding of the Institute for Maritime and Tropical Diseases in 1900 and the Colonial Institute in 1908), the channeling of specimens exclusively to Berlin rankled. In 1909 79. Kraepelin, “Die Bedeutung der naturhistorischen, insonderheit der zoologischen Museen” (1888–89).

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Kraepelin wrote to the Möbius’s successor as director of the Berlin museum, August Brauer, laying out his position. While it would certainly be difficult to come to a fairer and more appropriate division of spoils among the German states, Kraepelin wrote, surely Brauer could agree that the state of Hamburg, “which has taken upon itself the immense costs and tasks of a colonial institute, which moreover, through the appointment of a staff currently of ten scientific civil servants (not to mention a further half dozen temporary scientific workers) has shown that it is aspiring to maintain a large systematic scientific zoological institute, is not to be placed on the same level as just any duodecimo-state, where the material going to it will be lost to science.” Kraepelin assured Brauer that middle-sized states would agree with Hamburg’s right to be fi rst in line for the choice of colonial material. In reply, Brauer protested that in fact, during the three years of his directorship, no imperial funds had actually been spent on the collections they had gained. On the contrary, the museum itself had paid for the training of a collector and had outfitted him at the cost of some three thousand marks, only to receive goods worth a mere three or four hundred (on top of which the museum also had to pay freight costs). To be sure, perhaps ten collections had been sent by colonial officials, but these were virtually worthless. Furthermore, the most recent expedition supported by the empire’s “Africa fund” had produced insufficient zoological material to make up for the significant additional outlay provided by the museum. 80 In seeking to assuage Kraepelin, Brauer represented the official collecting from the colonies as expensive, unreliable, and limited in value. The advantages for the collections of being the official imperial repository, he implied, were less than jealous rival museums made them out to be.81 In contrast to these leading museums, which sought to develop global 80. For his part, Kraepelin argued that only Berlin and Hamburg ought “a priori” to have fi rst rights to all naturalia from imperial expeditions—Berlin as the capital, Hamburg as the home of the Colonial Institute. The argument should not be made on the basis of the size of the collections, Kraepelin argued, as then not only Munich but also “Dresden, Stuttgart, Karlsruhe, Bremen, Frankfurt, etc., etc.,” would mount indignant counterclaims. Karl Kraepelin to [Brauer], 11 September 1909; Kraepelin to Brauer, 24 September 1909; Brauer to Kraepelin (draft), 25 September 1909, fols. 78–85 in MfN d. HUB,HBSB, Sig. SII: Museum Hamburg, Bd. II, 1900–1934. 81. The 1910 museum guide produced under Brauer’s supervision sang a different tune: it differs from Möbius’s most strikingly in its explicit acknowledgment of donors, especially those from the colonies. Führer durch die Zoologische Schausammlung des Museums für Naturkunde in Berlin (1910).

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collections, provincial museums developing their regional collections of natural history could count on a much broader population of contributors, not only to build the collections but also to help survey the local landscape. Perhaps the most vigorous and successful museum curator to take on such a project was the paleobotanist Hugo Conwentz, who in 1880 was appointed the fi rst director of the West Prussian Provincial Museum in Danzig (now Gdan´sk, Poland), and who a quarter century later would become famous as a leader of the nature protection movement in Prussia. Within a year of his appointment in Danzig, he had developed a program of research to survey the little-studied naturalhistorical, archaeological, and ethnological resources of the state. 82 With only a skeleton staff to assist him (typically a lone student paid for short periods of time), he brilliantly mobilized citizens and public officials in the service of his project, using circulars and questionnaires to elicit information and specimens. Part of his purpose was to increase the museum’s collections. To establish a forest botany collection at the museum, in February 1884 he sent out an illustrated circular to all the district forestry administrators requesting samples of the given plants for the collections. A similar call for algae samples went out in April 1887, as well as one to bird-watchers to identify a variety of German birds, and “in doubtful cases to send the bird skin in question to the museum.” Through similar circulars targeted at building and railroad officials, he also built from scratch a collection of over fourteen thousand geological core samples in less than a decade.83 Conwentz’s solicitation of specimens for the museum was part of a larger project of information gathering. In the spring of 1881 he sent out general calls to the residents of the province, all district administrators (Landräte), and—through the provincial school administration—all the provincial institutions of teacher education, to notify the museum of any noteworthy natural-historical and prehistoric observations or finds, and to help him locate people who were willing to assist in the task of identifying these. A year later, the district administrators received a ques82. The following information derives from Conwentz, Das Westpreussische ProvinzialMuseum (1905), 9–18. 83. In 1903 most of these went to Berlin to become part of a national collection of geological samples, but a selection was retained for local display at the museum. Führer durch die Zoologische Schausammlung des Museums für Naturkunde in Berlin (1910), 15–16.

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tionnaire to be passed on to a reliable person in the district who might report on any particular landscape formations and sites of potential archaeological or natural-historical value. In June 1883 Conwentz sent out to teachers, foresters, and farmers a circular listing all the known vertebrates of the province and soliciting additions to the list; he followed this up with four updates and renewed questionnaires over the next several years. Beginning in the later 1880s, he targeted teachers in particular, giving speeches at several local teachers’ conferences annually, such that he reached some sixty-five school districts by 1905. In each talk, he would present information about the local natural history and archaeology of the district, using locally discovered demonstration materials, and soliciting helpers among the teachers, school inspectors, and forestry officials in attendance. As he came to know the local naturalists he could count on, Conwentz directed more specific questions to them. Thus, in 1886 his “collaborators” collected information on the distribution of adders (Kreuzotter) in their locales, and similarly in 1888 they contributed to a survey of West Prussian amphibians. Botanical collaborators received inquiries about the distribution of yew trees (Taxus baccata), wild service trees (Sorbus torminalis), and other rare plants. Although Conwentz recognized that the questionnaire method depended on the circulars to get into the right hands and yielded uneven results, he also gained much information. The result was a clear expansion of the list of known provincial flora and fauna, as well as considerable information about plants and animals that were rare in the province.84 As Conwentz became ever more deeply involved in the movement for nature protection, the information he had collected through the museum became central to his campaign. Although Conwentz was uniquely successful in soliciting knowledge from local informants about the fauna, flora, and artifacts of his province, it is clear that other museums also made use of local talent and knowledge, as when they got volunteers to help make taxonomic identifications of particular groups. These efforts paralleled the long-standing mobilization of mercantile travelers, sailors, and, more recently, colonial officials to send home exotic specimens, a practice upon which museums had long depended, as we saw in chapter 2. What was different now was the vastly intensified concentration on local and regional nature. The upswing in interest in regional natural history, supported by the new muse84. Conwentz, Das Westpreussische Provinzial-Museum (1905), 9–18.

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ums, also brought more systematic attention to developing an overall biological understanding of local fauna.85 If citizens were mobilized to help collect information, information flowed at least as plentifully in the other direction, as people sought out curators to answer their questions about naturalia. Hugo Dewitz, entomological curator at the Berlin museum, described in 1888 the hidden but time-consuming work of responding to nonspecialists’ queries. People living on the land or in the forest would bring harmful insects in for identification and wanted to know about their lifeways. A physician had a patient emitting maggots and sought information about the creatures and their life cycle; another wanted to know scientific details about a parasitic fly that had hitchhiked from Brazil on the body of a patient. A museum entomologist was called in to judge in a dispute between an entomological association and a seller of naturalia over whether a butterfly’s coloring had been tampered with. “From other quarters come queries on crayfish plague, bird protection, intestinal worms, and other creatures harmful to man and animal.” 86 In Hamburg at the turn of the century, the request for expert judgments on local natural history reached further, into the realm of policy. Lacking a university, the city-state leaned on its museum officials to provide expertise in the form of official opinions and recommendations. From 1897 to 1905, the geological curator participated in research on the status of the groundwater around Hamburg, in an effort to improve the water system for public health. In 1904, Kraepelin was asked to give his opinion on the caging of native songbirds, a practice that had been outlawed in Prussia. The Hamburg senate was considering instituting a similar law and wanted a scientific perspective. Also in 1904, Kraepelin was asked for his help in explaining the decrease in the local fish population in the Elbe, which was devastating the local river-fishing economy. Two commercial fishing associations blamed pollution from the sewers and wanted someone to establish its source. Kraepelin noted that the summer had been very dry, resulting in both lower water levels and less oxygen in the water; he thought that these climatic conditions, and not sewer 85. So, for example, the publishing project Westfalens Tierleben in Wort und Bild (1883–92), edited by the provincial museum director Hermann Landois and supported by the zoological section of the Westfälischen Verein für Wissenschaft und Kunst, pulled together a new, lively overview of the local vertebrates in three volumes published over a decade. 86. H. Dewitz, “Ueber die Aufgaben grosser zoologischer Landesmuseen” (1888).

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water, were probably responsible, though he argued that longer-term research on the quality of the Elbe was needed to come up with a defi nitive answer.87 These cases highlight two important points about the shaping of nature and science in the museum. First, government agencies, civic organizations, and individuals in German society beyond the museum brought their concerns to the museum’s experts for judgment, thereby shaping the everyday tasks of museum curators with their demands for answers. While the Hamburg case may have been extreme because of the conscious efforts to professionalize its scientific institutions in preparation for a university, many cities and towns in Germany lacked a university but had a museum, and museum curators in these communities served as public experts on nature.88 Although such a role had long existed, the rapid increase in the number of provincial and local museums and in full-time, publicly supported curators brought this role new prominence and helped to make the museum a central institution for the exchange of knowledge about nature. Second, such requests reinforced the importance to museum biology of the relations of humans to nature— and more generally, of functional-causal questions involving organisms and their environments. Bird protection and river and groundwater pollution involved both human relations to nature and a functional perspective, lending these two aspects of the biological perspective increased purchase in the museum setting.

Conclusion The museum reforms of the late nineteenth century embodied deep changes in both the social relations of natural history and the concep87. Regarding local songbirds, Kraepelin said that if numbers were reduced (a claim on which he cast some doubt), it had mainly to do with the loss of nesting sites; he further claimed that the number caught was actually very small in relation to the number born. These cases suggest that in contrast to Möbius, Kraepelin was more sanguine about the balance of nature reasserting itself in the face of human intervention. All of these requests for opinions and their responses are in Staatsarchiv Hamburg, Oberschulbehörde, Hochschulwesen I. Reg. Spez. C. IX a, Nr. 21, Bd. 1: Abgabe von Gutachten und dgl. (1891–1909). 88. Such a consultative role existed not only in Germany. In 1882, at the British Museum (Natural History), for example, Albert Günther, keeper of zoology and the nation’s leading ichthyologist, engaged in experimental research concerning the pollution of the Thames River and its effects on fi sh life. Gunther, A Century of Zoology (1975), 391.

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tions of nature developed within the museum setting. The most prominent change in the former, as we have seen, was the sharpening of the divide between the (professional) researcher and the (lay) visitor; this same divide was also visible in the structuring of the museum in the form of “dual arrangement.” This was part of the broader “bureaucratization of culture and the professionalization of its administration” characteristic of late nineteenth-century Germany and of the international museum world more generally.89 These structural changes were closely intertwined with the spread of the biological perspective. The new biological group displays and other exhibits of functionalist biology that were such a prominent feature of museum reform physically embodied the biological perspective for lay visitors to the museum and helped spread its message. To be sure, systematics still provided the framework upon which a considerable amount of both display and investigation was mounted. But the meanings became different with the infusion of the new display types. Tony Bennett and others have argued based on their studies of Anglo-American museums that the taxonomic framework of the late nineteenth-century museum supplied a progressive evolutionary narrative in which visitors participated as they traversed the exhibits.90 In German natural history museums, however, the evolutionary narrative was neither so prominent nor so unitary. The introduction of the new biological exhibits disrupted the fiction of a unified narrative, instead offering multiple views of nature.91 And those new views tended to emphasize the “biological” aspects of organisms. This trend was reinforced by another one visible in the museum reform age: museums were becoming more alike. From their diverse origins in civic associations, royal or private cabinets, universities, and city or provincial governments, they became increasingly similar in their aims, organization, rhetoric, and presentations of nature. While of 89. Lenman, Osborne, and Sagarra, “Imperial Germany” (1995), 12. 90. See esp. Bennett, Birth of the Museum (1995), chapter 7, “Museums and Progress: Narrative, Ideology, Performance.” 91. Although it would have been possible to explain such phenomena as mimicry and commensalism in evolutionary terms—thus working them into the evolutionary narrative and rounding it out—the exhibits in Berlin and Hamburg appear not to have been presented this way, perhaps because explicit discussion of evolution before about 1900 was perceived as inflammatory and not scientifically neutral. This is also consistent with the nonevolutionary character of German anthropology museums; see Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism (2001).

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course natural history museums offered unique specimens and highlights of their individual collections, they tended increasingly to strive for the same characteristics: dual arrangement; an outline of systematics; a collection devoted to local fauna, usually containing at least one or a few small biological group displays; and other biological exhibits, which could range from displays of mimicry or adaptive coloration to the developmental stages of insects. Thus, even as the kinds of zoological displays became more diverse within the museum, reforming museums themselves tended to present a more unified message across the civic landscape that placed scientific education, and especially education about local organisms in their functional contexts, at their center. Such arrangements displaced both the purely taxonomic scientific model and older civic models that might have placed more emphasis on aesthetic displays or that were organized around sets of personal collections, each with its own coherence.92 The new orientation of museums also presented the naturalist as someone more than just a cataloger or analyst of nature. The museum naturalist himself was already doing more, as a researcher and educator. But the expansion of the figure of the naturalist, and of natural history itself, went deeper. Because the biological exhibits inevitably included displays of harmful and useful animals (especially insects and birds) and often showed food fish and other economically significant organisms, the idea of a “pure” natural history, in which the scientist was a disinterested analyst simply offering an account of nature, went by the wayside. Instead, in these exhibits the scientist was implicitly projected as actively concerned with managing and intervening in nature—an approach that reflects another facet of the biological perspective, its orientation toward practical and economic zoology. New representations of nature and science were just the most visible results of the reformed museum. As we have seen, the professionalization and bureaucratization of curatorship had further consequences for the social relations of science, as it would for the biological perspective. The most significant was that increasingly, the curator was in charge of producing information about nature, while the visitor consumed it. Natural history museums thus participated in the much broader rise of a mass consumer culture. However, at the same time they also remained 92. Susanne Köstering discusses the shift away from personal collections in Köstering, Natur zum Anschauen (2003), 79–80.

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important sites of activity to which local nature enthusiasts might contribute, and as nonuniversity institutions of general education, they remained much more directly open to being shaped by the needs and desires of their publics. The museum thus continued to maintain a threeway role, as a site for the professional activities of curating, research, and publication; for supporting the cultivation of natural history by educated amateurs; and for general education of a lay public. This combination and the tensions and ambivalences it engendered would remain characteristic of the particular culture of natural history museums. The central tension can be summed up as follows: Were museum curators to speak for their publics, or to them? Did they represent the perspective of a broad “public,” or were they disciplining a broader audience to accept their own views of science and nature? From the time of Phillip Leopold Martin at midcentury onward, proponents of the biological perspective had viewed themselves as reformers seeking to open up natural history to much broader participation and to make its content livelier and more meaningful for this broader group. Early civic natural history associations and their museums tended to share this aim, as did schoolteacher-naturalists across Germany in the 1880s and 1890s in their civic organizations. They all took the emancipatory, democratic view that natural history could be undertaken by anyone, regardless of class or religion, and that it provided a common meeting place for people of different backgrounds.93 The professionalization of curatorship changed the voice of those promoting the biological perspective from within the museum setting, lending it a more didactic timbre. Indeed, Andreas Kuntz has argued that in the changed circumstances of the century’s end, the museum took on a new project: to impose bourgeois values on “the people” and suppress an alternative (political) culture.94 Ample hindsight and a critical view of the passive consumer make this critique plausible. However, the situation was more complicated than Kuntz allows. First, this shift does not seem to have been either conscious or explicit at the time, either for cu93. Karl Gottlob Lutz made this point especially explicit in an open letter to his readers, Lutz, “An die Leser!” (1889), 1–2. The magazine in which he published this, Aus der Heimat, was the organ for the Lehrer-Verein für Naturkunde (teacher’s association for nature study), founded by Lutz in 1887. Teachers, he believed, were the right people to spread the word of the common and open ground of natural history to the widest possible public. 94. The story of the transformation of the museum’s emancipatory project to that of the suppression or overriding of working-class culture is the burden of Kuntz, Das Museum als Volksbildungsstätte (1996).

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rators or for visitors. Because of its association with science in general and, increasingly, Darwinism in particular, the natural history museum appears to have remained a relatively popular site for working-class selfeducation, especially in comparison with other state cultural institutions such as art museums.95 Moreover, the continued liberal stance of many museum curators, who clearly believed that science was for all classes a route away from religious “superstition” and toward a rational understanding of the world, makes it difficult to assign them politically oppressive intentions. But structurally, the situation changed when the reformers took the helm. The relationship of the professionalized curator to the museum public tended to push it toward a dynamic of didacticism (on the part of the museum staff) and consumption (on the part of the visitors). This structural change combined with the changes in the content of exhibits such that by the First World War, the biological perspective, while still perceived as new and on the cutting edge, was no longer an oppositional, outsider’s position vis-à-vis the museum world. It had become an integral part of the picture of nature presented to the public in reform-minded museums. How it was embedded differently in museums of different kinds—especially through the exhibit form of the biological group—is the subject of the next chapter.

95. Visitor information is hard to come by for this period, but see Köstering, Natur zum Anschauen (2003), 259–63, on the mass public, and esp. 259, on the predominance of workers and lower-middle-class visitors.

chapter seven

Biological Groups, Nature, and Culture in the Museum

A

mong the innovations in natural history displays of the decades surrounding 1900, none spoke of modernity more than the biological group—a collection of animals posed together to represent a “naturalistic” scene. Whether such a group depicted a family unit near its nest or burrow, a habitat with its “characteristic” animals forming a Lebensgemeinschaft, predators stalking their prey, or different species that lived together in harmony, all of these displays reflected a new focus on the living animal and its functional relations with the rest of nature. Biological groups simultaneously gave physical presence to key ideas of the biological perspective and declared the up-to-dateness of the museum that displayed them. The “modernity” of such exhibits may seem ironic, given that they were already being prepared and advocated by artistic taxidermists such as Hermann Ploucquet and Phillip Leopold Martin in the 1850s and 1860s, and indeed the form can be traced back to courtly settings even before 1800. But between the innovations of Ploucquet and Martin at midcentury and the turn of the century, when they were becoming the hot new form in public museums, several significant developments, related in the last chapter, had taken place that shaped the production, reception, and interpretation of such displays in the German museum world. In favor of this form was its international success: across Britain,

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the United States, and Europe, museums that embraced the New Museum Idea found that group displays appealed very much to the broader public they were trying to reach. In Germany, such displays gained further scientific authority from Karl Möbius’s biotic community concept and the broader functional-biological perspective that he and other museum curators were developing, and indeed they came to epitomize the new biological perspective emerging across the civic institutions of zoology. Their only major downside was the fear—intense among some defenders of the traditional dignity of the research museum—that the theatricality of group scenes would drag visitors down into Schaulust or voyeurism rather than raise them to the loftier heights of scientific education. As one critic put it, “Although such tableaux captivate the lay public very much, one must always bear in mind that in fact they forsake the scientific foundation that a scholarly museum must under all circumstances maintain, coming dubiously close to those institutions that go by the name of ‘panopticon’ [wax museum].” 1 This was a significant objection for a vocal segment of the museum community. 2 Biological groups thus provided a focal point for tensions between old and new within the German museum community in the early twentieth century, embodying oppositions between systematic and scenic display, research and public education, rational recreation and titillation, and even truth and imagination. Research-oriented curators at state-run museums, while themselves engaged in significant exhibit innovations, were often cautious about devoting too many of their limited resources to novelties that might detract from the standing of their museums as research institutions. Although the major research museums of natural history incorporated a spectrum of biological exhibits as they updated their displays, including biological group scenes, the greatest enthusiasm for biological groups within the public museum community came rather from new museums that wholeheartedly embraced the New Museum Idea mission of attracting the general public. In adopting the bio1. Wandolleck, review of Annual Report (1905), 236. 2. See Nyhart, “Science, Art, and Authenticity” (2004). For parallel concerns in America, see Cain, “Nature under Glass” (2006), 91–96. Despite the inflamed rhetoric of some critics, panopticons were not quite as disreputable as American dime museums— ethnologists and anthropologists visited them to make use of traveling ethnographic groups (while still working hard to establish that their interests were purely scientific). See Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism (2001), 172–78.

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logical group, curators at these new museums worked hard to legitimate it as worthy of public educational establishments. This chapter examines three new museums of the 1890s and 1900s that made especially bold and successful efforts to draw in the public with innovative biological group exhibits: the Bremen Museum for Natural History, Ethnography, and Commerce (Bremer Museum für Natur-, Völker-, und Handelskunde, opened in 1896), the Altona City Museum (Altonaer Museum, 1901), and the Museum of Ocean Studies in Berlin (Museum für Meereskunde, 1906). In presenting the early histories of these museums, I seek to elucidate the larger settings in which the appeals of the biological group overcame their drawbacks. As their names make clear, the museums under discussion here were not devoted solely to natural history, but pursued cultural and scientific goals that went far beyond simply characterizing nature. Many museum visitors obtained their impressions of a professionally sanctioned picture of nature from such “unified” or “universal” museums—museums that combined nature and culture, which were far more common than those devoted solely to nature. Their analysis thus allows us to examine simultaneously how these museums incorporated the biological perspective into broader visions of the relationship of humans to nature, the relationship of the museum to the publics it served, and the very nature of museum-based knowledge. I argue that these museums embodied a particular attitude toward the production and construction of knowledge, captured in the term Kunde, which recurs as a suffi x in the museums’ names: the Bremen Museum for Natur-, Völker-, und Handelskunde, the Berlin Museum für Meereskunde, and the Altonaer Museum, which was a model museum for Heimatkunde. The Kunde projects, as I call them, were a significant feature of the cultural landscape of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that took form especially in museums. Before proceeding to the analysis of nature and “biology” in these museums, then, let us consider the nature of these projects.

The Kunde Projects In the late nineteenth century, a striking number of new popular sciences appeared with the suffi x -kunde—roughly translatable as “-ology” or “studies”—attached to their names. Thus, among the prominent leisure-

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time pursuits of Germans during the fi n de siècle were Volkskunde (folklife studies), Völkerkunde (ethnology), heimische Altertumskunde (local archaeology), and, especially, Heimatkunde (homeland studies). These studies joined such venerable scientific studies as Naturkunde (natural history), Bücherkunde (“bibliology,” or book connoisseurship), Länderkunde (regional geography), and Arzneikunde (pharmacy). Meereskunde (ocean studies), a new enterprise at the end of the nineteenth century, stood somewhere between the scientific and the popular, a newly named science conceived of as both about the ocean, in general, and of general interest. Dictionaries from the eighteenth century onward suggest that Kunde was a synonym for Wissenschaft, or science. However, by the late nineteenth century, I would argue, there was a real distinction. 3 Whereas Wissenschaft was distinguished by the search for general unifying laws, by the end of the nineteenth century Kunde denoted a different form of knowledge characterized by three leading attributes. First, it was encyclopedic in nature: that is, the Kunde of something was a kind of knowledge that ideally told everything about its object, exposing all its facets, even if they could not be expressed as unified intellectually by means of some overarching law. The source of unity lay in the topic or subject matter; approaches to the topic might be extremely varied. Second, consistent with its linguistic roots, which relate the term to both kennen (to know) and können (to be able, to do),4 Kunde often implied a hands-on way of knowing deeply dependent on material culture. To know an object of study in the Kunde fashion (especially clear in the older fields Arzneikunde and Bücherkunde) was to have a feeling for it that involved not just the understanding but the senses: it was to value the knowledge of the hands and eyes (and, in the case of Arzneikunde, the nose) as well as the mind. The third attribute derives in part from the fi rst two. The Kunde projects that rose to prominence in the later nineteenth century were understood as forms of knowledge accessible to the general citizenry, not exclusively academic sciences. Some of these projects—most notably the closely related areas of Volkskunde, Heimatkunde, and heimische Altertumskunde—were developed by by citizens largely outside academia who collected objects and information to establish and preserve 3. A useful dictionary entry that captures the changing overtones is in Hildebrand, Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm (1873), vol. 5, s.v. “Kunde,” columns 2620–23. See esp. under the third defi nition, columns 2622–23. 4. Kluge, Etymologisches Wörterbuch (1967), s.v. “kund.”

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a sense of their heritage. 5 Often, Kunde was understood to be useful or practical in some way (especially in contrast to academic knowledge, represented as overly ivory tower). But even in those areas that were promulgated by academics, which include Naturkunde and Meereskunde, these words, I would argue, indicated the popular and nonacademic nature of their enterprise. Their names declared them to be not exactly traditional science, but something else.6 In this way, the Kunde projects of the 1880s, 1890s, and early 1900s presented a challenge to traditional academic knowledge on several levels. They operated as alternative modes of knowledge gathering and representation open to nonacademics. Just as important, as Suzanne Marchand has demonstrated for archaeology and Andrew Zimmerman has argued for ethnology (Völkerkunde), these new sciences privileged objects vis-à-vis texts, challenging the primacy of the written word (especially the Latin and Greek written word) and the educational privilege associated with it. They proclaimed the value of the everyday world and the value of experience over book-learning.7 If they challenged the academic lock on knowledge making, however, the Kunde projects were nevertheless not radical in their political intent. On the whole, they did not aim at overturning the knowledge regimes represented by university learning, nor did they provide a forum for radical political activism. They generally received support from local, regional, and even national governments, even when they received their initial impetus from private organizations. They thus presented a model 5. It is worth noting that not all of the new enterprises I group among the Kunde projects exclusively used words with the suffi x -kunde. The term Völkerkunde was used interchangeably with Ethnologie, Meereskunde was sometimes called Ozeanologie (a term that did not stick, ultimately), and local history projects, which had many of the same attributes as the Kunde projects, went under the rubric Vor- und Frühgeschichte, though they were often closely associated with heimische Altertumskunde. Thus, while I am making much of the name, it represents a phenomenon that did not always go by that particular term. 6. Susanne Köstering notes that when the Berlin natural history museum moved to its new location in 1889 it was renamed the Museum für Naturkunde to indicate its new orientation toward a lay audience. She also notes that Naturkunde lacked the dangerous potentially evolutionary connection that could be made to the more traditional word Naturgeschichte. Köstering, Natur zum Anschauen (2003), 3. On local prehistory or Altertumskunde as a pursuit of dedicated amateurs, see Maner, “Die Entdeckung der Vor- und Frühgeschichte” (2001). I thank Suzanne Marchand for pointing out to me the frequent emphasis such projects placed on useful knowledge. 7. Marchand, Down from Olympus (1996); Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism (2001).

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of knowledge that remained within the accepted bounds of middle-class culture and state interest, even while challenging the hegemony of theoretical knowledge. Given the emphasis of these projects on object-based, hands-on knowledge, it is not surprising that they found their most prominent expression not in books (though there were plenty of those) but in museums. Museums, after all, were the prototype of the encyclopedic form; moreover, the way their contents accumulated over time through donations of private collections and individual objects only emphasized their heterogeneity, which an encyclopedic approach could accommodate much more easily than one devoted to underlying laws. As much as museum curators and organizers sought to smooth out this heterogeneity and impose unity and order on the collections, museums of any size generally divided their collections physically and spatially in ways that continued to reflect the multifaceted nature of their subjects. Indeed, that was often the point. Museums thus gave a particular form to the Kunde projects, and it would be fair to say the converse as well: Kunde was largely knowledge made and presented via museums.8 This, then, was the kind of popular, multifaceted knowledge project at work in the three museums under discussion here, in which biological groups took a prominent place. As these museums were explicitly designed to attract a mass audience, it is not surprising that their directors and curators turned to biological group displays, with their proven dramatic power, to draw in the masses. But the place of these biological displays in these museums, the messages about nature that they sought to convey, and the ways they represented the relations of humans to nature—these were as different as the museums themselves. An analysis of the larger frameworks into which these displays were placed thus reveals the variety of larger agendas that biological groups could serve. 8. An interesting exception is Volkskunde, which seems to have had two somewhat separate sides. Literary studies of folklore and folktales gained at least a foothold in universities (the Grimm brothers, for example, held academic positions), while studies of costumes, traditional technologies, and vernacular architecture appear to have long remained museum-based pursuits. On the literary side, see Bendix, In Search of Authenticity (1997). Museumskunde (museology) is another Kunde that fi rst appeared around 1900, when the professionalization of museum curatorship was sufficiently advanced to warrant a metalevel discipline of museum studies. The word was used as the title of the German professional museums journal, founded in 1904.

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The Museum für Natur-, Völker-, und Handelskunde in Bremen (1896) The Bremen Museum für Natur-, Völker-, und Handelskunde, as its name suggests, united multiple collections under one roof. As the product of a commercial bourgeoisie in a city without a university, it represented a particular set of relations between traditional science and populist Kunde as well as between humans and nature. In this setting, biological groups served as a bridge linking the theatrical ethnographic groups and exhibits of trade goods that dominated the museum to the scientific approach to nature represented by the increasingly marginalized systematic collections in natural history. The history of the collections and how they came to be joined in a single museum, with a unifying overarching vision, is instructive about the relative importance of natural history, anthropology, and commerce to the culture of Bremen’s commercial class and thus about the representation of nature within the museum. It also reveals the continuing centrality of nonscientists in contributing to, guiding, and supporting the collections, even as the trappings of science increased over the last quarter of the century. Consequently, there was a far more organic connection between those who organized and controlled the museum and the “general public” that was expected to visit it than was the case in the researchoriented scientific museums. The museum developed out of the consolidation of separate natural history and ethnology collections in the late 1870s. The natural history collections were the oldest, having been developed within the structure of voluntary associations so characteristic of German civic life. In 1875, the private Museum Society (Gesellschaft Museum) donated these collections to the city, which placed them in storage for lack of a suitable exhibition space. Separate efforts in the early and mid-1870s to establish a public museum for ethnography and prehistory resulted in a promising number of donations from Bremen’s merchants, naturalists, and missionaries; in 1878, the ethnographic collections found a new permanent home together with those for natural history to form the “city collections,” or Städtische Sammlungen für Natur- und Völkerkunde.9 Housed in an side annex of the city-owned cathedral, the collections would lan9. Abel, Vom Raritätenkabinett zum Bremer Überseemuseum (1970), 7–34.

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guish, chronically underfunded, under a series of three struggling new scientist-directors, for a dozen years. It would take the addition of a third Kunde, Handelskunde (commercial studies), to transform the city museum from a minor obligation of the city to its scientific and cultural life into a prominent institution, with a new building in 1896 that proved a magnetic draw for over a hundred thousand visitors a year. It was thus the intervention of the commercial elite that gave the museum its major impetus. The business life of Bremen was as dynamic as its professional scientific life was modest. The merchant economy was strong, as the long Hanseatic mercantile tradition brought materials from across the increasingly accessible oceans to process into salable products for European consumers. Tobacco, cotton, and sugar from the tropics were all imported in raw form and turned into cigars, cloth, and processed sugar in Bremen and its surrounding villages. Bremers sought to promote their city’s role as a business center based on imports. Indeed, the city had something of a tradition of trade shows and public exhibitions into which its citizens were willing to pour considerable resources. As early as 1865, the Bremen Trade and Industrial Association had put on an exhibition of “raw materials and industrial products in Bremen,” the fi rst of its kind in Germany.10 Spearheaded by the schoolteacher-botanist Franz Buchenau (who had founded the local Scientific Association [Naturwissenschaftlicher Verein] in 1864), the exhibition united science with commerce by combining scientifically labeled “living useful plants (coffee, cotton, sugar cane, etc.)” with product samples, “trophies” (Trophäen) made out of packing materials, and a gigantic ship’s propeller from a steamer of the Norddeutsche Lloyd company. Some of these displays would be reused in later exhibitions, with additions, and would end up in the new city museum of 1896.11 The 1865 exposition shows that the idea of exhibits combining trade and science existed early on; this would be solidified in the Bremen trade exhibition of 1890, the exhibits from which would become the heart of the new museum. In the summer of 1890, Bremen hosted the Northwest German Commercial and Industrial Exhibition, of which a prominent section was de-

10. Quoted in Korn, Hanseatische Gewerbeausstellungen (1999), 84–85. 11. Franz Buchenau, “Erinnerungen an die Bremer Handelsausstellung von 1865,” reprinted from Buchenau’s unpublished Lebenserinnerungen in ibid., 194–96.

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voted to a special Trade and Colonial Exhibition.12 Seeking to draw in repeat visitors to make the exhibition a fi nancial success, its organizers strove for a visual spectacle of a kind hitherto unknown in northwest Germany.13 To do so, they drew on practices that had become common in international exhibitions and world’s fairs, conjoining the display of cutting-edge manufactured wares with the reconstruction of exotic buildings and the use of living or wax models engaged in ethnographically interesting activities. In displaying the “primitive” and “traditional” alongside the latest in European manufactures, such fairs highlighted the extent of modern progress and the reach of Europeans across the world.14 The Bremen exhibition introduced these practices to the region. A tower of elephant tusks attracted the awe of some visitors, while others could watch a Burmese handworker sitting on a colorful rug and exhibiting his talents. Displays of commercial wares were punctuated with ethnographic reconstructions such as the Sumatran “Battak-Haus” donated by the fi rm H. Herrings & Co., complete with wax figures of people and domestic animals. Some exhibits featured diorama-style painted background scenery that blended into the three-dimensional figures in the foreground: these included a “Mexico group” scene in which a traditionally dressed man on horseback reached for a drink offered by an peasant woman standing in front of a thatched hut (figure 7.1) and an exhibit of a cotton field in which the reconstructed plants stood at the front of rows stretching back into the painting.15 Outdoors, a decora-

12. Both Gewerbe-Ausstellung and Handels-Ausstellung can be translated as “trade exhibition.” This can result in confusion when discussing the Bremen case, as the Handelsund Kolonial-Ausstellung was a part of the larger Gewerbe-Ausstellung. Here I adopt the translations used by David Ciarlo: “trade exhibition” for Handels-Ausstellung and “commercial exhibition” for Gewerbe-Ausstellung. See Ciarlo, “Consuming Race, Envisioning Empire” (2003), 26 n. 10. 13. David Ciarlo emphasizes the centrality of spectacle to the Bremen exhibition concept in ibid., 25–46, esp. pp. 27–31. 14. Martin Woerner has noted that the Paris exhibition of 1867 fi rst created an “ethnographic village”; thereafter such villages, displaying both exotic and “traditional” European shelter, costumes, and folkways, became a staple of worlds’ fairs. Woerner, Vergnügung und Belehrung (1999), esp. chapter 3. See also Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas (1988). 15. The elephant tusk pyramid and Burmese handworker are illustrated in the Leipziger Illustrirte Zeitung, no. 2464 (1890): 308. Herbert Abel documents the ethnographic and architectural exhibits carried over from the Handelsausstellung into the museum: Abel,

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figure 7.1. Mexico group at the Bremen museum. From Übersee-Museum Bremen, photograph P28396.

tive Chinese pagoda appeared to float at the center of the lake on the fairgrounds, providing a visual focal point for the fair-related activity on the water.16 Collectively and individually, the Bremen Chamber of Commerce, its members, and associated fi rms and individuals put enormous resources into the trade exhibition. When it ended, the exhibitors sought a permanent home for their displays.17 Drawing on their considerable economic and political resources, in less than a year they were able to fi nd eight hundred thousand marks to erect a new building to house the ex“Beiträge zur Geschichte des Übersee-Museums” (1967), 29, 71. The cotton exhibit is described on 24. 16. “Das Parkhaus am Hoffersee” (1890). 17. This search for a permanent home for exhibition displays was common among both regional and world exhibitions and often formed the impetus for gifts to existing public museums or even the founding of new museums in the late nineteenth century. See Woerner, Vergnügung und Belehrung (1999), chapter 6, “ ‘Kulturmuseum der Menschheit,’— Weltausstellung und Museumswesen,” 237–301, which clearly establishes this link for ethnographic and historical displays and museums.

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hibits together with the existing city collections of natural history and ethnography. As Buchenau noted, not without bitterness, “It was once again clear that in Bremen anything can be carried out if the tradesmen are interested (whereas other useful efforts have a hard time and often sink into oblivion.)” 18 Representatives of the merchant class were not the only ones to serve on the organizing committee of the 1890 trade exhibition. Buchenau, then secretary of the Scientific Association, lent his assistance, which included his experience from the 1865 trade fair. Hugo Schauinsland (1857–1937), the young zoologist who was the new director of the city collections, also served. It was evidently Schauinsland who persuaded the tobacco merchant Christoph Papendieck, head of the overall trade exhibition’s organizing committee and leader of the move to establish a museum of commerce thereafter, to unite this proposed museum with the other city collections, “to create one large common museum, which instead of two smaller institutes would become a major center of public education.” 19 It was Schauinsland who embraced the spectacular style of the trade fair and thought its exhibits could be readily transferred into a museum with educational and scientific intent. And it was Schauinsland who created a plan for the museum that would encompass its natural historical, ethnographic, and commercial collections and draw them into a single, unified vision. Schauinsland spelled out his conception in a printed letter to the senate dated 8 October 1891, just a year after the exhibition closed. Emphasizing the need to balance science and public education—“in a city like Bremen, the scientific side must not be overemphasized”—he sketched out a plan he argued would satisfy both. He would reorganize the exhibits from the trade exhibition into two different forms. One set of exhibits would unite the ethnographic and trade objects into geographic clusters, so that “the viewer can initially orient himself via the ethnographic objects to their culture, while through the trade articles he can learn about their potential for production or export trade. The ethnographic objects and the products should together create an overall image of the country (which might be strengthened by appropriate animal and plant groups 18. Franz Buchenau, “Lebenserinnerungen,” excerpted in Korn, Hanseatische Gewerbeausstellungen (1999), 206–7, quotation on 206. Half the funds came from private sources (including the local savings bank, which offered 237,000 marks); these were then matched by the city. 19. Ibid.

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that would reveal the character and climate of the land still more.)” 20 Although he did not mention it, he was drawing on the geographicethnographic model presented in the trade exhibition. The other, more “scientific” exhibit form would show the staple goods of Bremen trade “on their own terms.” This “systematic” approach would treat these goods as different kinds, removed from their original surroundings, and show the processes of extraction and transformation into consumer articles of trade. 21 Again, it is clear that at least to some extent this was already being undertaken with a few goods at the trade fair of 1890. Schauinsland applied the same twofold structure of geographicpopular exhibits and scientific-technical ones to the natural history section of the museum as well—indeed, it seems plausible that this double schema actually derived from his ideas about natural history displays. The “scientific” collection was already there, in the traditional systematic collections. The most important of these, such as the large and distinguished bird collection, would be placed on display, while the rest would be kept in storage, in keeping with the vogue for dividing exhibition and research collections. New biological group exhibits, which Schauinsland described as “popular” in contrast to “scientific,” would be added to parallel the geographic exhibits of trade and ethnography. Further characterizing the biological group as a “true-to-life” presentation that emphasized an animal’s utility or harmfulness, or that was “otherwise notable in some way, e.g., through its nest building, its beautiful coloration, its care for young, or through mimicry,” Schauinsland advocated using this form both to give the public a better understanding of the animal itself “and to clarify their connections to the rest of nature and to man.” 22 In adopting biological groups, Schauinsland rendered Bremen’s museum one of the fi rst public museums in Germany to present them as a tool of general education. But Schauinsland’s brilliant unifying idea lay not only in the consistent use of this dual organizational principle across the different depart20. Schauinsland to Herrn Senator Dr. Barkhausen, Bremen, 8. Oct. 1891, in Staatsarchiv Bremen, Acta betr. die Errichtung eines städtischen Museums für Natur-, Völker- und Handelskunde, dessen Bau und Einrichtung, auch Einsetzung einer besonderen Behörde für die Verwaltung desselben etc. 1890 Juni 13–1896 Juni 6. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid.

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ments of the museum. It also lay in the idea that this museum, with its diverse range of objects and collections, actually represented the chief kinds of knowledge that a young future businessman needed to know. In this way, ethnography and natural history became adjuncts to commerce (which accurately reflected the power structure of the city’s culture). As Schauinsland put it at the museum’s opening on 15 January 1896, “Through the chosen exhibition of ethnography and commercial products—which, to be sure, are distinct from one another but not completely separate—the young businessman in particular should be able to create a picture fi rst of the cultural means of a country (or of a people) in which he is perhaps interested, and then in a different part of the building to inform himself as well of its productive capacity.” 23 Or as he would emphasize in 1903, “Here one will see how Bremen brings up her sons for world trade.” 24 Scientific analysis would be a critical part of that upbringing, but as a handmaiden to commerce. The plan Schaunsland presented in his 1891 letter was largely realized, and as his later remarks suggest, Handelskunde became the museum’s core theme, absorbing the rest. As much as he hoped the museum would inspire its visitors to take a scientific approach to increasing knowledge, its mission quickly became primarily one of instructing the uninitiated through vivid exhibits and only secondarily about furthering research. Yet even Schauinsland, who so enthusiastically embraced the spectacle of the group display form, did not want his museum to be mistaken for a pure entertainment venue. When the architect in charge of building the museum returned a plan to make a glass-and-iron construction for the new building, echoing the Crystal Palace and other major exhibition buildings, Schauinsland objected strongly. Such a building was vulnerable to hailstorms, expensive to heat, and destructive to the collections with its excess of light and lack of control of humidity. Worst of all, however, was the tone set by these building materials, which everyone associated with the frivolity of temporary exhibitions, not serious museums. “Even if a city museum in Bremen exists primarily to teach and stimulate the broad public, it must nevertheless not lose the character of a scientific institute,” Schaunsland admonished the architect. No mu-

23. “Eröffnung des städtischen Museums” (1900), 219. 24. “Hier wird man gewahr, wie Bremen seine Söhne zum Welthandel erzieht.” Schauinsland, “Das Städtische Museum” (1904), 30.

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figure 7.2. Bremen Museum für Natur-, Völker- und Handelskunde, interior. From Übersee-Museum Bremen, photograph P12226.

seum in Germany, and possibly in Europe, had chosen such insubstantial materials for a permanent institution of science, and it would not do.25 Schauinsland had his way. The new museum that opened in 1896 on the Bahnhofplatz was a colossal three-story building with an imposingly heavy facade. Inside, it was structured like many other museums of the time, with broad galleries surrounding a central atrium (figure 7.2). In the main hall were displayed the large, eye-catching ethnographic group scenes, including in the center the Battak-Haus shown at the trade exhibition. The Mexican rider scene also made the transition, and a Chi25. Schauinsland to Oberbaudirektor Franzius, Bremen, 15. Sept. 1891, in Staatsarchiv Bremen, Acta betr. die Errichtung eines städtischen Museums für Natur-, Völker- und Handelskunde, dessen Bau und Einrichtung, auch Einsetzung einer besonderen Berhörde für die Verwaltung desselben etc. 1890 Juni 13–1896 Juni 6. In the case of the Berlin Ethnology Museum in 1901, it was the curator, Adolf Bastian, who proposed a glass-and-iron construction, which was then rejected by the state as unserious. Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism (2001), 178–79.

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nese pavilion (perhaps the one that had ornamented the lake at the trade fair) now dominated the back wall. 26 Nearby, other cases displayed ethnographic materials in “systematic” fashion. Around the outer edges of the ground floor the viewer could fi nd the geographic commercial exhibits, showing “what the various lands produce,” with emphasis on the products important to Bremen—tobacco, rice, petroleum, and cotton. These exhibits showed the raw form of the product and how it was cultivated, extracted, and transported. The “systematic” trade samples were relegated to the second-story gallery, which also showed the ways the extracted raw materials were transformed into consumer goods. “There one can, for example, follow how from the raw material of glass a wine bottle, a beer glass, a window pane, an optical lens, or a Venetian pearl originates; how one makes paper out of rags or wood, linoleum out of cork and linseed oil, soap from fat and lye.” 27 The fi rst floor housed the public natural history exhibits. It presented highlights from the systematic collections and some displays of large skeletons, including a whale and an elephant. It also included the biological group displays, which Schauinsland often called Lebensgemeinschaften. As was rapidly becoming the practice in natural history museums, the initial biological groups emphasized local fauna, such as a fox family outside its den and the profusion of life on a muddy riverbank. After Schauinsland voyaged to the Pacific in 1896–97, exotic groups that drew on his research and collecting appeared as well, such as “Bird Life on Laysan” and the symbiotic Lebensgemeinschaft of the stormy petrel and the tuatara lizard on Stephens Island in New Zealand (figure 7.3). 28 As Schauinsland emphasized in a 1903 speech, such non-European biological groups were displayed only where they represented a particular pedagogical idea or were important because of their rarity, and these included only scenes that he himself had actually observed, thus providing authentication of their truthfulness. 29 The representation of nature was not confi ned to these biological displays and the “raw materials” displays in the trade section. The basement housed an aquarium (traditionally placed at ground level to help regulate the water temperature and to avoid flooding), which 26. “Das neue städtische Museum für Natur-, Völker- und Handelskunde in Bremen” (1896); Abel, Vom Raritätenkabinett zum Bremer Überseemuseum (1970), 71. 27. Schauinsland, “Das Städtische Museum” (1904), 30. 28. See Schauinsland, Unterwegs in Übersee (1999), esp. 80–84. 29. Schauinsland, “Das Städtische Museum” (1904), 31.

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figure 7.3. “Lebensgemeinschaft of the Nearly Extinct, Remarkable Tuatara Lizard (Sphenodon punctatum Gray) with the Stormy Petrel on Stephens Island, New Zealand,” in Zur Geschichte des städtischen Museums für Natur- Völker- und Handelskunde zu Bremen (Bremen: Heilig & Bartels, 1928), 14. Original photo, Übersee-Museum Bremen, photograph P20609.

by 1903 was being used to demonstrate artificial fish culture. By 1903 as well, other, more scientifically specialized rooms of the museum would include sections devoted to botany, geology and paleontology, the peat bog (a local land type important to the agricultural economy of the area), and local prehistory. A separate room housed the models of the “correction of the Weser,” the giant civil engineering project to straighten and deepen the river running through Bremen, which long dominated the local landscape. At least some of these models had been exhibited in the 1890 exhibition. 30 Finally, the museum also con30. “Das neue städtische Museum für Natur-, Völker- und Handelskunde in Bremen” (1896); Schauinsland, “Das Städtische Museum” (1904); Luhrs, “Vor hundert Jahren” (1990), 14, mentions the “Weser correction” models at the Gewerbeausstellung. It is worth noting that Christoph Papendieck, the chief organizer of the Gewerbeausstellung, was an active and enthusiastic promoter of the Weser correction. Korn, Hanseatische Gewerbeausstellungen (1999), 139 n. 427. The Weser correction was a major engineering feat designed to deepen the Weser to allow large ships further upriver and to control its level for both flooding and drought. Not only did the models of it help render the museum more

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tained meeting rooms for the Scientific Association and the Geographical Society. 31 In Bremen, then, the biological groups can be understood as fitting into two different axes of the museum concept. First, as an exhibition type, they echoed the ethnographic scenes that formed the new visual heart of the museum. Both offered a glimpse into the ordinary, “typical” lives of beings that the visitor was unlikely to know fi rsthand. Second, as a way of conceiving of nature, the biological groups represented just one of several versions present in the museum, for nature appeared differently elsewhere: in the systematic exhibits as specimens for taxonomic science, in the ethnographic groups as scenery, in exhibits of global trade and manufactures as raw material that would be processed into valueadded products, and in presentations showing how the landscape around Bremen was molded by advanced human skills (peat bogs worked by local farmers, the artificial fish culture displayed in the basement aquarium, and the “corrections” of the Weser). In 1911, when a new wing opened, the theme of control over nature was sharpened, especially via the contrast between “primitives” and Germans. In the shipping and navigation exhibit, for example, model boats of primitive peoples were contrasted to models of “modern” vessels of the navy and merchant marine sponsored by the Weser joint-stock company. Similarly, the fisheries exhibit in the basement had expanded to include not only the most modern fishing ships and equipment but also displays of the modes of fishing of primitive peoples. 32 The contrast between the methods and products of German industry, at the peak of civilization, and those of the primitive peoples had always been there, of course, at least back to the trade exhibition of 1890, 33 but the new exhibits drew out the contrasts more explicitly than ever before. While other images of nature remained on display, one dominated: nature as a pliable raw material, whose degree of transformation by human hands demonstrated the level of advancement of a culture. The same local power structure that shaped the presentation of nature in the museum’s exhibits also shaped the underlying model of knowllocal, but it also brought home again the view of nature as a raw “resource” to be manipulated by humans. 31. Beyer, “Bremens jungste Bildungsstätte” (1896). 32. Weissenborn, “Das Städtische Museum” (1912), 148. 33. Ciarlo, “Consuming Race, Envisioning Empire” (2003), emphasizes this implicit contrast esp. on 38–39.

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edge production. Lacking an established scientific scholarly community, Bremen needed to appeal to a wide set of publics to make a successful museum. Wissenschaft was supported, as represented by the taxonomically organized research collections and by the pride Bremers took in the collecting expeditions undertaken by scientists connected with the museum. 34 Indeed, the inclusion of spaces in the museum for the Scientific Association and the Geographical Society—two of the most serious scientific bodies in Bremen—also indicates support for research and its trappings (papers and publications) as part of the museum’s task. But Wissenschaft alone would not suffice; to attract support for the scientific side of the museum required expanding the Kunde side and, indeed, allowing it to dominate. In Bremen, the biological groups signified this balance of power. The functionalism of the biological group exhibit—showing the adaptation of animals to their settings—slipped seamlessly into the functionalism of the trader, in which natural objects became commodities for use and commerce. By setting up its ideal visitor as a prospective merchant, the Bremen museum presented nature— and culture—through the eyes of the global trader.

The Altona City Museum (1901) and Heimatkunde If the Bremen museum taught its visitors how to view the world like a cosmopolitan trader, the Altona museum, which opened in 1901, taught its visitors to see their homeland and its culture as an integrated unit. Whereas Schauinsland found a way to mold a multiplicity of preexisting collections into a unified whole in Bremen, Otto Lehmann, the Altona museum director from 1899 to his retirement in 1931, relentlessly followed his own vision for a museum. 35 That he was able to impose his will 34. For example, Schauinsland was granted a fourteen-month leave in 1896 to travel to the South Pacific, where he collected botanical, zoological, and ethnographic specimens. The city contributed a sum to support his trip, which was mainly funded by the Prussian Academy of Sciences, the Verein zur Errichtung eines Handelsmuseums, the Norddeutsche Lloyd fi rm, and a private donation by the wealthy businessman Carl Schütte. The collections from this trip resulted in some fi fty publications. For another example, the Bremenborn merchant Bernhard Schmacker, a resident of Shanghai, left a large sum in his will to fund a malacologist to serve his important shell collection, which he also donated to the museum. Abel, Vom Raritätenkabinett zum Bremer Überseemuseum (1970), 75–79. 35. The Altona museum was so much Lehmann’s creation that a recent history of the museum was titled In Ottos Kopf [In Otto’s head]—a reference to a passage in Lehmann’s autobiography in which he wrote that, although it was nowhere written down, he had the

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so fully speaks to the power newly acquired by curators at the turn of the century, as well as to the considerable fi nancial support he was able to marshal from the city. The overwhelming success of the museum’s displays of nature, traditional arts and crafts, and home interiors and costumes made it a model Heimat museum. Lehmann offered a signature weaving of nature and culture and their studies, Naturkunde and Volkskunde, into the seamless fabric of Heimatkunde. Within this mesh, biological groups held a central position. But the Altona museum was not born entirely out of Lehmann’s head. It had a significant prehistory, in which Altona’s geographic location played an important role. From 1866, when Altona was formally incorporated into Prussia, until 1937, when it was incorporated into the city of Hamburg, Altona was part of the province of Schleswig-Holstein. Just downstream from Hamburg’s sprawling port on the river Elbe, Altona was economically dominated by the independent city-state. After 1866 the official political culture was Prussian, while the local culture was distinctively northern, with strong Danish and low German allegiances. 36 Creating a local museum under these circumstances immediately raised problems of what “local” culture was to be emphasized. Like many city museums, the Altona museum started out at midcentury without a strongly developed collecting agenda. When the museum association was founded in 1863, its aim was to collect artifacts and “reminiscences” of local history, along with scientific and ethnological materials. The initial collection built on the coins, medals, naturalia, and ethnographic objects collected since the mid-1850s by a privately run Sunday school for craftsmen and artists, and the museum retained this institution’s orientation toward the educated worker, with free opening hours and an emphasis on collecting the people’s history—although repeated efforts to get the city to set up an industrial school and museum in the same building, in the manner of the South Kensington museum, failed. 37 whole scheme for the museum in his head before he became director. (Lehmann, “Aus meinem Leben,” typescript, in Altona Museum archives, 65); Hinrichsen, In Ottos Kopf (2001). Lehmann’s biography below comes from these sources. 36. Although they were part of Schleswig-Holstein, Altonensers lived on the Hamburg side of the customs boundary separating the city from Schleswig-Holstein, and so their economic fortunes were tied to that of the free city more closely than to the province. See Lehmann, “Aus meinem Leben,” esp. 168–80. On life at the customs border, see Lehmann, “Aus meinem Leben,” esp. 1–12. 37. On the early history of the museum, see Wietek, Das Altonaer Museum (1963). See also document by Pastor Schaar dated 14 August 1867 and an undated manuscript in the

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After a bustling start, interest in the museum, and accessions to it, died down until the early 1890s, when the mayor placed himself at the head of a new city-run museum commission. His idea was for the museum to focus on the “narrower and wider Heimat”—the city of Altona, the province of Schleswig-Holstein, and the Prussian state—to develop broader allegiances that did not have deep roots in the local culture. With support from two prominent commission members who were collectors, plans moved ahead to build a large building to house two main collections, in natural history and cultural history. By the end of 1896 the commission decided to budget for a full-time museum administrator to look after the collections and oversee the building’s construction. In late 1897, the secondary school teacher Otto Lehmann was hired as an “assistant” (Hülfsarbeiter) to curate both collections; in 1899 he was officially appointed as the museum’s director, a position he would hold for the next thirty-two years. 38 Lehmann was a loyal Altonenser. The son of a Prussian customs official, he had moved there as a seven-year-old. After graduating from the Realgymnasium there, he attended the university at Jena, where he completed a dissertation under Ernst Haeckel in 1887; he then studied further at Halle, where he was especially taken with the teachings of the historicist-environmentalist geographer Alfred Kirchhoff, best known for his efforts in promoting and reforming school geography. Having passed the state teaching exam in 1889, he returned to his former secondary school in Altona, where he taught science and mathematics for a decade before he was appointed director of the museum. Like many secondary schools oriented away from humanistic learning and toward the “real world” in the 1880s and 1890s, the school where Lehmann taught was known for what he called its “look and learn” approach. Lehmann enhanced this in his science teaching by having his students take regular meteorological measurements, go on field trips to the countryside, and cultivate a school garden, much in the same manner as Friedrich Junge and other advocates of hands-on science learning. In his off-hours, he pursued his scientific interests, working through a collection of crustaceans lent to him for identification by Georg Pfeffer at the nearby Hamburg natural history museum. Through this work he was

same hand following it in Altonaer Museum Archives, 21.1.2.3: Sammlung des öffentlichen Museums in Altona, 1867–1869. 38. Wietek, Das Altonaer Museum (1963), 10–12.

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led to the existing Altona museum, where he spent his Sunday mornings with the museum commission members, working on new methods of displaying butterfl ies in groups and talking over the possibilities for a more ambitious museum. The museum commission of the 1890s had imagined that cultural history and folklife would dominate the collections. Lehmann’s academic background in biology and geography led him to organize the museum instead with nature at its heart. Where Schauinsland placed ethnographic group exhibits on the main floor of his museum, Lehmann set biological groups front and center. In 1903, he rehearsed his views on the purposes of museums and the role of biological groups in them at a pioneering conference on “museums as sites of popular education”—itself a sign of the newly professionalized task of museum curatorship. There he spoke to an audience familiar with the museum reforms promulgated by his Hamburg neighbors Justus Brinckmann, who had founded the Hamburg Museum of Arts and Crafts, and Alfred Lichtwark (keynote speaker at the conference), who had reformed the Hamburg Art Museum; both sought to elevate the aesthetic sensibilities of the working class. Following in this vein, Lehmann argued that the broad aim of the Altona museum was to teach “the people” how to see—how to look thoughtfully at objects, whether of nature or culture, to take in their meaning, and to appreciate their beauty. For such a project, the visitors had to want to see, and to that end a homely scene, whether of a peasant’s kitchen, a waxwork family dressed in traditional local costumes, or a beaver building its lodge, was far more gripping than a “scientifically” organized array of cooking pots, dresses, or stuffed rodents. That is, what was appropriate to display to such an audience was, as Lehmann put it, not “knowledge [Wissen] but living, fruitful views [Anschauungen] of nature.” As he repeated later on, with specific reference to the museum’s natural history section, “It is not the intention simply to convey a certain quantity of facts, but to educate the museum’s visitors into thinking humans; they should become accustomed to observing, in order to understand nature.” 39 To exemplify his pedagogy, Lehmann described an exhibit he had designed that depicted a group of moose (European elk) being attacked by a pack of wolves (figure 7.4). “The way that the wolf hunts is expressed 39. Lehmann, “Das Altonaer Museum” (1904), 37, 41. For a similar view, see Schauinsland, “Das Städtische Museum” (1904), 30.

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figure 7.4. Moose (European elk) and wolf exhibit, Altonaer Museum, 1901. From Otto Lehmann, Festschrift zur Eröffnung des Altonaer Museums (Altona, 1901), 14.

in these animals; the breathless hounding by the attacking animal” is present to the careful observer, as are the doe’s defensive movements, the buck’s turn of the antlers, and the dull bewilderment of the background animal. According to Lehmann, the group scene presented a far better picture of the natural history of the moose than a single mounted moose itself. The visual information offered by the group display was enhanced by the accompanying label, which, in keeping with the historicist and nostalgic tenor of the museum as a whole, explained that moose had been common in the German primeval forest in Caesar’s time, but the last wild one had been caught in 1746; the last wild wolf in central Germany was shot in 1838.40 Over the next few years, Lehmann would become perhaps Germany’s most outspoken advocate of the museum as a site for educating the masses (often called by Germans the “American” approach to the public museum) and its signature exhibit form, the biological group. Americans made their museums for all the people, Lehmann argued, not just 40. Lehmann, “Das Altonaer Museum” (1904), 42–43.

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some of them. And so should German museums—which, after all, were largely paid for through taxes collected from the entire citizenry. Rather than leaving the working man, who had not had the time to learn the background knowledge necessary to understand traditional exhibits, on his own to figure them out or not, the museum official should work to make the exhibits transparent, and biological groups were the way to do this. As he put it, biological group exhibits would convey to naive visitors a quantity of information about causal relationships that would otherwise be mystifying: “see, here the animal lives under these conditions— thus must it seek its food—these enemies threaten it—thus must it protect itself from them—and now all at once the form is understandable” and lively.41 To Lehmann, it was important that the display of activity be both realistic and visually and emotionally charged. Dramatic scenes allowed abstract scientific concepts like “the struggle for existence” or “the conditions of existence” to be grasped by the masses at the intuitive level of Anschauung, or the direct perception of real objects; the use of drama could also help develop the aesthetic sensibilities. At the same time, he also developed a new, sparer aesthetic for his biological groups. Like many other museum educators in Germany and beyond, Lehmann shuddered at what he called the “horribilia” of elaborately faked woodlands or flower-fi lled fields.42 He advocated a minimalist, dull-colored background with just a few suggestions of the physical setting that kept the attention focused on the animals and their behavioral interactions—the essentials that he was trying to convey.43 To allow visitors to study the exhibit closely, he preferred open, free-standing group displays that visitors could walk around, rather than placing the animals in the more theatrical diorama-style glass-fronted niche. This choice entailed dispensing with any expensive background painting, and also distanced the display visually from the stage-mounted style of contemporary commercial displays, which frequently placed the figures before a painted backdrop or a theater-like curtain.44 Lehmann’s biological groups aroused controversy. His wolf and moose exhibit came under attack for being based on imagination rather 41. Lehmann, “Biologische Museen” (1906), 62. 42. For parallel concerns in America, see Wonders, Habitat Dioramas (1993), 118. 43. Lehmann, “Biologische Museen” (1906), 64. 44. See illustrations in Schwartz, Spectacular Realities (1998); König and Ortenau, Panoptikum (1962).

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than fact (since both animals were now extinct) and for being misleading, since it could readily be inferred that the wolves had caused the moose’s extinction in Germany, which was not true.45 More generally, according to his leading critic, the biological group embodied all the aesthetic and educational pitfalls of the New Museum Idea, and the critic looked with longing back to the good old days when museums were organized for research. The dispute rippled outward to other museum men, extending over more than two years, and highlights the place of biological groups in tensions between old and new in the museum.46 Lehmann was hardly anti-science, however. In fact, if one of his chief early goals was to elevate the aesthetic sensibilities of the visitors, increasingly he also meant for his museum to instantiate a new, scientific approach to Heimatkunde. By 1900, Heimatkunde was an increasingly popular pursuit in Schleswig-Holstein, as elsewhere, especially among elementary school teachers. Though sympathetic to the collecting impulses of local Heimatkundlers, and certainly willing to trade on their interests in collecting for the museum, Lehmann was dismayed by the lack of system they displayed.47 Just as evolutionary science proceeded from the inductive building-up and comparison of forms, Heimatkunde could become a true science only by applying a similar method. In his travels around Schleswig-Holstein beginning in the 1890s, Lehmann sought to gather evidence from material culture of the differences characteristic of local “types” of people. The regional construction of farmhouses became one of his central interests, as he mapped particular house construction styles to particular locations, associating them with ethnic variations among the highly localized populations of areas within Schleswig-Holstein such as East Friesland, Dithmarschen, Vierland, and Wilstermarsch. The sciences of Volkskunde and Landeskunde thus consisted in comparing and differentiating types of material culture— traditional clothing, fishing boats, pottery, and farmhouses—linking them 45. Wandolleck, “Die Aufgabe der Museen” (1906), 645. 46. Lehmann, “Die Aufgabe der Museen: Erwiderung” (1907); Wandolleck, “Die Aufgabe der Museen. Ein letztes Wort” (1907); Dahl, Kurze Anleitung zum wissenschaftlichen Sammeln (1908); Fritze, “Biologische Gruppen” (1907); Dahl, “Das zoologische Museum als Mittel zur Volksbelehrung” (1909). For a more detailed discussion of the dispute, see Nyhart, “Science, Art, and Authenticity” (2004). 47. Christiansen, “Die Heimat” (1980). Rather than cater wholly to the desires of laymen to donate “unscientifically” collected goods, Lehmann was willing to reject numerous gifts to the museum that did not fit into his agendas for research and display. “Aus meinem Leben,” 91.

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to particular regions within Schleswig-Holstein, and linking these in turn with human racial/ethnographic populations. The museum provided the main venue for Lehmann to press his case. By 1914, the museum could devote an entire room to scale models of some twenty-five different local farmhouse types (all carefully built to the same scale of 1:20), with the roofs partially open so that the underlying construction could be viewed. These were keyed to a map showing the regional location of each and accompanied by landscape paintings illustrating the local scenery. In floors above the farmhouse models one could visit seventeen different local farmhouse room interiors showing “typical” furniture, tools, ornaments, and costumes, each room associated with a local ethnic variation.48 Lehmann’s approach to Volkskunde may appropriately be viewed as a transfer to human material culture of the comparative and evolutionary methods he had learned as a zoologist. But the relations between nature and culture here are deeper, for Lehmann followed his onetime teacher Alfred Kirchhoff in viewing the development of a people’s culture as intimately tied to the forms of the land upon which it lived. Each different landscape, including the houses in it, the way the land was cultivated, and the people who lived there, formed “a unique closed picture.” Thus, developing an idea that went back to the Enlightenment, Lehmann presented the landscape as coming fi rst, determining what sorts of agriculture and industry were possible, which in turn shaped the choices people made in structuring their barns, houses, and buildings.49 Lehmann developed and strengthened this idea over time, and as Uwe Claassen has noted, it is most fully expressed in the reorganization of the museum upon its expansion and reopening in 1914. 50 Here Lehmann expressed the ways culture grew out of nature through the organization of the floors, with the ground floor devoted to geology and ocean studies, the main floor to nature, and the upper floor with its surrounding galleries to human material culture. Such a layered view of the world, in which physical nature precedes and determines the forms of living nature, which in turn produces (and constrains) culture, appeared in other unified museums at the time as well: the Märkisches Museum, which opened in 1908 in Berlin as the Heimat museum for the Mark Brandenburg (the region surrounding Berlin), led visitors through a series of 48. Claassen, “Ein Rundgang durch die kulturgeschichtlich-volkskundliche Abteilung” (2001). 49. Lehmann, “Aus Meinem Leben,” 64–65, quotation on 64. 50. Claassen, “Die kulturgeschichtlich-volkskundliche Abteilung” (2001).

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rooms that similarly developed a progressive narrative moving from land to living nature to culture. Nor was this schema unique to German museums, as unified museums in other lands developed similar presentations of nature. 51 This deeply environmentally determinist schema was tempered in Lehmann’s version by his growing commitment to heredity as a factor shaping culture. A relatively early fan of Mendelian heredity, in 1913 he corresponded with Professor Kametaro Toyama at Imperial University in Tokyo, hoping to reproduce the results of the professor’s breeding experiments with silkworms, whose larvae, cocoons, and moths clearly illustrated the Mendelian rules. Although there is no evidence that Toyama replied to him, in the room titled “Origin of Species,” which opened in 1914, a wall case used moths to demonstrate Mendel’s rules, while another one used moths and beetles to show, respectively, variability in color and in form. 52 The power of heredity in humans was equally strong, Lehmann thought. In 1929 he wrote that living beings, including humanity, could be understood as tracing a “curve” whose shape was determined by a combination of environment and heredity. “Thus, the people in a particular geographic environment [Lebensraum] appear as a population, into which continually new, perhaps even immortal hereditary factors adapt themselves, whose manifestations of life—mental, bodily, economic, or however they may be—follow a curve that is influenced by the environment. With all the phenomena of Volkskunde, whether they concern a song or a fairy tale, folk dance, house construction, food, clothing, or whatever else, we inquire after the determining causes of the phenomena, and [we] hope, through the largest possible number of individual phenomena, fi nally to fi nd the law governing the path of the curve.” 53 For Lehmann, heredity served as an independent variable that 51. On the Märkisches Museum, see Nyhart, “Die Umgestaltung der musealen Naturgeschichte” (2001). In Britain, as early as 1877, W. Boyd Dawkins recommended a standard schema that progressed from mineralogy through paleontology, botany, zoology, human anatomy, and ethnology up to art. Dawkins, “The Organisation of Natural History Museums” (1877). Progressive-developmental schemas beginning with a geological foundation were present in European culture even before Darwin’s theory gave them a new foundation: see Bronn, Handbuch einer Geschichte der Natur (1841–49); and Chambers, Vestiges (1994). 52. Lehmann to Mr. Kametaro Toyama, 9 August 1913, in Altonaer Museum Archives, 21.7.16.1: Naturwissenschaft, Fauna und Flora. 53. Lehmann, “Die volkskundliche Aufgabe der Heimatmuseen,” Museumskunde, N.F., 1 (1929): 51, quoted in Claassen, “Die kulturgeschichtlich-volkskundliche Abteilung” (2001), 96.

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helped to explain anomalies. By his logic, locations with similar landscapes and similar economies should yield similar housing types. The problem, then, was how to explain instances in which the farmhouses failed to conform to environmentalist expectations. Normally, a housing type could be identified with a particular ethnic type (which also evolved originally in relation to a particular landscape). If the house failed to conform to the environment, then that anomaly would be explained by the migration of a person or small population associated with the anomalous housing type, who brought it in from elsewhere, along with other characteristic hereditary signs. By introducing the component of heredity, then, Lehmann succeeded in reducing culture to a combination of two biological determinisms: heredity and physical environment. Despite the abundance of technological objects, period rooms, and costumes displayed at the museum, culture, in the modern sense of traditions that might be passed on through practice and the cultivation of memory, had no place in his scheme. In Lehmann’s museum, then, the functional-causal approach of the new biology permeated all levels, both physical and figurative. At the level of individual exhibits, biological groups expressed relations among animals in ways that the casual visitor could recognize. At the broader level of the unity of the museum, nature became the foundation for culture—not in a vague way but as a determinative force: folk culture was simply a product of heredity and environment, and the artifacts of the museum were clues that could lead the investigator backward to understanding the relative effects of these factors in shaping the “traditional” lives of the people. Like Bremen’s museum, Altona’s was primarily a Kunde museum, yet here, too, commitments to both Kunde and Wissenschaft were present. As a museum dedicated to the preservation and representation of folk culture and the natural history of the province, Lehmann’s museum depended deeply and essentially on the participation of storytellers, collectors, antiques dealers, and preservers of traditional practices (such as spinning and weaving) across Schleswig-Holstein. In his autobiography, Lehmann acknowledged the many contributions of individuals, especially local museum directors and schoolteachers, who dedicated their leisure hours to the collection and study of their local material culture. Nothing of this was written down in books, Lehmann wrote—all the knowledge and material associated with it had to be collected from peo-

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ple. 54 This was the “Kunde” part of “Heimatkunde.” At the same time, Lehmann’s entire thrust toward system—creating a taxonomy of housing types and correlating them to ethnic types, for example—spoke of science in a more traditional sense, and his willingness to refuse gifts about whose authenticity he had doubts, or ones that did not fit into his scheme of things, reflects the more stringent standards of the Wissenschaftler. 55 Visitors to the museum might have participated in collecting the materials, but their organization and presentation was to be the work of professionals.

The Museum für Meereskunde (1906) The Museum für Meereskunde, the third museum analyzed in this chapter, was founded in 1900 and opened in 1906 as a highly atypical part of the University of Berlin, a museum representing the public face of a new university institute. Although the direct academic connection made it significantly different from Altona and Bremen, it shared two central features with these museums. First, like them, it represented a Kunde project. If the central unifying themes for the Bremen and Altona museums were, respectively, Handelskunde (commercial studies) and Heimatkunde (the study of the homeland), this museum’s theme was Meereskunde, or ocean studies. Just as the unified museums of Bremen and Altona brought together the various facets of their subject under one roof, presenting an encyclopedic combination of physical and biological nature, culture, and technology, so too did the Museum für Meereskunde. It was dedicated to promoting a total science of the sea that would encompass physical oceanography, naval science and navigation, the technology and culture of fishing, and the study of ocean and coastal life. 56 Second, in its substantial exhibit section on marine biology, it embraced the form of the biological group, lending this exhibit form further credibility through its association with a university institute. The biological section of the museum was organized geographically and ecologi54. Lehmann, “Aus meinem Leben,”esp. 56–64. 55. Ibid., 91. 56. On the holism of ocean science, see Schlee, The Edge of an Unfamiliar World (1973); and Schefbeck, Die österreichisch-ungarischen Tiefsee-Expedition (1991), 24–26. On the history of the Museum für Meereskunde see Probst, “Das Institut” (1996).

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cally, using biological groups to depict the effects of climate and physical conditions on the life groupings there. Although the pedagogical assumptions about visual learning were undoubtedly similar to those of Schauinsland and Lehmann, the more explicitly scientific agenda that stood in the foreground was tied to a different set of assumptions and concerns regarding nature, scientific knowledge, and the public. Whereas the Altona museum showed its visitors the ways in which a vanishing “traditional” life derived from the local landscape, and Bremen offered the prospective tradesman a chance to see the world he might someday visit on business, the biological exhibits of the Museum für Meereskunde connected its visitors to a distant larger world they were never likely to experience directly. Rather than focusing the viewer’s attention on dramatic scenes of animal behavior, as did Lehmann’s controversial wolf and moose exhibit, these displays emphasized the relations of animals to their physical environment, placing animals in scenery but not necessarily posing them in any visually obvious way as engaging with other animals. And rather than seeking mainly to evoke a visceral or intuitive connection to the drama of nature as a means of elevating the viewer’s aesthetic sensibilities, these exhibits worked to legitimate a new science through the reconstruction of the sites of its research. Indeed, the museum guide made a point of noting that scenes such as that of a coral reef on the Red Sea (figure 7.5) and the South Pole (figure 7.6) represented distant places where marine scientists pursuing their new research agenda had actually gone to study, places that could not be represented by living creatures in zoos or aquariums because of their delicate or extreme living requirements. 57 The active pursuit of research at the Museum für Meereskunde illustrates its intermediate place between the populist Kunde projects and the scholarly mission of the more traditional natural history museums. Whereas Bremen and Altona were city-funded museums that needed to appeal directly to their citizens, the Museum für Meereskunde was supported by the deep pockets of the Prussian crown, and its status as part of the university meant that it did not have to appeal directly to the public to survive. As we will see, the role of the public in the institutional life of this museum was quite different from that at Bremen and Altona. But it also differed from that of the Berlin Museum für Naturkunde, which, like the new museum, was officially part of the university. 57. Führer durch das Museum für Meereskunde in Berlin (1907), 97–98.

figure 7.5. Coral reef exhibit, Museum für Meereskunde, Berlin. From Führer durch das Museum für Meereskunde in Berlin (1913), 27.

figure 7.6. South Pole diorama, Museum für Meereskunde, Berlin. From Führer durch das Museum für Meereskunde in Berlin (1907), 108.

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To be sure, like the Naturkunde of the older Berlin museum, Meereskunde had both an academic face, represented by the institute, and a public one, represented by the museum. But unlike the fields pulled together in the natural history museum (mineralogy, geology and paleontology, and zoology), Meereskunde was new science at the turn of the century. The Museum für Meereskunde was aimed as much at promoting this new science to the public as at promoting ocean studies as a scholarly endeavor. The location of the new museum, on the Georgenstrasse, across from the Friedrichstrasse train station and a block away from the main university building, aided in this promotional aim: the museum was readily accessible to tourists visiting Berlin’s other major downtown cultural attractions—the “museum island,” the university, the opera, and the commercial panopticons. (In contrast, the Museum für Naturkunde had relatively few visitors, largely because of its awkward location on the Invalidenstrasse near the newer scientific and medical institutes, distant from any touristic sites.) The importance of the public relations aspect of the oceanography museum and institute went deeper, however, than simply promoting a new science. The museum aimed to convince inland dwellers that the ocean was part of their German identity. From the very start, the scholarly aim of promoting the new science of the oceans was wedded to the political goal of getting citizens to accept the kaiser’s ambition to make Germany a global naval power. Like the museums in Altona and Bremen, then, the Museum für Meereskunde represented a union of interests. One set comprised those of the imperial navy and the kaiser himself, who wanted to establish a naval museum. Initially such a museum was anticipated for Kiel, home to the naval academy. In early 1899 the kaiser put his weight behind the idea, suggesting that such a museum might be connected to an academic institution, perhaps the University of Berlin. A week’s worth of consultations between the secretary of the navy and the cultural minister produced three key ingredients: an appropriate scholar to oversee the task—Berlin’s geography professor Ferdinand Freiherr von Richthofen; a memo outlining an expanded vision for a museum, in which the naval museum would be part of a larger museum of ocean science; and a commitment from the kaiser of 250,000 marks out of his personal funds to support the project. 58

58. GSPK, Rep. 76 Va Sekt. 2, Tit. X, Nr. 158, Bd. I, “Die Begründung eines oceanographischen Instituts nebst Meeresmuseum in Berlin,” fols. 1, 3, and 4. Details on the earlier interest in a naval museum are given in Röhr, Bilder aus dem Museum (1981), 11–15.

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Shortly thereafter, an undated, unsigned secret memorandum circulated among a small group, proposing a specific plan for such a museum. It made clear the institution’s fundamentally propagandistic purpose. German interests in the ocean were growing rapidly, its anonymous author wrote, with the increase in shipping traffic, the acquisition of overseas possessions, and the intensification of international politics surrounding the oceans. Yet the significance of the ocean for Germany’s political and economic life was insufficiently appreciated by the citizenry, the great majority of which comprised inland dwellers who had no direct connection to the ocean. Germany’s inlanders needed a museum to explain to them “the true nature of this important branch of national life.” 59 Here, then, the relation of the museum to the general public was to be a one-way street. The museum was to persuade the public of the value of Germany’s maritime interests, including its fisheries, its shipping, trade and travel routes to its new colonies and elsewhere, and especially its navy. The role of the general public was to be the willing recipient of this vision, to appreciate and accept the maritime politics of empire.60 Yet the breadth of vision for the museum expressed even in this fi rst memo was unlikely to have stemmed from the navy, whose existing collections were dominated by ship models, naval instruments and weaponry, flags and heraldry, relics of sunken naval vessels, and old anchors.61 Rather, it seems far more likely to have come from the pen of Ferdinand Freiherr von Richthofen, director of the Geographical Institute at the University of Berlin, chief consultant on the project, and, as it would turn out, the fi rst director of the planned institute and museum. Geography was a notoriously all-embracing discipline, and the plan for the museum put forth here, though not yet called “Meereskunde,” bears the telltale marks of a geographic mind. The museum was to have two departments. A “technical-economic 59. “Denkschrift zur Errichtung eines Marinemuseums in Berlin,” in GSPK, Rep. 76 Va Sekt. 2, Tit. X, Nr. 158, Bd. I, “Die Begründung eines oceanographischen Instituts nebst Meeresmuseum in Berlin,” fols. 9–12v. 60. This fitted well into the propaganda-oriented policy of Admiral Tirpitz, head of the German navy beginning in 1897. Given the general lack of enthusiasm for developing the navy, Tirpitz embarked on a broad campaign to persuade the German people and elected officials of the need for Germany to become a naval power. See J. Meyer, Die Propaganda der deutschen Flottenbewegung (1967). 61. As suggested by the later Reichs-Marine-Abteilung des Museum and by Mehlhorn, “Die Marinesammlung” (1996).

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section” was to include the history of maritime affairs, ethnographic groups, merchant shipping, merchant and naval shipbuilding, naval warfare, coastal life, fisheries, maritime rescue, boatbuilding, and water sports. The scientific-mathematical section would encompass marine biology; the study of the ocean’s surface, floor, and coasts; a historical instrument collection; and a collection of modern nautical instruments.62 As even these fi rst, sketchy outlines show, the museum reflected the ambitions of the German state to achieve a prominent place in the global naval and imperial order. Yet it is important not to reduce its goals to simple nationalistic and imperialistic ones: the founders of the institute and museum, while sharing in those goals, were also clearly interested in using the kaiser’s ambitions to generate support for the more academic aspects of ocean science. The scientific aims Richthofen and his allies63 set for ocean science were global and encylopedic: to understand the general patterns and principles governing the oceans, from the nature of the ocean floor and the physical and chemical properties of seawater to the vertical and horizontal differentiation of the ocean waters over the earth and the circulation patterns of oceanic currents. In addition, one had to attend to the distribution, history, and biological properties of the life-forms in them. Meereskunde was thus a broader, more multifaceted science than oceanography, which typically meant physical oceanography only. To know the sea in all its fullness would require the cooperation of physical scientists, biologists, geologists, naval personnel, fisheries experts, and even, in Richthofen’s conception, historians and ethnographers, who would investigate the uses of the oceans across human cultures. More often than not, as the science was worked out in practice, its encyclopedism came more to the fore than its unity, but among at least some practitioners, an integrated, unified picture of the oceans was the goal.64 To achieve these aims, the museum that opened in 1906 sought to educate both the general public and students of the institute. The origi62. “Denkschrift zur Errichtung eines Marinemuseums in Berlin,” fols. 9–12v. 63. Two similar expositions of Meereskunde may be found in Krümmel, Der Ozean (1886); and Walther, Allgemeine Meereskunde (1893). 64. Eric L. Mills explores the historical relations between oceanography and Meereskunde in Mills, “From Marine Ecology to Biological Oceanography” (1995). While I would agree with his claim that Meereskunde ultimately “provided an umbrella for all the marine sciences” in contrast to a “fusion” (41), I would also argue that at least some people at the turn of the century wanted a fusion but could not achieve it.

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nally proposed twofold division was restructured into four. The chemical and physical properties of the oceans, including the movements of the water, were the province of the “oceanological collection,” which also housed an “instrumentarium” containing nautical instruments. A second, biological collection illustrated life in the oceans, with one subsection emphasizing fisheries. A “historical-economic” collection presented information about shipbuilding, navigation, marine travel, ports, and emergency rescue operations. And fi nally, the museum housed the collection of the imperial navy, which remained under separate curatorial control but was integrated physically into the building.65 In comparison to presentations of marine and maritime science outside Germany, the concept of the Berlin museum was unusually broad. Perhaps its most radical departure from the usual focus of maritime museums on ship technology was its emphasis on marine biology.66 Moreover, the way it approached marine biology itself was innovative for Germany. Instead of organizing specimens to illustrate systematic relationships, the biological exhibits would represent “the union of typical forms that live together under a given sum of external conditions or that depend on one another in their life functions” 67—that is, biological groups emphasizing ecological relationships. They would do so through reconstructions of actual scenes. At its opening in 1906, the museum had in place a number of dramatic dioramas, among them a spectacular coral reef, a South Pole scene, a sponge ground in the Aegean Sea, and a German North Sea mudflat. Underwater groups were displayed, too, most often exhibited in “alcoholariums,” an invention that preserved sea creatures in an aquarium-like setting, suspended in alcohol to look as though they were swimming in water (figure 7.7). (As the alcohol quickly faded even fish whose colors had been touched up with paint, this method of exhibition was abandoned within a decade.) 65. Führer durch das Museum für Meereskunde in Berlin (1907), 3–4. 66. When the idea for the museum fi rst began to be seriously developed in early 1899, the museum’s planners took a study tour of existing oceanographic exhibits in England and France. Upon their return they stressed the limitations of existing models and the novelty of their own conception. Institut für Meereskunde, Berlin, Denkschrift (1900). Copy in GSPK, Rep. 76 Va Sekt. 2, Tit. X, Nr. 158, Bd. II, Acta betr. das Institut für Meereskunde an der hiesigen Universität vom Dez. 1900 bis Febr. 1902, fols. 9–40v. Although the Denkschrift was printed, the fi le pages are paginated folio style, on the front of each right-hand page only. 67. Ibid., fol. 17.

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figure 7.7. “Sand Bottom in the Adriatic,” alcoholarium, Museum für Meerskunde. From Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin, Historisches Archiv, photo VI.I.00. Q VII 28B.

Such scenes were expected to appeal to the casual visitor (as trade fairs and ethnographic exhibits had proved), but the museum’s staff, mindful of their role as a purveyor of science, wanted to assure that they would also be accurate and scientifically significant. So, for example, when Richthofen sought funding in 1901 for the Privatdozent Ludwig Plate to go to the Egyptian coastal city of Tor to collect materials for a coral reef exhibit from the Gulf of Suez, he argued that this was a much more efficient and scientifically justified way to gain materials than to await gifts or buy items piecemeal on the naturalia market.68 Richthofen’s pitch was successful, and the resulting coral reef diorama was one of the museum’s largest and most attractive (figure 7.5). The theme of presenting scientific research (and not just “nature”) also crept into other dioramas as well, though remaining relatively subtle. The South Pole diorama (figure 7.6) illustrates how the museum’s 68. Richthofen to Kultusminister Studt, 16. Feb. 1901, in GSPK, Rep. 76 Va Sekt. 2, Tit. X, Abt. X, Nr. 158, Bd. II, fol. 134–37. It is worth noting that German museums did not generally commission field research or in-house preparation of dioramas, in contrast to such American museums as the American Museum of Natural History.

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various agendas and forms mingled. This diorama, placed in a corner of one of the biology rooms, grouped Antarctic fauna in front of a painting that depicted the research ship Gauss of the German South Pole Expedition. Naming both the ship and the expedition in its text, the 1907 museum guide noted that the specimens had been donated to the museum by the expedition. This was the nation’s most recent large-scale project of scientific exploration, and the attention given to it in the text and background painting reinforced both the nationalistic naval themes of the museum as a whole and its scientific emphasis on oceanographic research. (Indeed, the article in the Leipziger Illustrirte Zeitung that appeared soon after the museum’s opening included a photograph of the diorama, which, notwithstanding the prominence of the seals and penguins in the foreground, bore the caption “South Pole ship Gauss in the ice.”)69 The museum guide went on to call attention to the ways in which the Weddell seals and two species of penguins in the diorama showed their adaptation to life in the ocean: their smooth, rounded forms; their closable ear and nose openings; the placement of the fl ippers on the seals and legs on the penguins so as to accommodate swimming. The background painting, the text noted, even showed how the penguin could use its beak to help pull itself out of the water.70 Thus, this display modeled both basic scientific concepts about adaptation and a site of scientific research, while also underlining German imperial ambitions. The illusionistic scene, though less complete than classic dioramas because of the visible ceiling panels, was clearly meant to draw the viewer in to a “real” place and moment, to teach a scientific lesson about the relations among biological form, function, and environment. Within the museum, these biological exhibits played an integral role, underscoring the museum curators’ holistic form of ocean studies that embraced marine biology as much as it did physical oceanography, fisheries, and naval science. Yet this holism did not primarily serve a romantic vision of the unity of scientific knowledge. In keeping with its propagandistic origins, the museum offered a hardheaded representation of the domination of the seas that stressed economic and military might as much as intellectual mastery. This message of human (and more spe69. “Das neue Museum für Meereskunde in Berlin” (1906). 70. Führer durch das Museum für Meereskunde in Berlin (1907), 107–9.

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cifically, German) mastery of the seas permeated the museum’s exhibits and framed the presentation of the biological material. This framing was most evident in the route through the museum prescribed by the guidebook. The bulk of the military-naval and historicaleconomic collections (with exhibits ranging from model ships to real torpedoes) occupied the ground floor, with the historical-economic collections continuing up into the museum’s upper story. To get to the biological collection on the second floor, one had to walk fi rst through the collection of oceanographic instruments that showed how scientists collected the information about the oceans and their inhabitants: plumb lines and their associated machinery, dredges and nets, scads of research instruments, and, in the long, narrow passage immediately preceding entry into the biological collection, maps reconstructing the topography of the North and Baltic seas. At the other end of the biological collection, after viewing the dioramas, alcoholariums, and their associated smaller exhibits, one passed on to the fisheries section, which emphasized the exploitation of the “products of the ocean” and the human-made equipment necessary to turn the resources of the ocean to human use. This large section displayed not just food fishes but also whalebone, sponges, pearls, shells, guano, and many other products of creatures associated with the seas and seacoasts.71 Understanding the relationship between sea creatures and their organic environment, then, served the more general purpose described in the museum’s planning document: “the presentation of the history of the domination of the ocean by humans by means of the gradual perfection of shipbuilding, the improvement of nautical instruments, the application of more powerful means of operation [Betriebsmittel], the progressive development of the globe and the scientific discovery of the most efficient shipping routes.” 72 Fisheries exhibits contributed by emphasizing the “the historical and ethnographic factor,” while the biological exhibits were understood to be simply essential to any picture of the sea “as a whole.” 73 Thus, the biological exhibits at the museum were contextualized at the most general level as part of the mastery of nature. Not scientific principles themselves, nor intellectual integration, nor even eco-

71. Ibid., 119–50. 72. Institut für Meereskunde, Berlin, Denkschrift (1900), 18. 73. Ibid., 17–18.

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nomic use brought unity to Meereskunde in this context—it came, rather, in the union of all three of these in the naked exercise of power. Through this museum, then, the visitor, projected as an inland dweller,74 was to learn to appreciate his or her own participation in the project of Meereskunde as a citizen of the empire. To make German naval might a politically palatable reality, the population of Germany’s interior needed to understand the importance of the oceans to Germany’s place in the world, intellectually, economically, and militarily. Meereskunde was the all-encompassing project that would serve that end. In this context, the “Kunde” properties of Meereskunde did not reside in the participation of the public in making the knowledge on display. In sharp contrast to the city museums in Bremen and Altona, and much more like the Museum für Naturkunde, the public here is cast as the ignorant general visitor. This is understandable in light of this museum’s location at a university and illustrates how the power relations at work in this museum structured the Kunde aspects of the museum and their relations to Wissenschaft. As a new university subject legitimated by an institute, Meereskunde represented an expansion of the sphere of academic knowledge, especially via the emphasis in the biological section on the new science of marine ecology and biogeography. But, like other Kunde projects, it also represented deeper challenges to academic knowledge. In its interdisciplinary ambition to bring together the physical and biological sciences, history and folk culture, into one great science of the sea, it challenged the disciplinary splintering that was increasingly the norm at the universities. In its self-presentation via a museum explicitly oriented toward the general public, it also spoke critically against the ivory-tower tendencies that were at the heart of the German university’s reputation.75 And in its self-consciously propagandistic aims, it legitimated encyclopedism as a model of knowledge to be placed in the service of an imperial German identity.

74. Ibid. 75. This was just one of many moves to open up the ivory tower in the decades surrounding the turn of the century. Other similar efforts included the joining of academic and industrial interests in the Physikalische-Technische Reichsanstalt, founded in 1887, the elevation of the Technische Hochschulen to the same status as the universities in 1900, and the foundation of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft in 1911 to promote new, practical areas of scientific research.

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Biological Groups, Modernity, and the Representation of Nature Museums bring the world to their visitors. In doing so, they serve as powerful tools for shaping both the image of that world and the expected role of the individual in it. In the early twentieth century, reformist museums provided a particularly potent vehicle through which Germans might imagine “modern” relationships to the making of knowledge, to their place in the world, and to nature. In their form, content, and placement within the larger frameworks in the museum, biological groups contributed critically to these imaginings. Biological groups asserted their modernity in two ways: they signified a new way of seeing nature in the museum and also the new, mass audience at which they were directed. As we have seen, curators projected different roles for this audience as recipients of the messages the museums had to offer—the prospective international merchant (Bremen), the local visitor seeking to understand her relationship to her heritage (Altona), and the German citizen who needed to be convinced that his country deserved to be a naval power (Berlin’s Museum of Ocean Studies). The museums also asserted different roles for the public in the production of the knowledge made at the museum, ranging from the patroncollaborator through the data gatherer guided by the scientific hand of the curator to the simple consumer of information. But in all of these cases, nature was used as a crucial way of helping visitors situate themselves in the world, and biological groups served that end. At the same time, against the dry systematic traditions of the natural history museum, the biological groups brought nature to life, reasserting the value of nature’s aesthetic qualities and the pleasures of marveling—whether at the slices of nature presented in these exhibits or at the craftsmanship that rendered them so lifelike. These qualities made biological groups suspect to old-school museum curators—they were too enjoyable, too closely associated with the theatrical fictions of the wax museum, to be scientific. Proponents of biological groups answered such criticisms by pointing to their intellectual merits. Depending on the context, curators claimed more or less scientific content for their group exhibits. At one extreme, they might be represented as only embodying “characteristic” scenes from nature, true illustrations but nothing more. Thus, Bremen’s Schauinsland explicitly indi-

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cated that the group scenes, while scientifically accurate, served mainly to inspire the viewer with a love of nature that could then be turned toward science.76 More often, museum curators (including Schauinsland on different occasions) argued to other professionals that their groups made accessible to the public modern scientific concepts, such as symbiosis (as in Bremen’s tuatara lizard and stormy petrel) and adaptation (as in the Museum für Meereskunde’s South Pole animals exhibit)— functional relations that represented the science itself as modern—while still maintaining aesthetic appeal. The biological groups also acted as signifiers of modernity in the broader frameworks of these museums, especially in the museums’ representations of nature and humanity’s relations to it. In contrast to conservation-oriented dioramas developed in the United States, which glorified a wild nature undisturbed by human intervention, the biological exhibits at these museums served other agendas. As we have seen, the dominant presentation of nature in Altona aimed at acquainting citizens of Schleswig-Holstein with a natural world that was vanishing along with the traditional folk culture of the region. In Bremen, while the biological groups in the rooms devoted to local nature served to familiarize citified children and their parents with nearby nature, the predominant message was that of nature as a resource to be developed for human use; furthermore, the complexity of processing that a culture could impose on the “raw materials” of nature indicated that culture’s degree of civilization. And at the Museum für Meereskunde, where mastery of the ocean was the predominant theme, the biological groups also served multiple ends: while some showed sites of scientific research (such as the South Pole or the coral reef at Tor), others acquainted inland dwellers with scenes from their coasts on the Baltic and North Sea. Based on these three museums, it would be easy to generalize that modern German museums simply projected the chief concerns of Germans at the turn of the century, and that the representation of nature served as handmaiden to those deeper concerns. In this formulation, the Bremen and Berlin museums illustrate Germany’s increasing economic and naval power on the international scene, and the concern with mastery of nature seen in the museums reflects a deep preoccupation with this power. By contrast, the Altona museum reflects the reaction against 76. Schauinsland makes this explicit in his speech at the opening of the museum; see “Eröffnung des städtischen Museums” (1900), 220.

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figure 7.8. Carl Salzmann, Krabbenfang auf dem Watt. Painting in arch of gallery at Museum für Meereskunde. From Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin, Historisches Archiv, photo VI.I.00. Q VI 15b.

modern life that was also characteristic of German culture of the period and that would take on darker tones as the twentieth century proceeded. Its arcadian representation of nature was of a piece with its nostalgic efforts to create the image of a golden pastoral era of folk culture that might never really have existed.77 Such a representation would be too pat. While these themes are certainly there, we can also learn something else about the ways modern nature was imagined from these encyclopedic museums—namely, that na-

77. The opposition between the arcadian and imperialist themes is developed by Donald Worster, who admirably draws them out for the development of ecology, especially in the Anglo-American world, in Worster, Nature’s Economy (1985).

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ture’s relation to culture was necessarily heterogeneous. In all of these self-consciously modern museums, modernity and tradition were continually being thrust against one another. The Museum für Meereskunde, for example, even while celebrating the complex, high-tech equipment required for scientifically studying the seas, also presented a series of frescoes of traditional northern European fishing practices (figure 7.8). Both were part of the image of modern Germany. Here the modern contained the traditional—or at least, the two were presented visually as coexisting. At Altona, although the whole museum was a historical one dedicated to preserving the memory of cultural and natural forms that were going extinct, modern biology was also represented via the exhibit on Mendel’s laws—still novel science in 1915 when the display went up. Nature, then, was represented not only in its arcadian form but also as an object of modern scientific study. In Bremen, the representation was even more heterogeneous, as we have seen: here exotic, there local, in one room valorizing animal family life, in another valuing nature only for what it might yield for human use. Modern nature in the Kunde museum, then—like its counterpart in the natural history museum—was not unitary but multiple, a disunified combination of different perspectives with which the modern citizen had to learn to live.

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From Biology to Ecology

B

iological groups were just one aspect of the biological perspective, though they constituted a supremely important embodiment of it in the public exhibits of the museum. Even as biological groups and other kinds of functionally oriented biological exhibits were becoming more visible in the museum setting, the biological perspective itself was becoming increasingly codified. In the 1890s and especially the fi rst decade of the new century, Biologie—understood in its narrower sense as the study of organisms’ functional interactions in nature—was everywhere, prominent not only in museum exhibits and primary schools, as we have seen, but also in secondary school reform efforts, popular writing about nature, and professional research. It would soon dissolve into “biology in the broader sense” as the general science of life, on the one hand, and ecology, a professional research area within zoology and botany, on the other. But for a significant moment in the early twentieth century, Biologie had a powerful if shimmering existence. And museum men, working together with schoolteachers, university professors, and independent researchers and popularizers, were active in pulling together its topics and point of view into a coherent framework. As we have seen, the job of the natural history museum curator was multifaceted, combining attention to exhibits, education of the broader public, and research. Curators therefore had uniquely liberal license to

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work across different aspects of natural history with their different constituents, and to reach out well beyond the quite small group of museum scientists to engage with primary and secondary school reformers, nature lovers of all classes and ages, and professional scientists. This multiplicity and breadth of connections in turn made them key players in the formulation of Biologie in the decades around the turn of the century, and in the related emergence of animal ecology as an autonomous area of research just before World War I. Biologie was critical to the development of ecology (especially animal ecology) in Germany because it provided the conceptual framework and standard topics that would structure the field as a research discipline—its canon. Whereas Biologie was perceived as mainly a popular and pedagogical subject, however, ecology was a specialist endeavor. Because museum men and secondary school teachers were active in both research and education, they knew what research topics were available for synthesizing, and the books and lecture courses they crafted for pedagogical and popular purposes readily provided the broad conceptual framework into which individual research problems could be integrated. These men, then, were essential in building a coherent field around the collection of distinct research problems concerning organisms and their environments. This claim offers a new perspective on the history of ecology in Germany, which (like the general history of ecology) is usually characterized in terms of four independent strands: freshwater ecology (including limnology and river studies), marine ecology, and terrestrial plant and animal ecology.1 I argue that, despite their different objects of study and institutional bases, Biologie, as developed by museum and school reformers, united them. Furthermore, the picture of ecology’s development presented by Donald Worster and accepted by many subsequent historians has represented the study of communities or social relations of organisms—synecology—as the raison d’être of ecology. The study of the individual’s relations to the physical environment, a central feature of the biological perspective, was what English-language writers came to call “autecology” or “physiological ecology.” Autecology was, in Worster’s view, “not the major thrust, the distinctive impulse that gave 1. See, e.g., McIntosh, The Background of Ecology (1985), esp. chapter 2. Günther Leps divides ecology more broadly into aquatic and terrestrial ecology, but then further divides these into marine and freshwater ecology and terrestrial plant and animal ecology: Leps, “Ökologie und Ökosystemforschung” (2000).

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ecology its early identity.” 2 Yet even if this was true for the development of disciplinary identity around ecology, especially as it took place in the Anglo-American context that Worster concentrated on, in Germany autecological topics and questions remained central to the popular subject Biologie, as well as to the research areas of marine ecology, limnology, and ecological animal geography. 3 The very split articulated between autecology and synecology itself, I argue here, was in fact part of the emergence of animal ecology as a specialist research enterprise in Germany: whereas Biologie somewhat indiscriminately covered all kinds of organisms’ interactions with their surroundings, organic and inorganic, ecology as a research area was characterized by the development of a more refi ned vocabulary to distinguish different subjects and problem areas, of which syn- and autecology were just one important pair. This chapter fi rst shows how the framework and canon of Biologie came to be set through secondary school reform and through popular writings—both areas in which the Hamburg museum director Karl Kraepelin played a leading role. I then show the circumstances under which Biologie became Oekologie, with particular attention to the development of a technical language for ecology that gave it a specialist character and set it apart from its popular counterpart.

Biologie and Secondary School Reform Middle school and secondary school curricula and textbooks were a key means by which the biological perspective was codified into Biologie. This took place mostly between 1900 and 1908, a significant period in the reform of biology teaching at the secondary level. After the “ban on biology” in 1882 and the relegation in Prussia of natural history education to the lower school levels, few formal changes in natural history teaching in the secondary schools appeared before 1900. One small but significant change came in a new set of school regulations in 1891: although natural history instruction actually lost further ground in terms 2. Worster, Nature’s Economy (1985), 203–4. Ludwig Trepl agrees, arguing that autecology (and therefore animal ecology) was “of relatively little importance” in the early development of ecology. See Trepl, Geschichte der Ökologie (1987), 122. Robert P. McIntosh ascribes somewhat more significance to the early history of autecology: McIntosh, The Background of Ecology (1985), esp. 146–50. 3. The rise of ecological animal geography is the subject of chapter 9.

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of hours taught, the regulations now mandated that schools take into account instruction in animal geography and “biology” (understood then as the study of the dynamic relations of organisms to their natural surroundings), and teachers were encouraged to introduce outdoor instruction, especially field trips, as part of their curriculum. Although minor, these alterations signaled the beginnings of a broadening beyond the old taxonomic and morphological orientation.4 In 1900, sweeping changes took place in the Prussian educational system. The technical colleges gained the right to award doctoral degrees, like the universities, and simultaneously, pupils at the Realgymnasien and Oberrealschulen, both schools associated with learning for the practical world, were now eligible for university admission, along with those from the humanistic Gymnasien. 5 The curriculum in natural history was updated in 1901 to include human anatomy and hygiene and called for more attention to direct observation, experiments, and excursions (while still avoiding evolution). But distinctions persisted across the schools: the humanistic Gymnasien remained oriented primarily toward systematics (the approach Junge had associated with dry Wissenschaft and the development of the “rational” faculties), while students at the Realgymnasien and Oberrealschulen continued to study the geographic distribution and “mode of life” of plants and animals as well. In the latter schools, excursions could be directed at engaging students with “the life phenomena of the animal and plant worlds, the mutual dependence and the Lebensgemeinschaften of both.” 6 The influence of Junge-style reforms is evident here, though its impact was limited. In the eyes of many, the 1900 Prussian guidelines, which provided the model for most of the other states, did not go far enough. The absence of biological study from the upper grades of the Gymnasium (which still produced the great majority of students going to the university) had long been a sore point among both high school and university instructors in biological subjects, and by 1901 it was intolerable. To many biologists the 4. On the Prussian regulation changes, see Scheele, Von Lüben bis Schmeil (1981), 107–10. More generally on the school conference that produced these changes, see Albisetti, Secondary School Reform (1983), 208–42. In other states, natural history teaching fared unevenly in the 1880s. See “Die realistischen Fächer” (1884). For an overview of the situation of the natural sciences in the higher schools, see Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung (1998), chapter 2. 5. Students from the Oberrealschulen were not eligible for medical study until 1907. Scheele, Von Lüben bis Schmeil (1981), 195–96. 6. See ibid., 196–98, quotation on 198.

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refusal of the administration to allow university-bound pupils to deal with biology because of fears concerning evolution harmed both secondary and tertiary education. When the annual meeting of the Society of German Scientists and Physicians in met in Hamburg in 1901, the local biology community in Hamburg, led by Karl Kraepelin, swung into action to mobilize the nation’s university professors and high school teachers. In advance of the meeting, Kraepelin and his colleagues had hammered out a set of propositions for biology teaching reform, which were then presented at the meeting by Friedrich Ahlborn, a teacher at the Johanneum (where Kraepelin—and still earlier, Möbius—had taught). Under Kraepelin’s chairmanship, an unusual combined session of the sections for zoology, botany, anatomy and physiology, and mineralogy and geology met to discuss these propositions, which called for restoring the teaching of biology to the upper levels of the curriculum of universitybound students.7 The “Hamburg theses” on biology education, as they came to be called, declared that “Biology is a science of experience,” not responsible for “metaphysical speculations.” School biology should “acquaint the growing youth with the most substantial forms of the organic world; discuss the phenomena of life in their diversity; set out the connections of organisms to inorganic nature, to one another and to humans; and give an overview of the most important periods of the earth’s history.” The study of the organic world taught children to respect nature and to appreciate beauty, the Hamburg theses argued; in the face of nature’s manifold diversity and mystery, the child was also led to become humble in the awareness of the limits of scientific knowledge. For all these reasons, sophisticated, up-to-date biology education at the upper grade levels was a requirement for the educated citizen.8 The careful language of the Hamburg theses incorporated in an indirect way what discussants made explicit in the session: that ignoring evolution in the secondary classroom did not keep pupils from learning about it, and that in fact the best remedy against “metaphysical speculation” was the cool dissemination of the facts of the matter. This point would be repeated over the subsequent six years of hard lobbying by 7. See Schäffer, “Karl Kraepelins Lebensgang” (1915), 10–11; and Georgi, “Professor Dr. Fritz Ahlborn” (1957). Ahlborn made a research name for himself at the boundaries of physics and biology, working on the fluid dynamics of wing and fi n form. 8. Ahlborn, “Die gegenwärtige Lage des biologischen Unterrichts an den höheren Schulen” (1901), 278–79.

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biology reform advocates, eventually reaching parliamentary discussions in April 1907, when one parliamentarian recalled a secondary school teacher’s comment that nineteen out of twenty-one students in his classroom had read Ernst Haeckel’s best-selling evolutionary-monistic Riddles of the Universe. As another representative noted, when even the Jesuit priest Erich Wasmann called for including evolution in the upper levels of the high school curriculum in order to counteract Haeckel’s monism and the crass materialism of other radical evolutionists, surely it was time for educators to step in as a moderating influence.9 There was more to the discussion than accepting evolution. At the 1901 meeting and in subsequent years, professors commented on the need for university-bound students (especially medical students) to have better observational skills and a fuller basic understanding of anatomy and physiology; others noted that these skills were important even for university students who would not concentrate on biological subjects, just to be well-educated leaders of society. In 1903, when the issue of secondary school biology teaching was put before a plenary session of the Society of German Scientists and Physicians, leaders in other scientific disciplines lent their voices to the biologists’ cause, in the name of supporting science in general. Thereafter, an independent committee on mathematical and scientific education met to hammer out a proposal for secondary education that would make room for biology while not disadvantaging the other sciences. (Kraepelin served on this committee, too, this time as representative from the German Zoological Society.)10 The Hamburg theses provided the foundational document for these subsequent discussions. After the 1901 national meeting, an editorial committee in Hamburg produced a printed version of the theses, and, at Kraepelin’s instigation, the Hamburg Scientific Association provided funding to send them to every high school and middle school in Germany. Within three months, nearly eight hundred teachers and professors had endorsed them,11 and over the next several years some states incorporated these recommendations into their curricular guidelines, especially in the middle schools, sprinkling the guidelines with such words 9. “Zur Förderung des naturwissenschaftlichen Unterrichts” (1906–7). This was a transcription of the parliamentary discussions of 16 April 1907. 10. Bericht der Versammlung der Gesellschaft Deutscher Naturforscher und Aerzte in Cassel (1903); Schäffer, “Karl Kraepelins Lebensgang” (1915), 10–12. 11. Kraepelin, [Discussion] (1903), 149–50.

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and phrases as “life activities” (Hamburg in 1902), “biology” (Baden’s middle schools in 1903; Saxony’s middle schools in 1904), and “particular weight is to be laid on the study of biological and ecological conditions” (Bavarian Realanstalten in 1907).12 In this way, momentum built to pressure Prussia and those states that followed Prussia’s lead to incorporate the viewpoints expressed in the Hamburg theses and to reintroduce biology teaching into the upper grades of the secondary schools. In 1908, fi nally, the Prussian higher schools did so, in a decree that stated in part that the point of this biological instruction was “to awaken interest and understanding for biological approaches and to encourage the sense for independent observations in this direction.” 13 But how was this newly “biological” teaching to be structured at the secondary school level, and what was to be its content? The Prussian government gave school districts considerable latitude in how to organize and teach biology.14 Three leading possibilities presented themselves, based on approaches that had been developed in different settings over the previous two decades, especially in the middle schools outside Prussia. One was to draw heavily on Junge’s Lebensgemeinschaft curriculum. This approach seems to have been most discussed with respect to secondary education for girls, where it played into tensions over the degree to which education for girls should imitate the system set up for boys. In the mid-1880s, when Junge’s book appeared, the German states were still staunchly opposed to university education for girls, and thus secondary schools (for those privileged few girls who were educated beyond the statutory age of fourteen) were something of an extension of the middle-school level, intended to put a fi nishing gloss on an education aimed at future mothers and housewives. Rather than concentrate on the “mechanical” memorization of Latin names and systematic terms that would be “meaningless” to girls, they and their teachers were to emphasize the direct observation of nature, an approach more appropriate to their non-college-bound station in life.15 12. Scheele, Von Lüben bis Schmeil (1981), 215–22. On Saxony: B. Landsberg, “Zur Förderung des biologischen Unterrichts” (1904). 13. Quoted in Scheele, Von Lüben bis Schmeil (1981), 209. 14. “Naturgeschichtlicher Unterricht” (1910). 15. [Decree by] Königliche [preussische] Regierung, Schleswig, den 28. Juli 1885, fol. 19–19v (quotations on 19v), in Stadtarchiv Kiel, 49283: File: Schulverwaltung 25, H, 6: Unterrichtswesen, Allgemein, 1876–1935.

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Junge’s reform approach fitted right into this conservative plan for girls. As the girls’ education leader Helene Sumper put it in a speech at the second national meeting of women teachers in 1893, “Is the family itself not a Lebensgemeinschaft, at the center of which the girl should stand, thoughtful and conscious of her duties and true to her duties?” Elsewhere in the same speech, in discussing the example of the production of new soil through the decomposition of trees, Sumper exclaimed, “Nature is certainly a thrifty housewife!” Over twenty years later, the message had become more elaborate but not changed significantly. At the same group’s meeting in 1905, the Bonn teacher Else Koettgen quoted the official responsible for the forthcoming girls’ school curriculum, from a letter salted with terms from Junge’s laws: “The natural lawfulness of all life is expressed in the principles of accommodation [Gewöhnung] and exercise [Übung] for individual development, in the principles of economy, thrift [Sparsamkeit] and order, the harmony and devotion to the good of a Lebensgemeinschaft for social development. The female youth must, just like the male, learn to recognize that in the overall development of life, in the position, life duties and professional duties, as in the conduct of life, there reigns a strict, unbending lawfulness that is of a generally valid nature, that has been true for all peoples and at all times and is of a universal character.” 16 Despite these socially conservative appeals of Junge’s program for teaching girls, the official Prussian guidelines only slowly accommodated it. When new guidelines appeared for the secondary girls’ schools in 1894, no language encouraged a shift toward teaching natural history. Indeed, despite having just recently published a text for middle school boys reorganized around communities, the successful authors Ludwig Kahnmeyer and Hermann Schulze felt constrained in their textbook for girls to retain a framework based on systematics. Still committed to what they called a “physiological-biological” viewpoint, the authors instead incorporated within the section on each plant and animal more information about its characteristic life activities and habitat.17 By the time of the next set of revisions, in 1908, when secondary schools were fi nally restructured to allow girls to study for the university, a host of other aspects of biology competed with the Lebensgemeinschaft idea for attention. Seeking to balance all interests (in a much 16. Quoted in Koettgen, “Stellung und Aufgabe der Naturwissenschaften” (1905), 89. 17. Kahnmeyer and Schulze, Naturgeschichte (1898), iii–iv.

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more prescriptive way than the guidelines for boys), the new guidelines for girls asserted the fundamental intertwinedness of morphology, systematics, biology, and geographic distribution. Lebensgemeinschaften were mentioned explicitly as a way to structure girls’ learning on natural history excursions, and teachers were admonished to use field trips, school gardens, terrariums, and aquariums to enhance the study of living plants and animals. But the guidelines placed at least as much emphasis on comparative morphology, systematics, and plant identification as on studying organisms with reference to their natural surroundings. In addition, the new biology curriculum was to cover several other more “practical” subjects, including attention to domesticated animals and plants and hygiene.18 The reinstatement of evolutionary principles and cell theory, both following university-based biology, and the desire for practical education meant that Junge’s Lebensgemeinschaften became just one way to look at biological relations in the secondary schools for girls, not the primary way. It would still be possible to structure much of the classroom learning on these subjects around Lebensgemeinschaften, but other approaches had at least an equal claim. The solution found by Kahnmeyer and Schulze for their girls’ school texts—to maintain a traditional taxonomically organized structure but infuse it with biological information—would become the predominant one at the boys’ secondary schools as well. This strategy was pursued with spectacular success by Otto Schmeil, who began what would become a natural history textbook empire in 1898 with his Textbook of Zoology. His Textbook of Botany would soon follow; by the early 1920s these had each gone into over ninety editions, along with summary versions for different audiences. Schmeil credited himself with successfully infusing the biological perspective (a term he used) into the schools through these texts.19 Yet he organized his zoology textbook in a deeply traditional form. After a brief discussion of cells, tissues, and the basic body types of the animal world (a characteristic way to open zoology texts since at least midcentury), the body of the book was organized taxonomically, beginning with vertebrates and descending from apes down to fishes, then moving to the articulates (insects, spiders, crabs), followed by the other invertebrates and ending with single-celled creatures. Each 18. Schöppa, Das Mädchenschulwesen in Preussen (1909), 177–80. 19. On editions (which often simply meant new print runs): Schenk, Otto Schmeil (2000), 121 n. 56. On Schmeil’s self-crediting, see foreword to the 25th ed., reprinted in Schmeil, Lehrbuch der Zoologie (1912), iii–vii.

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group was represented by a few “characteristic” animals, with the key taxonomic characters leading off the discussion of the group. However, the text devoted to each animal was fi lled with life, setting the animal right into its habitat. Consider “The Common Squirrel, a Tree Animal, a True Animal of the Woods” (figures 8.1–8.3). “Like the fish in the water, the squirrel has his place in the woods,” this entry begins. “His homeland [Heimat] lies in the trees of both the leafy and evergreen forest, which he never willingly leaves.” The description went on to analyze the strong hind legs made for jumping from branch to branch, the feet adapted for clinging to twigs and paws for holding nuts, and the function of the tail as balancer. Succeeding paragraphs analyzed the squirrel’s skull, jaws, and teeth, so characteristic of rodents; the squirrel’s enemies (martens, foxes, falcons, and owls) and its modes of protection from them, including its camouflaged nest; the winter as the most dangerous time of year for the squirrel; and its reproductive response to its many natural enemies—two large litters per summer. Significantly, Schmeil incorporated both technical and scenic-style illustrations into his texts to reinforce their scientific merit while also infusing a sense of active animal life. Much like the organization of exhibits at the Berlin Museum für Naturkunde, this approach preserved systematics as the framework while incorporating information on functional morphology, behavior, and the organism’s relations to its natural surroundings within that structure. A third approach to organizing upper-level secondary school biology instruction was to take “biology” seriously as a truly general, synthetic science, one that drew together the different kinds of knowledge about plants and animals gained in the earlier grades and re-presented them in terms of general, uniting aspects that crossed all kinds of organisms. This was the approach undertaken experimentally beginning in the late 1890s in the upper grades of the Realgymnasium of the Johanneum in Hamburg and presented as a model curriculum to the pedagogical community in 1902. This plan divided biology into four general thematic areas, covered in the fi nal three years of school: functional and comparative anatomy and physiology; “ecology or biology in the narrower sense,” including the physical and chemical conditions of existence for plants and animals, competition, protective mechanisms, mutualism, and parasitism; evolution, including paleontology, heredity, species defi nitions, and critical discussion of the evolution concept; and anthropology,

figure 8.1. Squirrel forefoot, grasping hazelnut, and hind foot. From Schmeil, Lehrbuch der Zoologie (1912), 100.

figure 8.2. Squirrel skull and jaw views. From Schmeil, Lehrbuch der Zoologie (1912), 101.

figure 8.3. Squirrels at their nest. From Schmeil, Lehrbuch der Zoologie (1912), color plate 3 (between pp. 100 and 101).

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including human anatomy, physiology, and hygiene, and the history of the human races and culture. 20 Kraepelin, an established textbook writer, was well primed to take up this sort of structure. From the beginning of his career he was oriented toward the functional-morphological approach he had learned from his professor Rudolf Leuckart, and his textbooks of botany and zoology for middle and secondary schools, which he had begun producing during his days as a schoolteacher in the 1870s and 1880s, were oriented toward explaining why organisms were structured the way they were. Although his zoology textbook followed the same top-down systematic framework that Schmeil would take up in 1898, its content focused on how organisms’ structures allowed them to live in their conditions of existence. Systematics was even less predominant in Kraepelin’s botanical textbook; by its fourth edition in 1893, he was taking a multifaceted approach that incorporated general plant anatomy and physiology (including cell theory), systematics, and “plants and their surroundings.” These textbooks were successful enough to place him second after Schmeil as a natural history textbook writer for the secondary schools. 21 Given Kraepelin’s close ties to other biology teachers in Hamburg and his active participation in the school reform movement, it is not surprising that he would produce a textbook of biology that shared their approach. First published in 1907, his biology textbook had three sections: “The Dependence of Organisms on the Effects of the Environment”; “Structure and Life Activities of Organic Beings,” which incorporated a substantial section on evolutionary theory; and “Man as an Object of Natural Study.” All parts of the Hamburg biology curriculum were covered. In 1909, after the reintroduction of biology into the Prussian higher school curricula, Kraepelin would add a separate section on evolution and incorporate geographic distribution into his discussion of the effects of the physical environment on the organism, to make it con20. Schwarze, “Der biologische Unterricht” (1902). 21. Kraepelin, Leitfaden für den zoologischen Unterricht (1881). Subsequent editions appeared in 1891, 1896, and 1907; “coauthored” editions retaining Kraepelin’s name continued to be published long after his death in 1915. Kraepelin, Leitfaden für den botanischen Unterricht (1875) had new editions in 1881, 1889, 1893, 1898, 1902, and 1908. Kraepelin’s obituarist noted his emphasis on functional morphology and systematics in the early editions (Schäffer, “Karl Kraepelins Lebensgang” [1915], 8–9.) Already in the 1890s, however, he had incorporated attention to the organisms in relation to their surroundings. On Schmeil and Kraepelin as the leading biology textbook writers, see Schenk, Otto Schmeil (2000), 61–62.

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form to new curricular requirements. This textbook went into a third edition by 1912, indicating that it enjoyed some success. 22 The intersections of this textbook with Kraepelin’s other activities in the museum are worth noting for the fluid back-and-forth they show between the different kinds of pedagogical work he undertook. The fi rst and longest section of Kraepelin’s biology text derived from a series of lecture courses (mainly for teachers) that he had given at the museum between 1902 and 1906 and from which he had already published some popular works. Thus, in the winter semester of 1904/5, he had given an evening lecture course on “the relations of animals to one another and to the plant world,” and in 1905 he published a little popular book with that title. The topics in this book would be incorporated into the textbook, along with sections on plants’ dependence on their physical and chemical conditions, plants’ relations to one another, and animals’ relations to their physical conditions of existence. (The last of these was the subject of his lecture course in the winter of 1905/6.) By 1913 he could expand his original popular lecture text of 1905 to an illustrated second edition of two small volumes, one devoted just to the relations of animals to one another, the other to the relations between animals and plants. 23 By means of these different pedagogical genres, Kraepelin helped to establish a canon of topics around the functional relations of animal life. When discussing the relations of animals to one another, he worked outward from the most immediate ones, beginning with those between the sexes, moving on to those among family members (especially how they protected their young and raised them to maturity) and from there to the relations among individuals of the same species (swarms, herds, and insect states). Finally, he considered the interactions of different species with one another, including competition, predator-prey relations, commensalism, parasitism, and symbiosis. His discussions of plants’ and animals’ relations to their physical environments concentrated in parallel fashion on the role of temperature, light, and the surrounding media (earth, air, water) in determining the organism’s geographic distribution. When discussing the relations of plants to animals, his interests had a social cast 22. Kraepelin, Leitfaden für den biologischen Unterricht (1907); Kraepelin, Einführung in die Biologie(1909; 3rd ed. 1912). 23. Kraepelin, Die Beziehungen der Tiere und Pfl anzen zueinander (1905; 2nd ed., 1913). On Kraepelin’s courses: Hochschulwesen: Dozenten und Personalakten: II 197: Akten betr. die Vorlesungen des Herrn Prof. Dr. Kraepelin, Direktor des Naturhistorischen Museums, 1886, 1902–1912, in Staatsarchiv Hamburg.

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similar to his analysis of animals, breaking down into “friendly relations” and those of enmity. 24 These topics, and their organization into physical and social relations, were becoming the standard ones defi ning ecology in these years, and books such as Kraepelin’s were what rendered them so. Schmeil’s and Kraepelin’s texts demonstrate the two basic approaches toward biology that worked in boys’ secondary schools. Both emphasized the living organism in its environment, and the growing importance of illustration in their texts lent support to the teaching orientation focused on hands-on learning, field trips, school gardens, and other nontextual pedagogical aids. One preserved the traditional disciplinary division between botany and zoology, and the taxonomic organization that had a long tradition in natural history teaching. Schmeil retained this conservative position, as well as his reticence on evolution, even after the 1908 reforms that gave teachers latitude to bring evolution back into the classroom. In his 1909 edition, he insisted on caution with respect to introducing controversial theoretical ideas into the classroom, even to the extent of refusing to discuss mimicry in his text. 25 At the same time, his emphasis on the biological perspective within this framework meant that pupils were getting a more functional picture of the living organism in its environment, reinforced by his rich combination of anatomical and scenic illustrations. Whereas Kraepelin’s zoology textbook shared this form of organization, his biology text did something quite different, establishing a framework that transcended and united the classificatory divisions between animals and plants. Systematics was an important tool but not the point; the laws of functional adaptation were. Within this broad structure, biology in the narrower sense held a prominent place, and its subject matter had its own autonomy in the larger scheme of things— enough so that it was gradually becoming recognized as the independent domain of ecology.

Biologie as Popular Natural History Even as Schmeil and Kraepelin produced textbooks for teacher and student use, popular books provided another set of genres for framing and

24. Kraepelin, Einführung in die Biologie (1912); Kraepelin, Die Beziehungen der Tiere und Pfl anzen zueinander (1913). 25. Schmeil, Lehrbuch der Zoologie (1912), v.

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elucidating Biologie. Although an enormous amount of biological information appeared in the ever-expanding throng of nature magazines, to which schoolteachers and museum men contributed prominently, books offered a better chance to set individual observations into a coherent structure. This section examines popular books by three museum naturalists—Kraepelin; Kurt Lampert, director of the Stuttgart natural history cabinet; and Friedrich Dahl, curator of arachnids at the Berlin natural history museum. Although their styles of popular writing differed, their collective effect was to reinforce a biological canon that emphasized both functional interactions of organisms with their surrounding nature and the observer’s own active engagement out in the field. Between 1896 and 1911, Kraepelin produced a successful series of books for youthful naturalists titled Nature Studies. All were built around the same narrative premise and conversational format: the teacher-naturalist-father would discuss biological topics with his three sons, Fritz, Hans, and Kurt, based on the world around them, often during a Sunday afternoon hike. Thus, Kraepelin wrote Nature Studies in the Home, Nature Studies in the Garden, Nature Studies in Forest and Field, Nature Studies on Summer Vacation, and a fi nal volume, Nature Studies in Distant Zones, which incorporated material from a trip to South Asia he undertook in 1903–4 with his brother, the psychiatrist Emil. 26 All of these books used highly didactic conversations between father and sons to promote the understanding of organisms in relation to their physical and biological conditions of existence as well as their distribution. In the book on the summer vacation, for example, father and sons left the mother at home to venture off to the mountains, where they observed and discussed geographic distribution and the conditions that governed that distribution, via conversations on such topics as alpine life and protective coloration, cave fauna, and the role of humans in shaping animal diffusion and extinction. After seven exhaustingly didactic days, they returned home, whence after several weeks and a turn of the reader’s page the entire family left for a beach vacation on Germany’s north Atlantic coast. There they spent another several chapters observ26. Kraepelin, Naturstudien im Hause (1896; 4th ed., 1910; Kraepelin, Naturstudien im Garten (1901; 3rd ed., 1908); Kraepelin, Naturstudien in Wald und Feld (1902; 3rd ed., 1908); Kraepelin, Naturstudien in der Sommerfrische (1906; 2nd ed., 1911); Kraepelin, Naturstudien in Fernen Zonen (1906; 2nd ed., 1911). A “people’s edition” with excerpts from the fi rst three books also appeared, titled Naturstudien: Ein Buch für die Jugend (1905; 2nd ed., 1909).

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ing and discussing the conditions of brackish water at the mouth of the Elbe, the plants and animals living between the tides and in the mud flats, tides, and ocean currents. From there it was just a conversational gambit to discussing life in the deep ocean. 27 In an accessible conversational style structured around looking at the world surrounding one’s home, Kraepelin presented what would become a standard range of ecological and biogeographic topics to aspiring boy naturalists like Hans, Fritz, and Kurt, while also presenting their excursions as a model of family outdoor education and recreation. Although the tone seems very didactic to a modern reader, the series was reviewed at the time as a charming and exemplary way of engaging youths with natural history, and it fitted into a broader genre of “conversational” science writing (Plaudereien) that had a long history and a strong presence in late nineteenth-century Germany. 28 If Kraepelin was perhaps the most successful among the museum men at popularizing such biological ideas, he was hardly alone. Kurt Lampert, director of the Württemberg natural history cabinet from 1894 until his death in 1918, also devoted much of his time to writing for a broad public.29 He wrote a number of volumes for popular science book series, on topics such as insect life, evolutionary theory, and life history studies of animals. He was a regular contributor to natural history magazines such as Natur und Haus; Aus der Heimat, the Stuttgart-based magazine of the Schoolteacher’s Assocation for Natural History; Kosmos; Jugendgarten; and Natur und Kultur. Among his many other endeavors, he published two books on central European butterflies and brought out a picture book of animals. 30 Lampert’s magnum opus, Life of the Inland Waters (1899, 2nd ed., 1909; 3rd ed., 1925), although massive in scope, was a lively and accessible introduction to the subject, with a primary focus on the lives of fresh27. Kraepelin, Naturstudien in der Sommerfrische (1906). 28. B. Landsberg, review of Naturstudien in Wald und Feld (1902). On the Plauderei as a popular genre in the late nineteenth century, see Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung (1998), 330–31. 29. On Lampert, see J. Eichler, “Lampert, Kurt, Oberstudienrat, Vorstand der K. Naturaliensammlung in Stuttgart,” in Deutsches Biographisches Archiv, N.F., fiche 781, frames 372–78; and L. Lampert, “Kurt Lampert, 1859–1918” (1960), 332–39. 30. A partial list of Lampert’s works may be found in L. Lampert, “Kurt Lampert, 1859–1918” (1960), 6–8. Other titles appear in a typescript list, “Die aus dem Archiv entnommenen Schriften von Kurt Lampert (Febr. 1976),” in Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde in Stuttgart, Archiv. His articles in Natur und Haus are not listed in either of these bibliographies.

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water invertebrates and lower plants. Following the expansion of perspectives that was becoming common in reform natural history texts, he split the book between systematics and biological analysis. Yet even the systematic part was hardly a dry listing of classificatory differentia, though it was organized taxonomically. Rather, the text took a narrative form, beginning with a walk to the field site. The opening chapter in the systematic section, on “moss animals,” or bryozoa, begins in medias res: “Our excursion led us to a small forest lake; trees and bushes densely surrounded the banks and their branches hung down to the surface of the water and dipped into it.” Examining a branch floating in the water, the narrator notes that its surface has a white, slimy covering which, upon opening, reveals a papery and cell-like interior similar to a beehive. Yet no immediate signs of life are present. “We stick the thing into a vessel fi lled with water, take it home with us, and put it in a bowl with water. Soon the picture changes.” 31 The narration of the excursion, the presentation of the phenomenon as a mystery that appeals to the curious mind, the subsequent simple experiments with the branch, and the use of direct observation (with the help only of a magnifying glass and, occasionally, a microscope) all bespeak Lampert’s skill as a teacher and popular writer, and his aim of inspiring his readers to take up similar investigations on their own. Eventually, after describing the history of knowledge about the strange creatures, their formation into colonies, and their anatomical structures and corresponding physiological functions, Lampert provides an identification key for German bryozoa, with elaborations in the next few pages of text. But then he returns to a more biological mode, discussing bryozoan geographic distribution, symbiotic relationships, and life cycles, noting that the last especially offered a fertile field for new investigations. 32 If this sort of analysis occupied the two-thirds of the book devoted to the “systematic part,” what was left for the “biological part”? Here Lampert offered chapters on the various types of freshwater environments—ephemeral puddles, moors and wetlands, standing bodies of water, and flowing waters; the origin and distribution of life in these different waters; the place of freshwater organisms in the larger economy 31. K. Lampert, Das Leben der Binnengewässer (1899), 31. 32. Ibid., 43–52, quotation on 51.

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of nature; the methods for researching freshwater environments; and, in the second and third editions, fisheries biology. He followed other European limnologists—of whom there were a substantial number by the second edition of 1909—in using physical conditions to divide lake life into three zones comprising shoreline or littoral organisms; organisms living freely in the waters, or pelagic life; and organisms of the deep lake bottoms. Geological and organic conditions also came into play. In talking about streams, for example, Lampert noted that these had different characters depending on the land they flowed through: a stream snaking through open fields would support a cluster of plants and animals different from the one supported by a mountain stream careening down into the valley below. 33 Generally, he built his environments up from their basic physical features to their geological properties to their organic composition (treating plants before animals to reflect the dependence of the latter on the former). Lampert’s synthesis clearly drew from his own experience as a field naturalist and educator as well as the increasingly refi ned and mathematically complex scientific study of lakes. 34 As limnological research advanced, he kept pace with a new edition of his book in 1909; a third edition, which he was working on at the time of his death in 1918, was completed by three younger associates. 35 But the tone of his book (and most of its prose) remained the same across these editions, aimed at the weekend naturalist—possibly a teenager—who might go out and investigate nature on his own, and who with this volume might begin making his way to becoming a scientist. This sophisticated yet accessible book, with its striking combination of color lithographs of organisms in situ, black-and-white drawings of invertebrate anatomy, and photographs, represents the high end of popular natural history writing of its day. It also reinforced for limnology the basic categories of physical conditions, functional morphology, and social and biological relations that informed both systematic and ecological analysis. The work of Friedrich Dahl (1856–1929) represents another angle on 33. K. Lampert, Das Leben der Binnengewässer (1910), 574–75. 34. On the history of German limnology and hydrobiology to 1925 (with many international comparisons), the best source I know of (sketchy as it is) remains the “Historischer Überblick” that opens K. Lampert, Das Leben der Binnengewässer (1925), 8–39. See also Leps, “Ökologie und Ökosystemforschung” (2000). 35. K. Lampert, Das Leben der Binnengewässer (1925).

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popular biological writings, with a less narrative and more didactic focus on field methods and greater explicit attention to living communities. From the beginning of his career, Dahl was attracted to the biological approach to zoology. Educated by the functional morphologist Rudolf Leuckart at Leipzig, the Darwinian August Weismann at Freiburg, and Möbius at Kiel (where he received his Ph.D. in 1884 and his teaching credentials in 1887), Dahl was well steeped in various aspects of this approach. By 1889, five years after he had completed his dissertation, he had already contributed to some of the major biological questions that had developed in the wake of Darwin’s theory: seasonal dimorphism, animal consciousness, sexual selection, and mimicry. 36 At the same time, he also gained expertise in more traditional faunal and taxonomic problems; indeed, it would be fair to say that throughout his career, Dahl’s science was characterized by an interest in the dialectic between faunal and classificatory issues, on the one hand, and functional-biological questions on the other. 37 As curator of arachnids at the Berlin Museum für Naturkunde under Möbius’s directorship after 1898, Dahl held a secure position as a museum man, and he followed its general profi le of combining popular and specialist work. Like his colleagues Kraepelin and Lampert, Dahl wrote many articles aimed at the amateur and novice naturalist and often answered queries sent to the “mailbox” column of Naturwissenschaftlichen Wochenschrift.38 In his pamphlets and booklets, he focused his attention on the practical tasks of the naturalist in the field, seeking to teach them how to observe nature in a way that highlighted organisms’ physical and social relations to one another. An early foray in this direction was a guide to the Grunewald woods southwest of Berlin, a popular site for family excursions and school trips, organized around the ideal of a woodland biocoenosis. Deriving from a pair of lectures for workingmen delivered at the Berlin museum in advance of a field trip, this little pamphlet described in conversational style how the anatomy of the different creatures of the woods was tightly dependent on their place in it, especially with regard to how they obtained their food and where in the wood they lived. Rather than making generalizations about the overall nature 36. See the bibliography in Bischoff, “Friedrich Dahl” (1930). 37. His earliest works concerned spiders’ legs, which he examined from both a functionalmorphological perspective and a systematic one: Dahl, “Die Spinnen Norddeutschlands” (1883); Dahl, “Über die Hörhaare” (1883); Dahl, “Beiträge zur Kenntnis” (1884). 38. Bischoff, “Friedrich Dahl” (1930), 627.

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of the woods, he focused his audience’s attention on how to observe organisms in relation to their activities in nature. 39 Dahl wrote two other general books aimed at teaching amateur naturalists how to view nature, and in these he insisted on the importance of the biocoenosis as an organizing principle structuring observations of nature. (Indeed, Dahl is frequently credited with transferring Möbius’s biocoenosis concept from marine settings to land settings.)40 Thus, his Introduction to the Collection and Conservation of Animals for the Zoological Museum in Berlin (1904; 2nd ed., 1908), in contrast to earlier similar books put out by the museum, began not with the animals to be collected but with the landscapes and biocoenotic conditions in which different organisms would be found in the field; only afterwards did he offer information on collecting equipment and methods, an overview of the animal kingdom, and a discussion of the different aims and organization of collections. His 1910 Introduction to Zoological Observation gave structure to his methodological interests by organizing the study of “bionomie, the science of scientific observation,” into three aspects of observing—casual versus planned observations, statistics, and experiment—while his field biology priorities came through in the three aspects of animal nature to be observed—the ecology, ethology, and psychology of animals. Of the three objects of observation, the most developed, he stated, was ecology, which he divided into two subcategories: “the various connections of animals to one another” and “general external adaptations.” The fi rst included a by-now-familiar list—symbiosis, mutualism, commensalism, and parasitism—but also “parabiosis,” or the ability of animals of different species to live densely among one another; different categories of eaters (eaters of live plants, eaters of dead plant material, live-animal eaters, carrion eaters); and a small but conceptually distinct category of “space parasitism” (Raumparasitismus), such as when beetle mites (Parasitidae) overwhelm their host to the point that it can no longer move. In his second subcategory of ecological phenomena, “external adaptations,” Dahl presented another set of familiar 39. Dahl, Das Tierleben (1902). See also Krumbach, review of Das Tierleben im deutschen Walde (1903). 40. This claim originated in Hans Bischoff’s obituary notice for Dahl, Bischoff, “Friedrich Dahl” (1930), on 626. It has been repeated by Günther Leps in several places, most prominently in Leps, “Ökologie und Ökosystemforschung” (2000), 609–10. However, as we have seen (in chapter 5), a version of the biocoenosis concept, the Lebensgemeinschaft, was already being applied by schoolteachers to woodlands, fields, and other habitat types before Dahl’s formalizations of the 1900s.

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properties of animals: protective forms and colorations that camouflage a resting animal, mottled coloration that protects a moving animal, and mimicry.41 Dahl would continue his promotion of field categories and methods until the end of his life.42 Collectively, the writings of Kraepelin, Lampert, and Dahl exemplify both the style and content of the biological perspective developed by museum men in the early twentieth century. With their commitment to popular forms, proponents of the biological perspective carried forward the populist strand of this approach to nature, evincing a strong commitment to methods of independent discovery and observation that could be taken up by any Hans, Fritz, Kurt, or workingman who might be interested in taking up natural history. With respect to content, proponents of the biological perspective analyzed the physical, biological, and social relationships structuring animal existence, covering the same topic areas that would increasingly be bundled under the rubric “ecology.” These popular and synthetic writings, then, helped to establish the basic categories of ecological analysis. But while a primary commitment to a wide public was a fundamental feature of museum-based Biologie around the turn of the century, simultaneously researchers began to articulate an increasingly arcane language and technical set of concepts with which to pursue their questions. The shift from Biologie to “ecology” to describe this work was itself, I suggest, part of its emergence as a specialist research field.

From Biology to Ecology Dahl’s use of the term “ecology” in 1910 to describe phenomena that formerly fell under the rubric “biology” reflects significant intellectual and disciplinary developments that took place in the decades before and after World War I. Although the term had been invented by Ernst Haeckel in the 1860s, it was only in the early twentieth century that it began to gain favor among German zoologists. Most likely this is due to the in41. Dahl, Anleitung zu zoologischen Beobachtungen (1910). 42. His last project was a series of field identification guides under the general title Die Tierwelt Deutschlands that combined morphology with a discussion of animals’ modes of life. Continued after his death under the editorship of his wife, Maria, until 1968, the series was still producing new volumes in 2006, with a focus on invertebrates, especially insects.

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fluence of ecological plant geographers, especially after the German translation in 1896 Eugenius Warming’s Textbook of Ecological Plant Geography (originally published in Danish in 1895), and the subsequent spread of the term into English. But the shift also probably had to do with changes in the tides of power in the German life science community. Biology “in the narrower sense” had long coexisted with biology “in the broader sense” as the science of life, but around the beginning of the twentieth century, cell biologists were gaining in their claims that the term should refer only to those attributes that had to do with general properties of life common to both plants and animals—which they defi ned primarily as the properties of the cell.43 At the same time, secondary schools were also newly using the term to cover the science of life as a whole. In the face of such claims, and with another term available for use, by the First World War, the term Oekologie began to gain in usage. The shift was gradual: sporadically appearing in article titles and the rare book title before 1914, the term took on heft among German zoologists with the publication of Dahl’s Fundamentals of Ecological Animal Geography in 1921–23, followed by Richard Hesse’s Ecological Basis of Animal Geography in 1924. With the renaming of Spengel’s Zoological Yearbooks, Part B from “Systematics, Biology, and Geography of Animals” to “Systematics, Ecology, and Geography of Animals” in 1926, there was no turning back. The shift from “biology” to “ecology” was not just a matter of a label, but involved a more detailed set of intellectual refi nements as well. Early discussions of “biological” questions tended to include anything having to do with organisms’ ability to live, whether they were talking about functional morphology, the physical and chemical conditions of the environment, or relations to other organisms. Indeed, Karl Möbius’s original biocoenosis concept embraced all of these without fi ner distinctions: a biocoenosis represented the sum total of organisms in a commu43. See, e.g., Dahl, “Experimentell-statistische Ethologie” (1898). Referring to the study of the “life habits” (Lebensgewohnheiten) of animals, he wrote (p. 122): “Earlier, it was called biology. But after this term came to be used in the broadest sense to refer to the investigation of all life-forms, and cell research in particular called itself biology, we, as the less well known and respected, must cede the field.” Dahl suggested using the term “ethology” to describe this area of study, of which the two most important parts were ecology (which he defi ned as the study of the living place or habitat) and “trophology,” the study of nutrition. On the rise of a cell-based “general biology,” see Laubichler, “Allgemeine Biologie als selbständige Grundwissenschaft” (2006).

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nity as well as the physical conditions that sustained it. But by 1910 quite a number of scholars had been working to articulate a clearer distinction between an organism’s relations to its physical surroundings and its relationships with other biota. Already in the early 1890s, scholars were starting to invent new designations to describe the physical surroundings structuring the existence of an organism, separate from its relations to other animals and plants. In 1893 the marine biogeologist Johannes Walther suggested the term Lebensbezirke (life districts) to designate the particular constellations of physical conditions that would limit the distribution of organisms; he also brought over from geology the term “facies” for “the physical properties of the seabed that condition the distribution of marine organisms in the ocean.” 44 Working from a somewhat different perspective, in 1897 the geographer Friedrich Ratzel introduced the concept of Lebensraum (literally, “living space”), developing it in 1901 to refer to the idea that a fundamental drive of all species was to expand the physical space they took up on the earth. Although this idea would later become notorious for its political uses, as the Nazis used it to justify the naturalness of Germany’s drive for expansion, it also quickly gained traction in the biological world, reinforcing the importance assigned to animals’ relations to their environments.45 Researchers could also make use of the terms “autecology” and “synecology,” introduced into plant ecology in 1896 to distinguish between the study of individual plant species’ relations to their environments and the study of aggregations—indeed, this division was adopted by the Third International Botanical Congress in 1910.46 Although the terms were supposed to divide the study of individuals from that of communities, “autecology” essentially referred to the relation of the organism to its physical environment, while “synecology” focused on the relations of different species to one another. These terms do not appear to have gained much immediate use among German animal ecologists, however. Instead, a similar distinction was articulated in different terms, in the context of the community concept itself. 44. Walther, Einleitung in die Geologie (1893–94); quoted and cited in Ortmann, “Bericht über die Fortschritte . . . (seit 1889)” (1899), 251–52. The individual volume titles are more revealing than the overall title: vol. 1: Bionomie des Meeres [Bionomy of the Ocean]; vol. 2: Die Lebensweise der Meerestiere [The Mode of Life of Ocean Animals]; vol. 3: Lithogenesis der Gegenwart [Lithogenesis of the Present]. 45. Ratzel, “Der Lebensraum” (1901). On the early reception and spread of the Lebensraum concept, see W. Smith, “Friedrich Ratzel” (1980). 46. McIntosh, The Background of Ecology (1985), 146.

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In 1908, just after Möbius died, Dahl introduced the term “biotope” to name the essential physical surroundings in which a biocoenosis formed. With this word, he sought to differentiate between the broader conditions of existence and the particular local community, in parallel to the distinction among plant geographers between plant formations and plant associations.47 As it came to be used, however, the term “biotope” did not so much refer to local units (rather than larger-scale ones) as it referred to the physical environment for a particular kind of community (rather than the mutual relations of the organisms within that community).48 At the same time, Lebensgemeinschaften, or “biocoenoses,” increasingly came to refer only to organisms’ relations with other organisms, rather than the sum total of biotic and physical relationships that mutually sustained a community, as Möbius had originally used it. While the oyster community remained the paradigmatic one for German ecology, Lebensgemeinschaften could also refer to parasite-host relations, predatorpray relations, and symbioses—all different kinds of relationships among animals. All of these vocabulary moves served similar ends: to articulate a distinction between a physical, spatial aspect of ecology and a biological, behavioral one. By 1914 Franz Doflein could cement this distinction in his major popular book Das Tier als Glied des Naturganzen (The animal as a member [link] of the whole of nature). Here again we see the museum connection: although Doflein was professor of zoology at Freiburg when the book appeared, he had written it over the previous decade, most of it while he served as conservator and then director of the Munich state natural history collection; the volume was dedicated to “my dear friend” Ludwig Döderlein, director of the Strasbourg museum. Divided into three books, the work echoed contemporary concerns of Kraepelin, Dahl, and Ratzel, with the fi rst and largest book devoted to “the animal and the living elements of its Lebensraum,” the second to “the animal and the nonliving elements of its Lebensraum,” and the third book to a two-chapter conclusion on “adaptedness [Zweckmäßigkeit] in animal structure and life and its explanations.” The fi rst book, which took up the volume’s fi rst 760 pages, considered living communities, beginning with the classic oyster community; relations surrounding food; enemies; sex; migration; care for young; “society-building in the 47. Dahl, “Grundsätze und Grundbegriffe” (1908). 48. Hesse, Tiergeographie auf ökologischer Grundlage (1924), 141.

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animal kingdom”; and social insects. The second focused on the physical conditions of existence, primarily medium, substrate, food, temperature and climate, and light—categories already established by writers such as Kraepelin and Lampert.49 If the distinction between physical and social relationships came to be understood as a critical one to ecology, researchers were refi ning their conceptual vocabulary in other ways as well, especially within the study of ecology’s physical dimensions. One important innovation concerned the range of tolerance an organism had to fluctuations in its physical surroundings. Although this idea extended well back into the nineteenth century, it became increasingly significant in the second and third decades of the twentieth. Known as Liebig’s law of the minimum after its early nineteenth-century originator, the chemist Justus Liebig, this principle said that the growth of a plant was limited by that factor in least abundance; a closely related concept was that of the “optimum,” which recognized a certain set of conditions as optimal for an organism. This concept was useful in clarifying that different plants had different optima that might account for their geographic distribution. The temperature optimum was the most obvious determinant, but plants also had an optimal range of other factors, such as light and humidity. 50 The concept of the optimum had another analytically useful dimension as well: its range. If the range around the optimum in which an organism could survive was small, it was more limited ecologically and geographically; if the range was large, it had more flexibility. Plant biologists and geographers used this idea to focus on a plant’s ability to withstand fluctuations in temperature and humidity. 51 Ecological animal 49. Doflein, Das Tier als Glied des Naturganzen (1914). This appeared as the second volume of the two-volume work Tierbau und Tierleben in ihrem Zusammenhang betrachtet [Animal Structure and Life, Considered in Their Connection]. The fi rst volume, Der Tierkörper als selbständiger Organismus [The Animal Body as an Independent Organism], had been published by Doflein’s good friend Richard Hesse four years earlier. The term Zweckmäßigkeit is more often translated as “purposiveness” in the history of biology, especially in studies of Kant’s concept of the organism, but by the early twentieth century, it was incorporated into evolutionary theory to refer to the fact of an organism’s adaptedness to its surroundings—a fact that required explanation, which Doflein offered in his third book. 50. I have been unable to fi nd a history of Liebig’s law or of the idea of the optimum. Its use, however, was ubiquitous in the early twentieth century, and probably earlier—see, e.g., Schimper, Pfl anzen-Geographie (1898), esp. chapter 2. 51. See ibid.; Kraepelin, Einführung in die Biologie (1909), 2–7.

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geography had a similar concept, credited to Möbius. In 1876, Möbius had identified fish that could tolerate only a narrow range of salinity as “stenohaline,” and ones with a broad range as “euryhaline.” Similarly, he posited, fish that could tolerate a wide range of temperatures were “eurytherms,” whereas ones with narrow limits were “stenotherms.” Although this term does not seem to have been adopted immediately, it came back into use as interest in distinguishing animals by their ecological range increased. Thus, in 1913 Kraepelin used it in his Introduction to Biology, extending it to freshwater animals as well as marine fish, while in the same year, the zoologist Richard Hesse generalized its usage to land animals. Hesse would further extend the concept by the early 1920s to “stenoökie” and “euryökie,” to refer to an organism’s ability to “sustain its household under a wide range of external influences”; and “stenophagie” and “euryphagie,” to refer to a limited or broad range of things an organism will eat. 52 In 1921 Dahl added “stenotopic” and “eurytopic” to the list, to refer to the range of biotopes an organism could inhabit—terms one can still occasionally fi nd in ecological literature. 53 All of these terms allowed German animal geographers to clarify the possible environmental limits on distribution of a given animal type. Such new terms as “Lebensraum,” “biotope,” and the steno-eury dis52. Kraepelin, Einführung in die Biologie (1909), on temperature optimum, minimum, and maximum, for plants, 2–4; and for animals, plus the steno-eury distinction, 63–66, 83, 86. Hesse cited Möbius as the source for the steno-eury distinction: Hesse, “Die ökologischer Grundlagen der Tierverbreitung” (1913), 336; Hesse, “Über Akklimatisation” (1921), 98–99. Möbius, “Die äusseren Lebensverhältnisse der Seethiere” (1877), originally delivered as a speech to the second general session of the Versammlung deutscher Naturforscher und Aerzte in Hamburg, 20 September 1876. Zoologists were aware of the distinction between animals with wide and narrow tolerances much earlier; see the many examples in Schmarda, Die Geographische Verbreitung der Thiere (1853). In plant ecology, A. F. W. Schimper developed the idea of the optimum and range of tolerance in his Pfl anzenGeographie (1898). “Stenotherm” and “eurytherm” appear as terms in H. Ziegler, Zoologisches Wörterbuch (1909), but not any of the other steno- or eury- variants. It is difficult to know what relation this discussion bears to Victor Shelford’s characterization of the law of the optimum and law of toleration of physical factors in Shelford, “Physiological Animal Geography” (1910). Robert P. McIntosh credits Shelford with establishing these laws in The Background of Ecology, 88, 149; and Hesse cites this article in his 1913 essay. For his part, Shelford cited translations of Schimper and Warming, from which he might have drawn the concept of the optimum; he did not use the steno- or eury- terms. 53. Dahl, Grundlagen einer ökologischen Tiergeographie (1921–23), 1:1–2, 14. In the same breath as discussing Möbius’s steno-eury distinction, Dahl mentions the “Gesetz vom ökologischen Minimum, Optimum, und Maximum” in connection with Liebig and the agricultural physicist Wollny.

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tinction represent a scientization of ecology, not just through the creation of a jargon but also through the conceptual refi nements and distinctions they embodied. They became tools that scientists could use to defi ne their questions more sharply than in the past, tools that would lead them ever further away from breezy conversations with German amateur naturalists.

Pedagogical, Popular, and Professional Ecology In 1910 Richard Hesse, then zoology professor at the agricultural university in Berlin, published the fi rst volume of the massive two-volume Animal Structure and Animal Life. In its introduction, he acknowledged that “if the interest in the biological perspective on the living world is now very widespread, if the demand for an introduction to this point of view is so general, a good deal of the credit must undoubtedly go to the schoolmen, who, with their pedagogical feel and understanding, sought and found the salvation of scientific school instruction in this approach. Their meritorious and successful work cannot fail to give some stimulus to biological research and to call attention to the many worthwhile tasks that are yet to be solved in this area.” 54 Similarly, in 1912 the young geographer Leo Waibel could still write in the Geographische Zeitschrift, “Today one often encounters the biological perspective better represented among laymen and in schoolbooks than in scientific treatises.” 55 Hesse and Waibel might have added “museum men” to their “schoolmen” and “laymen” (or popularizers to laymen), for these overlapping groups collectively codified the basic analytical categories of the biological perspective in the fi rst decade of the twentieth century: plants’ and animals’ biosocial relations to one another and to their own kinds, their relations to their physical surroundings, and functional morphology. The fi rst two of these would rapidly become identified with ecology. While school curricula, textbooks, and popular writings would continue to be produced around these topics in the 1920s and after, educational reform in its broad sense would no longer be the primary locus for ecology after World War I, because by that time new institutions were available to support specialist ecological research and writing. 54. Hesse, Der Tierkörper als selbständiger Organismus (1910), vii. 55. Waibel, “Physiologische Tiergeographie” (1912), 164.

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We can see this especially well in the development of freshwater ecology. Whereas this research was connected to popular natural history at the turn of the century, as exemplified in Lampert’s work, the later history of limnology emphasized its practical and theoretical aspects over its rendering as popular natural history. Thus, the Plön limnological station in Schleswig-Holstein was established privately in 1891 by Otto Zacharias (1846–1916), an independent scholar and former teacher who supported the station from soft money grants and his earnings as a popular writer—a man in the mold of many other popularizing naturalists of the late nineteenth century. Only after decades of agitation did he successfully gain the underwriting of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, and it was under these auspices that Zacharias’s successor, August Thienemann (1882–1960), turned the station into a major center for limnological research. Thienemann’s own early career shows that universities were beginning to take an interest in ecological issues after 1900, primarily in connection with practical interests. Thienemann studied under Robert Lauterborn (1869–1952), Germany’s leading river biologist, who, as extraordinary professor of zoology at Heidelberg from 1903 to 1918, taught about freshwater plankton, the scientific study of wastewater, and forest zoology, while also serving as a consultant to the imperial health office on matters of water pollution. Thienemann would follow in Lauterborn’s footsteps by directing the “biological division for fisheries and wastewater questions,” beginning in 1907, at Münster’s zoology institute, where he conducted his pathbreaking research comparing the effects of differing oxygen levels (caused by different levels of pollution) on the populations of a series of deep crater lakes in western Germany. Thus, freshwater biology and ecology were gaining new institutional sources of support for professional research. If in the fi rst decade of the twentieth century the museum director Lampert could serve as the main synthesizer of this work, by the end of the 1920s, limnology and hydrobiology were becoming respected and productive areas of biological research in Germany, largely outside the museum setting. 56 56. On Thienemann and Lauterborn, see Leps, “Ökologie und Ökosystemforschung” (2000), 606–8. On Zacharias, see Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung (1998), 517–18. On Lauterborn, see Müllerott, “Robert Lauterborn” (1982). The Hamburg Zoological Museum founded a hydrobiological station in 1899 and a fi sheries biology division in 1910. This was almost certainly part of broader efforts toward establishing a university in Hamburg. See Hans Lohmann, “Karl Kraepelin,” Hamburgischer Correspondent, Nr. 165

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In this crucial early period before the world war, though, pedagogical and popular writings provided the vehicles through which the big picture of ecology was not merely articulated for a broad audience, but actually established. And museum men, as we have seen, were vital to that project.

(31 March 1914), clipping, in Universität Hamburg, Zoologisches Institut und Zoologisches Museum, Zeitungsausschnitt-Sammlung, A 760: Kraepelin, Karl.

chapter NINE

Museum Research and the Rise of Ecological Animal Geography

I

f the biological perspective found its most visible expression in the public exhibits of Germany’s major civic museums and its broadest social impact through the curricular reforms of the public schools, it also became an increasingly important intellectual force in zoological research after 1900. Museum curators played a key role not only in the codification of animal ecology as a scientific specialty but also in its integration into zoological thinking more broadly. In the decades around 1900, museum research revolved around three main areas: systematics, which established classificatory relationships and explained them in evolutionary terms; animal geography, which sought to establish and explain the patterns of distribution of animals across the earth; and animal biology, the study of the conditions and adaptations that allowed the animal to survive in nature—the area of scholarship that would soon be renamed animal ecology. These areas were not wholly distinct: systematists increasingly used geographic patterns and ecological factors to help elucidate taxonomic relationships, while in many instances well-established taxonomic relationships and physical ecological factors offered clues to geographic patterns of distribution of animal groups. Ecological analysis would become increasingly prominent between 1890 and the 1920s, as it emerged from the primordial soup of the biological perspective to take on an ever more visible role in the study of animal distribution. Indeed, the biggest intellectual

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development in museum zoology between the 1880s and the mid-1920s was the emergence of ecological animal geography, which used ecological criteria to explain the distribution of animals, and which constituted a major research payoff of the biological perspective. Ecological animal geography, which fi rst made its mark in marine research in the early 1890s and culminated in Richard Hesse’s 1924 Ecological Basis of Animal Geography, is central to the histories of both ecology and biogeography in the early twentieth century. It has received little attention from historians of ecology, however, perhaps because its emphasis on animals’ relations with their physical environments falls outside ecological historians’ primary focus on biosocial relationships, or perhaps because the research of museum scientists has been neglected in general. Even less historical research has been undertaken on the history of biogeography in the early twentieth century than on ecology. The best overview by a historian, presented in Peter Bowler’s Life’s Splendid Drama, emphasizes the context of evolutionary theory and the critical discussions surrounding migration and physical geology (especially the question of land bridges).1 Bowler argues that in the early twentieth century, explanations of evolutionary change based on these dynamic causes became more satisfying than those based purely on animal morphology, and he pegs the rise in this approach to evolutionary studies to the decline of morphology. His overwhelming focus on intellectual history, however, brackets out the importance of institutional structures and scientific communities in structuring how, why, and where certain kinds of explanation came to be more acceptable than others in biogeography, and his relative neglect of German sources and marine biogeography leaves important gaps in the overall picture of biogeography he presents. The biogeographers C. Barry Cox and Peter D. Moore present a contrasting historical overview in their 2005 introductory textbook, organized around the view that “the most fundamental split in biogeography is that between ecological and historical aspects of the subject.” 2 Their picture of this history carries the division back to the evolutionary thinking of the early nineteenth century but skims over the critical period of the early twentieth century, when, I argue here, the division between the two aspects fi rst crystallized in the consciousness of ecological animal geographers. 1. Bowler, Life’s Splendid Drama (1996). 2. Cox and Moore, Biogeography (2005), 15–44.

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In this chapter, I argue that ecological animal geography emerged out of three converging sources: research in marine biology and ocean exploration, the work on terrestrial and freshwater animals conducted under the rubric of “biology” introduced in the last chapter, and the traditional questions and concerns of animal geography. Museum men were not the only zoologists engaged in these areas of research, but they were active players in the fi rst two areas and dominated animal geography. Some—most notably Möbius’s onetime student Friedrich Dahl, who is a central actor in this chapter—engaged in all three. In an era of intensified marine investigation but limited university positions for specialists in marine biology, museums provided a home both for the cornucopia of new forms dredged up by voyages and for some of the leading scholars who studied them. By the second decade of the twentieth century, studies of animal geography were taking on a profoundly different character than they had previously had. The increasingly ecological orientation of animal geography in the second decade of the century and after, I suggest, allowed it new prominence in the university context, once again through a reinterpretation and recontextualization of what “biology” (or by this time, “ecology”) was understood to oppose. Whereas Philipp Leopold Martin had contrasted his lively, biological approach to display with the uniform poses required for taxonomic research, and Friedrich Junge had opposed biological teaching around communities to the rote memorization of Latin species names, the university professor Richard Hesse set ecological animal geography—the analysis of present-day distribution—against historical explanations. In the hands of Hesse, who had never been a museum man or a secondary school teacher, the construction of ecological animal geography as an alternative to historical explanations in zoology became a new way to make academic zoology modern, one that engaged with ongoing debates among university zoologists. By the early 1920s, the biological perspective, having already made its presence felt across civic institutions throughout Germany, had penetrated to the heart of German academia.

Exploring Life in the Ocean The infusion of ecological thinking into broader zoological issues took off most dramatically with the development of oceanographic research

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in the 1880s and 1890s. Marine exploration drove the development of both animal ecology and animal geography in the decades between 1880 and 1925, as it focused biologists’ attention on the relationship of marine organisms to their physical surroundings. Museums were major (if not exclusive) recipients of the specimens, people, theories, and methods associated with marine research. The intense international interest in exploring the ocean resulted from a convergence of intellectual, institutional, and political factors. The governments of nations around the North and Baltic seas were concerned to understand the fluctuations in fish catches, and beginning in the 1870s they put increasing resources into investigating the conditions for the presence or absence of fish, including tracking their location and migration patterns. Scientists quickly tied fishes’ locations to their food supplies—especially the tiny floating invertebrates and plants dubbed “plankton” in 1887—at the same time connecting plankton location and movement to the temperature, pressure, and salinity of ocean waters. The investigations aimed at improving the fish catch were thus intimately tied to ongoing work among physical oceanographers engaged in mapping the ocean and its waters. 3 In Germany, too, serious research into the distribution of life in the oceans fi rst developed in the early 1870s in conjunction with fisheries interests. The addition of Schleswig-Holstein as a province in 1866 roughly doubled Prussia’s North Sea coastline and significantly increased its Baltic shores, and in 1867–68, with support from the German Fisheries Union, the newly appointed professor of physiology at the University of Kiel, Victor Hensen, gained funding from the Prussian parliament for a fisheries-oriented research program. Its governing body, the Commission for the Scientific Investigation of the German Seas (known more familiarly as the “Kiel commission”), was initially made up of Hensen; Kiel’s professor of physics, Gustav Karsten; Karl Möbius; and Möbius’s former patron and coauthor, the merchant-cum-physical- oceanographer H. A. Mayer. Between 1871 and 1886, the Kiel commission established a series of shoreline stations to measure the physical and chemical properties of water near the coast and study the local marine fauna, and it undertook research trips into the North Sea and the Baltic to study fau3. Much of this summary derives from Mills, Biological Oceanography (1989). On fi sheries history, see also Jansen, “Den Heringen einen Paß ausstellen” (2002), 153–69; Rozwadowski, Fathoming the Ocean (2005); and Rozwadowski, The Sea Knows No Boundaries (2002).

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nal distribution. Hensen also conducted a series of one-day cruises near Kiel between 1883 and 1886 to sample plankton and fish eggs and larvae in an attempt to estimate the “productivity” of the local seas. It was this body of work that provided the basis for Hensen’s first major monograph on the nature and quantity of plankton in the ocean, a landmark of marine ecology.4 Germany’s participation in the scientific exploration of the deep ocean began in 1889 and may be viewed as part of the German government’s efforts to establish Germany’s presence as a maritime power. Under Hensen’s directorship (and with the participation of Möbius’s assistant Friedrich Dahl), the summer-long Plankton Expedition conducted soundings across the Atlantic all the way to the northeast corner of South America to try to establish the horizontal and vertical distribution of plankton in the northern half of the Atlantic, which the researchers hoped in turn to correlate to patterns of temperature, salinity, and depth of the water. An even more ambitious research voyage followed in 1898–99, when the university zoologist Carl Chun led the Valdivia on a nine-month voyage around the world with the mission of studying life in the deep oceans. And the Gauss research expedition to Antarctica from 1901 to 1903, under the geographer Erich von Drygalski, also yielded important soundings and faunal samplings. Other expeditions to the Arctic Circle, to Indonesia (where Germany had established colonial outposts), and to South America often included attention to marine fauna, yielding more significant information for studies of marine faunal ecology and distribution. 5 Marine research opened up new ways of thinking about the relations of animal distribution to the conditions of existence. Whereas most analyses of animal geography concentrated on the distribution of related animal types across the face of the earth, marine research focused attention on the vertical dimension of the ocean. Did life exist at all depths? The pioneering British Challenger expedition of 1872–76 had established the existence of life on the deep-ocean beds, but some scientists disputed whether any organisms lived at the intermediate level between the top two hundred fathoms or so and the seabed stratum. Investigating the na4. Mills, Biological Oceanography (1989), chapter 1; Hensen, “Über die Bestimmung des Planktons” (1887). 5. A useful list of leading expeditions up through the early twentieth century may be found in Schwarz, “Frühe Ökologie” (2000), table 9, 294–99 (available at http://tumb1 .biblio.tu-muenchen.de/publ/diss/lg/2000schwarz.html).

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ture and distribution of this “intermediate fauna” was a major motivation for Chun’s Valdivia expedition, which also sought to discover how deep-sea organisms obtained their food, since the absence of light meant that no plants grew below the topmost layer.6 Scientists also wanted to know how confi ned marine organisms were to any given oceanic stratum and whether deep-sea forms ventured upward to obtain food. In addition, because ocean creatures were surrounded by water, not air, scientists were sensitized to the impact of this medium on the animals living in it. How did differences in salinity affect the distribution of creatures in different oceans? How did temperature gradients and their changes over the course of the day and the seasons constrain the distribution of organisms living in the upper levels of the ocean most affected by temperature changes? The absence of sunlight in the deep ocean further led scientists to wonder why some organisms living there were equipped with functional eyes and to ask about the nature of phosphorescence and other possible organic means of light production; in a period when the disappearance of eyes among cave fauna was a central subject of debate among evolutionary theorists, such questions about deep-sea organisms generated considerable interest.7 The horizontal distribution of marine organisms across the globe was another object of investigation for ocean expeditions. Especially perplexing were instances of so-called “bipolar” distribution, in which closely related forms appeared in the oceans around the North and South poles but not in between. How had this come about? This question motivated the staff at the Hamburg natural history museum to mount a voyage in 1892–93 to collect organisms from the waters around the southern tip of South America, to examine the northward distribution of antarctic deep-sea forms. It was also a question for Chun and his traveling companions aboard the Valdivia a half decade later.8 6. See Mills, “Alexander Agassiz” (1980), 360–72. 7. This was also the context for Karl Kraepelin’s interest in the fauna of the (lightless) water pipe system in Hamburg in 1885, discussed briefly in chapter 7. On the history of sightless cave organisms, see Romero, “Scientists Prefer Them Blind” (2001), 43–71. 8. The leading participants in the German bipolarity debate were Arnold Ortmann and Hamburg’s Georg Pfeffer. See Ortmann, “Ueber ‘Bipolarität’ ” (1897); Pfeffer, “A. Ortmann und die arktisch-antarktische Fauna” (1897); and Chun, Die Beziehungen zwischen dem arktischen und antarktischen Plankton (1897). Literature relating to the debate after 1908 is listed and discussed in Rensch, “Tiergeographie” (1931), 121–32. Bowler mentions the bipolar hypothesis in Life’s Splendid Drama (1996), 190, without going into detail or discussing the debate’s German participants. On the Hamburg expedition to the Straits of Magellan, see Naturhistorisches Museum zu Hamburg, Ergebnisse der Hamburger Magal-

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Questions about both horizontal and vertical distribution in the oceans were understood to be fundamentally about differences in water temperature and pressure, light, and salinity—physical properties understood to control distribution. But they could also be interpreted in terms of the history of changes in the planet and its oceans that might have affected those physical conditions. Scholars working on ocean biogeography could thus draw on the approaches of physical scientists, historical geologists, and geographers to answer their questions. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these approaches were not yet viewed as fundamentally opposed, but rather as complementary. The consequences of the new ocean exploration for zoological research were manifold. Most immediately, voyages provided zoology museums and institutes with vast amounts of new material to be sorted and classified. Although the Plankton Expedition became famous for Hensen’s quantitative, statistical approach to investigating distribution, which emphasized collecting and counting the tiny organisms floating in a given quantity of water, his approach required traditional classificatory analysis as well, mainly in the hands of zoologists. Karl Brandt, Möbius’s successor as professor of zoology at Kiel, oversaw the separation of the collected material into approximate taxonomic groupings by advanced workers in his institute and their distribution to over two dozen Germanspeaking European zoologists for further identification and classification. In addition to providing a classificatory analysis, authors reported on what their samples revealed about the vertical and horizontal pattern of distribution of their organism in the Atlantic, although this task was fulfi lled to different extents by different authors.9 The Valdivia expedition similarly distributed its much greater bounty for classificatory analysis, as did the South Pole expedition of 1901–3. Through its sheer quantity, this material made marine life a much more prominent part of zoology, as a large cohort of scientists gained expertise in marine creatures, many of them previously little-known to science. Moreover, as the analyses of individual groups collected on these haensischen Sammelreise (1896–97), iii; and Reh, “Die Hamburger Magalhaensische Sammelreise,” Hamburger Correspondent, 15 March 1908, clipping in Staatsarchiv Hamburg, Zeitungsausschnitt-Sammlung, A 585. 9. Analysis of the author listings of the full run of the voyage results reveals that thirtyone scientists contributed to classifying the ocean creatures collected on the voyage. Most (but not all) were junior workers in the field; quite a few used the material in their doctoral dissertations; and two women were among the authors. The Plankton Expedition reports are worthy of a study in their own right. Hensen, Ergebnisse (1892–).

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expeditions took decades to trickle out, the questions raised by the voyages remained before the scientific community long after the voyages themselves ended.10 The preoccupations with vertical and horizontal distribution and the physical characteristics of ocean habitats that dominated the Plankton Expedition and the voyage of the Valdivia became a familiar way of thinking, especially among those assigned to work through their collections, whether or not they continued to focus on marine fauna in their careers. Furthermore, research on marine distribution, especially that carried out under Hensen’s auspices, raised methodological issues that zoologists had not previously confronted. The ocean was a large place, and much controversy ensued over the meanings to be drawn from the contents of a plankton net. Questions about what constituted a valid sample of the ocean and how to obtain it would dominate marine ecology, creating pointed attention to the methodological issue of sampling and statistical methods in zoological research more generally.11 The continuing importance of fisheries and marine biology to the German state allowed a small scholarly community to devote itself to these topics. Its main participants worked at the University of Kiel and the Helgoland biological station, built in 1892 after Germany acquired the island from Britain. But not all of those who worked on marine plankton could be accommodated at these institutions, and some took their expertise to new settings. Thus, Carl Apstein, one of Hensen’s assistants, became a leader of the new science of limnology by transferring his teacher’s quantitative approach to the study of plankton in freshwater lakes.12 Arnold E. Ortmann (1863–1927), who analyzed the decapods 10. The fi nal report of the Challenger appeared in 1895, nearly twenty years after the expedition’s return; the material from the 1889 Plankton Expedition was still producing reports as late as 1926, thirty-seven years after the voyage; and the fi nal report of the Valdivia appeared in 1940, over forty years after that ship returned. 11. On the problem of ocean sampling, see Lussenhop, “Victor Hensen” (1974); and Mills, Biological Oceanography (1989), 15–42. For a broad overview of methodological and theoretical issues in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century marine biogeography, see Broch, “Methoden der marinen Biogeographie” (1920–39). A more detailed summary of plankton research from the perspective of 1912 is Lohmann, “Die Probleme der modernen Planktonforschung” (1912). 12. Apstein’s importance is noted in K. Lampert, Das Leben der Binnengewässer (1910), 548. For further biographical information, see Remane, “Eröffnungssprache” (1965), 45. The role of Hensen-style quantitative plankton analysis in limnology, though reaching as far as E. A. Birge’s famous limnological plankton studies on Lake Mendota in Wisconsin, was mitigated by other research programs for studying lakes that developed in

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for the Plankton Expedition while an assistant at the Strasbourg natural history museum, and who wrote one of the earliest general programmatic works on marine biogeography, ended up emigrating to the United States. As a museum curator of invertebrate zoology, fi rst at Princeton and then at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, he transferred his expertise to freshwater Crustacea and became a well-known player in the American zoological community, specializing in biogeography.13 The most striking case of a marine researcher carrying over his expertise to the museum setting is Friedrich Dahl.14 Although Dahl is perhaps best known in the history of German biology as an advocate and developer of Möbius’s biocoenosis concept,15 his most sustained scientific contributions revolved around his extension and adaptation of Hensen’s quantitative sampling methods to new situations. Even before he went on the Plankton Expedition, he was practicing them. In 1888 and 1889, while working at Kiel as a Privatdozent, he combined Möbius’s biocoenotic analysis with Hensen’s methods to analyze the distribution of organisms in the lower Elbe, where the ocean and river waters met to create a stable gradient of brackish water whose salinity determined a series of faunal “regions.” Later in 1889, during the Plankton Expedition, he conducted a similar study of the brackish zones of the lower Amazon.16 Over the next two decades, Dahl developed and adapted Hensen’s methodological concerns to the collection and study of land organisms, especially treating questions about sampling. Whether discussing how to analyze the contents of birds’ stomachs or how to establish the frequency of an organism in a particular area, he repeatedly returned to issues of sampling and statistical methods.17 Prominent among his methodological discussions was his concern to overcome the arbitrary collecting Switzerland and Germany in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. See K. Lampert, Das Leben der Binnengewässer (1925), for a contemporary history; and Schwarz, “Frühe Ökologie” (2000), for a more recent one. 13. Biographical information on Ortmann comes from Neue Deutsche Biographie and from A. E. Ortmann, Faculty File, in Princeton University Archives. 14. On Dahl, see Leps, “Friedrich Dahl” (1989); and Damkaer and Mrozek-Dahl, “The Plankton-Expedition” (1980). 15. See chapter 8 n. 40. 16. Dahl, “Untersuchungen über die Tierwelt” (1891); Dahl, “Die Copepodenfauna” (1894). 17. Dahl, “Experimentell-statistische Ethologie” (1898), discusses the analysis of birds’ stomachs and credits Hensen with bringing great progress to statistical methods in zoology.

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methods associated with typical natural history. Collectors traditionally picked what caught their eye—a beautiful bird, a shiny snail, an unusual beetle. This made for bad sampling. Instead, Dahl advocated what he called “mechanical collecting.” Dahl’s mechanical collecting was based on two principles. First, a collector should sample all different kinds of sites within the area where he is collecting—shady, sunny, damp, dry, containing different soils, and so on, “whether or not these locations are rich or poor in animals.” Second, at whatever spot the collector is working, he should gather all the organisms in that spot. Mechanical collecting, then, meant collecting without thinking or discriminating. It might mean using a physical trap or other collecting device that could capture animals that came into an area over a certain period of time (thus avoiding the arbitrariness of simply collecting what was there just when the collector happened to be there), but what was “mechanical” was not so much the trap itself as the attribute of nondiscrimination among supposedly valuable and valueless organisms. Only by collecting everything in a certain location could one know what the real inhabitants of a community were, how densely packed were the organisms in one location, how varied they were, and what relation they might have to one another. Just as the plankton net captured everything in its path, only to have its contents sorted later, so too should a naturalist on land collect everything possible, without making any decisions on the spot about what is valuable; he must go back to the museum and carefully and at leisure go through the process of determining what was there.18 These principles—attention to representativeness and mechanical collecting—would continue to preoccupy Dahl as he developed his ecological approach to biogeography and systematics, from his early work on the distribution of spiders to his synthetic Fundamentals of Ecological Animal Geography. Although he spent most of his career as a land ecologist and biogeographer, his approach to these topics can be usefully understood as combining the methodological principles he adapted from his plankton studies with his commitment to Möbius’s community concept. Dahl’s story illustrates how the theoretical and methodological concerns of marine ecologists were carried over to research on terrestrial 18. Ibid.; Dahl, “Die mechanische Methode” (1907); Dahl, “Das mechanische Sammeln” (1907/8); Dahl, Kurze Anleitung zum wissenschaftlichen Sammeln (1908), iii–iv.

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ecology. There was more to it than methodological issues, however: the ecological orientation that characterized questions about marine distribution came to infuse animal geography as well. While Dahl was faithful to the issues of his professors Möbius and Hensen, animal geography as a whole underwent a broader reorientation toward considerations of the physical environment affecting distribution, and I argue that here, too, the conceptual trajectory moved from marine zoogeography to terrestrial zoogeography.

Making Animal Geography Ecological In the annals of German zoogeography, the period from the 1880s to the early 1900s was marked by two trends: the impact of ocean research and the beginnings of a conceptual reorientation of zoogeographic goals and assumptions away from the dominant late nineteenth-century focus on large-scale zoogeographic provinces. These trends were related. The fi rst impact of ocean research on zoogeography was simply the increased recognition of the ocean as a significant unit and object of analysis.19 In 1889, in the last of his many literature surveys of animal geography in the review journal Geographic Yearbook, Ludwig Schmarda, the Viennese grandfather of German-language animal geography, called attention to the rapid increase in importance of marine research. He devoted half of his report to recent ocean voyages and their reports (especially those of the Challenger expedition, which were just nearing completion), while allotting the same number of pages to the progress in zoogeography in the entire rest of the world. Moreover, his report had defi ned zoological provinces not only for land fauna but also for marine fauna, which he split up according to oceans (Arctic, North Atlantic, Mediterranean, tropical and southern Atlantic, Red Sea, Indian Ocean, and Pacific Ocean, with “deep ocean” treated as a separate category). This was consistent with the activities of the previous two decades in zoogeography, which were dominated by efforts to delineate distinct geographic regions for animals. While land zoogeographers argued over the validity of Alfred Russel Wallace’s six general faunal regions, marine biologists 19. The ocean was not entirely absent from earlier discussions of animal geography. As early as 1853, Ludwig Schmarda had divided his overview of animal geography into three divisions, one of which was “the animal world of the ocean.” Schmarda, Die Geographische Verbreitung der Thiere (1853).

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in the 1880s were also beginning to consider more detailed divisions of the oceans. Not long after Schmarda’s last report, for example, Möbius introduced a new scheme of faunal regions that included new marine divisions as well as land ones; this was used for the new distribution maps that accompanied exhibits at the Berlin natural history museum.20 The goal of establishing geographic provinces or regions was an old one in animal geography. Such provinces had typically been based on global features such as climate, topography, and vegetation and would then be typified by a few “characteristic” animals understood to represent the province. Zoogeographers might also start from the perspective of particular taxonomic groups, considering how they dispersed from a common origin point, and mid-nineteenth-century animal geographers already considered such factors of physical ecology such as temperature, light, humidity, and salinity as enabling or constraining distribution. These factors were cast into the shadows somewhat after 1859, when the work of Darwin and Wallace made evolutionary history central to the study of animal distribution. In their wake, animal geographers sought to explain the present-day distribution of species within a genus, genera within a family, or families within an order on the basis of what had happened in the past, considering both evolutionary change and shifts in geological and physical barriers to dispersion. The history of migration thus dramatically overshadowed the analysis of the contemporary environment in the 1860s and 1870s. However, as Peter Bowler has shown, beginning in the mid-1880s, interest in the effects of the environment in shaping distribution gradually reemerged.21 By 1899 the picture was changing dramatically, most notably by moving away from the earlier preoccupation with zoogeographic regions. As Ortmann observed that year, “The science of zoogeography has begun, in the last decade, to enter a new stage, after having stood for nearly two decades under the influence of Wallace.” The problem that resulted in the endless carping over regions, Ortmann observed, was not that Wallace had gotten the regions wrong in their details, but that his fundamental idea was mistaken. Faunal regions, in which many different animal 20. Schmarda, “Bericht” (1887); Möbius, “Die Thiergebiete der Erde” (1891). The scheme discussed in this article was the product of considerable negotiation among the curators at the Berlin natural history museum. See meeting minutes of 9 and 25 November 1887, in MfN d. HUB, HBSB, Sig. SII: Akta betr. die Protokolle der Sitzungen der wissenschaftlichen Beamten, Vol. 1: 1887–1892. 21. Bowler, Life’s Splendid Drama (1996), 371–18, 429–35.

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groups existed together within roughly the same boundaries, could not exist, for every species requires subtly different external conditions of existence, each of which was likely to be unique to that group. Moreover, because different organisms had emerged in different periods under different geological, climatic, and ecological circumstances—in other words, because organisms were the product of their own diverse histories— it was illogical to expect that different taxonomic groups would share common faunal boundaries. 22 Ortmann arrived at this conclusion partly on the basis of his own research on the historical and ecological causes of the distribution of marine organisms. As an assistant at the zoology museum in Strasbourg under the directorship of the paleontologist and marine specialist Ludwig Döderlein from 1887 to 1894, he had become an expert on marine organisms; his analysis of the crustaceans of the Plankton Expedition was published in 1893. He expressed his new approach to zoogeography most fully in his 1896 Fundamentals of Marine Zoogeography, which bore the subtitle Introduction to the Investigation of the Geographic Distribution of Marine Animals, with Special Attention to the Decapods, and which would become the single most widely cited work in marine zoogeography for the next quarter century. 23 In this largely programmatic tract, Ortmann argued that a truly scientific approach to animal geography required systematically grouping organisms according to the physical conditions that limited their distribution. Although Ortmann recognized a few predecessors as having pointed in this direction, including most prominently Johannes Walther with his concept of life districts, he sought to be more systematic by specifying the categories of conditions that differentiated these life districts. Each was characterized by a unique combination of fundamental conditions: light (or its absence), medium (air or water dwelling; for water dwellers, fresh or salt water), and (again for water dwellers) substrate (dependent on the bottom or not). Ortmann used these three conditions to sharpen categories already commonly used among geographers: terrestrial, fluvial, littoral (shoreline), pelagic (the open sea), and 22. Ortmann, “Bericht über die Fortschritte . . . (seit 1889)” (1899), 245. There is every reason to believe that Wallace himself would have agreed with Ortmann. 23. Ortmann, Grundzüge der marinen Tiergeographie (1896). For biographical information on Ortmann, see n. 13 above. My claim about Ortmann’s leadership in citations derives from extensive reading in German and American marine biogeography of the period.

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abyssal (the deep-sea floor). Thus, the fluvial district was characterized by the presence of light, fresh water as medium, and the substrate dependence of its organisms; the abyssal district by absence of light, salt water, and substrate dependence; and so forth. Following upon these basic conditions, Ortmann specified another order of conditions of existence, adopting the concept of facies from Walther to designate the locally differing physical materials on which substrate-dwelling organisms depended. 24 He went on to create a taxonomy of facies for the different marine districts involving substrates (that is, the shallow shoreline area and the deep-sea floor), which would account for further, geographically specific regions. Having set out his parameters, Ortmann then proposed that the project of marine biogeography should be to investigate the relationship of the actual distribution of marine organisms to the potential distribution made possible by the physical conditions of existence. The distribution of organisms does not line up with the physical boundaries of life districts or facies; generally a particular group occupies only part of the space it could. Why is this so? Ortmann considered three factors to limit or condition the distribution of a particular group: climate, topography, and biology. Among climatological factors in the ocean, he identified temperature as the most important: borrowing Möbius’s distinction between steno- and eury- organisms, he noted that for stenotherm organisms, which can tolerate only a narrow range of temperatures, a climate with great temperature variation acts as a barrier to expansion. Topographic barriers, much more fully examined and discussed by land biogeographers, were important for littoral creatures as well, since specific substrates or facies could function as topographic barriers. They were less important for pelagic dwellers, acting mainly in concert with the climatic barrier of temperature to divide the Indo-Pacific creatures from Atlantic ones. Finally, Ortmann considered the effect of “biological (biocoenotic) conditions” on distribution, especially on organisms’ spread. When two different groups engage in the struggle for existence over territory, they can be understood to face biological limitations on expansion. An organism that lives in a vigorous and tight biotic community may also be hindered in its efforts to expand, since the organisms it

24. I discuss Walther’s terms “life district” and “facies” in chapter 8 above, in the context of the development of new ecological vocabulary, along with Möbius’s steno-eury distinction, mentioned below.

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is dependent on have to be able to spread as well. 25 History was not absent from these considerations, but complicated the picture by introducing change over time. The key factors limiting distribution were still climate, topography, and biological interactions. The fruit of all these considerations was the construction of a complicated world map designating marine biogeographic regions—actual places on the map in which the various biotic districts and their facies were bounded geographically by climatic or topographical barriers (figure 9.1). Against this map of putative regions Ortmann considered the actual distribution of decapods, a large, wide-ranging group of Crustacea that had representatives in virtually all life districts. In comparing the two, he had a number of aims. One was to identify certain families as “characteristic” of particular regions. Here he sought to reform the idea of the “characteristic animal” that had become so widely and unrigorously used in the previous twenty years. Whereas in earlier formulations, an animal might be considered characteristic of a region simply because it was prominent, in Ortmann’s view, for an animal to be considered characteristic of a region or subregion, it must be uniquely bounded by that region. Although he identified numerous families of decapods as characteristic of various regions, Ortmann actually found this less interesting and important than the anomalies—organisms that stretched beyond a particular region (accounted for by unusual tolerance to a wide variety of conditions) or organisms that showed discontinuities between regions, which needed to be accounted for by history. The effort had no defi nitive outcome, as the decapods, though a wellresearched group, were still not well enough known to demonstrate rigorously the validity of ecologically based regions. But the principles Ortmann presented in 1896—the use of categories that placed physical and geological conditions of existence ahead of geographic or topographical characters in seeking to understand the nature and causes of animal distribution—continued to grow in prominence among biogeographers over the next quarter century. 26 Ortmann positioned himself to reinforce the physical-ecological direction in animal geography by writing three major literature reviews for the review journal Geographisches Jahrbuch (Geographic yearbook) 25. Ortmann, Grundzüge der marinen Tiergeographie (1896), 42–43. 26. See, e.g., Jacobi, Tiergeographie (1904), which adopted Ortmann’s categories wholesale. Jacobi was professor of zoology at the forestry academy in Tharandt, and the book was part of a series of popular pocketbooks produced by the Leipzig publisher Göschen.

figure 9.1. World map of marine biogeographic regions, as determined by topographic and climatic barriers. In the colored original, tropical coastal (littoral) regions appear dark red, tropical pelagie regions are light red, polar littoral regions appear dark blue, and pelagial regions are light blue. From Ortmann, Grudzüge der marinen Tiergeographie (1896), following p. 96.

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in 1899, 1903, and 1908. In 1908, for example, he not only gave pride of place to a work that supported his views, but, at least as significant, he also structured his main ideas into the very organization of the review. 27 Like his previous reviews, this one opened with a section on works of general (theoretical) significance, especially with regard to the spread of the notion of the life district as an organizing principle. Sections on two traditional subjects followed—Chorologie (the study of the present distribution of individual species or groups) and Faunistik (the study of faunal regions or districts)—but Ortmann kept them short, dismissing these topics as merely “statistical” and not representing “actual scientific zoogeography.” The latter was represented instead by a new section on Biotogenie, “the science of the origin of the distribution of the biota (fauna and flora) upon the earth.” This section took center stage in Ortmann’s 1908 report and presented his understanding of what real scientific zoogeography should be about. Two other new sections, one on ecology, the other on the theory of descent, highlighted the dynamic nature of modern animal geography. Since ecological conditions helped to defi ne life districts, the study of ecology was naturally of utmost significance to understanding geographic distribution, while with regard to the theory of descent, speciation was coming to be viewed as a function of geographic and ecological isolation. Although Ortmann pushed his own views in these reviews—highlighting certain works and merely mentioning others—he was not distorting the picture very much. Other prewar works demonstrate the same trends. For example, in his authoritative 1914 articles on biogeography and animal geography in a leading new encyclopedia, The Culture of the Present, the director of the Berlin natural history museum, August Brauer, identified the main tasks of biogeography as, fi rst, to establish the present-day picture of animal and plant distribution; second, “to establish the interactions between living beings and their surroundings”; and fi nally, to explain the origin of the present-day picture. Again, it was the central place of the second goal that was new. Moreover, like Ortmann, Brauer excoriated the older style of zoogeography that identified regions with visually prominent (but arbitrarily chosen) “characteristic” animals, sharing the former’s arguments about each type having its own

27. Ortmann, “Bericht über die Fortschritte . . . (1901–03)” (1903); Ortmann, “Bericht über die Fortschritte . . . (1904–07)” (1908). The book he foregrounded was Jacobi’s Tiergeographie.

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distribution; he also called attention to the commonly limited optimum range of living conditions of a given group, which had the result that few organisms were truly cosmopolitan. Finally, he recurred to history as a necessary layer of explanation for present-day distribution, since the different conditions of the past provided the only explanation for the discontinuous distribution of related species. 28 In their synthetic overviews, Ortmann and Brauer incorporated both the older approaches to animal geography, with their emphasis on history and geographic regions, and the newer ecological approaches to explaining distribution. At the level of the overview, it was not hard to embrace these various views. Significantly, these were presented not as competing approaches but as different layers or levels of explanation. But what was to be the actual link between ecological considerations and a global animal geography? How were ideas about zoogeographic regions, history, and ecology to be integrated in practice? Friedrich Dahl’s attempt to realize this integration in the early 1920s shows some of the difficulties posed by such a project. Dahl published his two-volume Fundamentals of Ecological Animal Geography between 1921 and 1923. This book, which he dedicated to the memory of his teacher Karl Möbius, “the founder of biocoenotic research,” extended ecological themes he had developed earlier into the realm of animal geography, an area in which he had fi rst taught a lecture course in Kiel in 1894–95. Though published after World War I, this work bears the marks of prewar Biologie. He directed this book to serious amateurs—“the teachers, the doctors, the clerics, etc., who are interested in our animal world.” As in his earlier works, too, he began with the ecological fundamentals—how to consider an animal in relation to its physical and biological conditions of existence. He stressed once again the importance of quantitatively rigorous, mechanical collecting for developing an accurate picture of a biotope or habitat and its living inhabitants, illustrating his statements with examples derived largely from his own research on plankton, carrion eaters, and spiders. 29 For Dahl, as for Ortmann, understanding animal distribution fundamentally meant understanding why any given group of animals was not located everywhere. Assuming that a particular taxonomic group always originated in one location on the earth, the question then became, 28. Brauer, “Biogeographie” (1914). See also Brauer, “Tiergeographie” (1914). 29. Dahl, Grundlagen einer ökologischen Tiergeographie (1921–23), 1:v–12.

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What constrained its spread? Although Dahl did consider various physical and topographical means by which animal groups expanded their territory or had that expansion blocked, and the ways these might have changed over time, he laid particular emphasis on the ecological factors that constrained animal distribution. Echoing by-now-familiar themes, he asserted that temperature, light, and humidity were the chief physical factors that limited dispersion, although for water-dwelling animals other factors were also important, such as the salinity and other chemical features of the water, and for bottom dwellers, the constitution of the ground (muddy, sandy, rocky). Animals were also deeply dependent on the plants they lived with, and often on other animals in the same biotope. Harking back to another of his long-standing themes, Dahl drew attention to ecological factors that were constituted over time, such as seasonality or the time of day when an animal was active. He had recourse to the steno-eury distinction between organisms that tolerated a limited or wide range of conditions, admonishing his readers at the opening of the book that this was a better distinction than “rare versus common” for describing and analyzing the density of distribution of an animal, because it supplied more information. None of these ecological ideas was new by this time. In the context of animal geography, however, ecological considerations could be put to use in new ways. Dahl’s main route to generating an ecologically based animal geography was what he called “comparative biocoenotics.” He had fi rst thought about this approach over thirty years earlier, during the Plankton Expedition, when he noted that on different islands in the Atlantic, “representatives of completely different animal groups often held the same position in the household of nature,” 30 and indeed this conception was central to his idea of animal geography as comparative biocoenotics. In the Fundamentals of Ecological Animal Geography, for example, he compared animals in two biocoenoses he had studied at different times in his career—the Bismarck Archipelago, which he had visited in 1896–97 (now part of Papua New Guinea, but at the time of his research a German protectorate), and central Europe, the subject of much of his later zoogeographic and ecological investigation. The Bismarck Archipelago, he observed, supported many more ants than did central Europe. This was not only because its tropical climate was amenable to them but also because in Europe there existed two po30. Ibid., v.

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tential competitors, the ground beetle and the wolf spider. The ground beetle lived under rocks like many ants, and also like ants, both ground beetles and wolf spiders ate nonflying insects; thus, both fi lled some of the same ecological functions as the ant. The relative lack of ants in Europe, according to Dahl, derived from the competition from these other forms. Conversely, it was evident to Dahl that there was “no place [Raum] for ground beetles in the tropics,” where the ants, adapted to tropical climates, ruled. Thus, the puzzle that had frustrated so many beetle specialists, of why the ground beetles were so plentiful in temperate zones and so rare in tropical places, was explained ecologically “in the simplest possible way.” Although Dahl’s argument appears to contain tautological elements (he defi ned ants as “thermophile,” and therefore more successful in the tropics than the beetles, which were adapted to temperate climates), his broader message was that a specialist on a single taxonomic group could not afford to ignore the other organisms in a biotope in accounting for the presence or absence of that group. Moreover, recourse to historical factors was not always necessary: “If there is ecologically no place [Raum] for an animal group in a faunal region, no biotope present, it would be futile to look to considerations of geological history for why [the group] is absent.” 31 Dahl went beyond particular examples to create a broader system of comparative biocoenotics that scaled up his ecological insights to the global level. Like many zoogeographers before him, he sought to establish large patterns of correlations between animal groups and regions of the earth, and as the mammals were the best known, he followed his predecessors in using them as the leading case. Instead of organizing his mammals taxonomically, however, as evolutionary biogeographers before him had tended to do, to establish patterns of migration and evolution, he grouped them by what they ate—a fundamental indicator of their place in a biocoenosis. He thus created a table that set up eating types against geographic location. One axis was divided into five major eating types, each with subdivisions: leaf eaters (subdivided into field, treeleaf, and ground-leaf eaters), fruit eaters (of ground or tree fruits), those that ate large animals (divided into those on the ground, in the trees, and swimmers), those that fed on small animals (divided into those that fed on ants and termites, running and climbing animals, diggers, swimmers, and flying animals), and omnivores. The other axis listed thirteen geo31. Ibid., 62.

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graphic land regions. The grid thus sought to establish which kinds of eater existed in each geographic region, which would then allow a systematic comparison of which animals fi lled which biocoenotic roles in each. For Dahl it was important to establish which regions might be ecologically “full,” which would make it harder for new species to invade them, and which were not full and thus might more easily take new colonizers. He asserted that any region with at least six different families of the same kind of eater was “ecologically full” for that kind of eater. 32 Analyzing the table for each region and across the different grids, he then sought to explain the different distributions through a combination of ecological, historical-geological, and evolutionary explanations (generally involving competition). This approach presented many difficulties, not the least of which were the variable scales Dahl used when speaking of biocoenoses, biotopes, and geographic regions. Other analysts such as Walther and Ortmann (as well as plant geographers) had already confronted these problems and sought to identify different-sized categories with different levels of generality. A region or similar geographic category might be defi ned by topographical and climatological boundaries, while other units, such as facies, would be defi ned more specifically by physical-ecological factors and relationships that were more localized. Dahl’s category “biotope” was ambiguous—it could refer to the physical setting for a particular biocoenosis or the physical setting for a number of biocoenoses. Indeed, in Dahl’s usage the concept of the biocoenosis itself could be scaled up or down: he argued that most biocoenoses themselves were open systems that overlapped with one another, thus allowing larger and smaller units of biocoenotic analysis. A tree and a forest were both biocoenoses, albeit of different scales. 33 Such flexible usage allowed Dahl to analyze the relationship of ecological factors to geographic distribution on a large scale—as when he used Africa and South America as geographic units in his grid of mammalian eating types—but it then lost the specificity that was part of the appeal of ecological analysis. Yet in order to scale up ecological analysis to the regional and global levels at which the leading analyses of animal geography operated, Dahl was willing to introduce these ambiguities. The flexibility of scale in his use of the biocoenosis 32. Ibid., 67. 33. Ibid., 58–59.

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concept parallels the less technical usage of the Lebensgemeinschaft concept in the classroom, which also scaled up and down, and indeed that ambiguity seems to have been extremely appealing to users of both. Dahl’s approach to integrating ecological considerations into animal geography retained many of the older concerns and categories of the latter. The idea of biogeographic regions remained strong, and he maintained a certain allegiance to the utility of characteristic animals in establishing biogeographic regions. He continued to operate with the categories of analysis used by evolutionary biogeographers, including migration, competition, and speciation, to explain present-day distribution. In his animal geography, ecology provided a new tool for solving old problems, but it was just one tool in a larger kit. This approach represented an effort at synthesis bound up with the long-standing categories of museum zoologists.

Ecological versus Historical Zoogeography By the second decade of the twentieth century, ecological analysis was gaining increasing interest among university professors of zoology. The university system had long housed a few pockets of researchers interested in organisms’ interactions with their environments, bucking the predominant trend of evolutionary morphology and cell and tissue studies. Advanced zoology researchers conducted “biological” investigations especially at Kiel, in relation to the program of plankton research led by Möbius’s successor Karl Brandt in close cooperation with the physiologist Hensen, and at Leipzig, where until the mid-1890s Rudolf Leuckart still taught the functional approach to morphology that he had developed in the late 1840s. 34 Upon Leuckart’s death in 1898, his former student Carl Chun, a plankton expert deeply interested in questions of biology and distribution, left Breslau to replace him at Leipzig, thus gaining a more prominent platform for his interests. At the smaller Prussian universities of Bonn and Giessen, Hubert Ludwig and Johann Wilhelm Spengel (each of whom had experience as a museum man, running the Bremen civic zoology collection) also maintained research programs

34. For discussions of functional morphology and “biological” research in German academia, see Nyhart, Biology Takes Form (1995), 308–14; and Churchill, “Life before Model Systems” (1997).

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that combined systematics with biological questions. Beginning in 1887, moreover, Spengel provided a significant publication outlet for such research, by dividing his newly established journal Zoological Yearbooks into two separately published parts, one devoted to “animal anatomy and ontogeny,” the other to “animal systematics, biology, and geography.” The latter became a leading publication venue for both museumbased researchers and those based in university institutes who worked on these topics. Most of this work was not especially high profi le—only Chun’s gained broader attention, thanks to the Valdivia expedition, which was well covered in the popular and scientific press and which produced a widely read travel narrative. 35 The hottest discussions among professional zoologists around the turn of the century revolved instead around distinctions between “mechanical” and “historical” analyses of organisms. Following especially the polemics of the zoologist Hans Driesch and the methodological commitments of the vertebrate anatomist Wilhelm Roux, such discussions typically set up experimental analysis of individual development as truly “causal,” in contrast to comparative studies of embryos that analyzed differences in development to establish phylogenetic relationships. The latter approach, which had been popularized by Ernst Haeckel, came to be denigrated as simultaneously “descriptive” and “historical,” so that historical explanation was rendered as no explanation at all, but only description. This “revolt from morphology,” as Garland Allen christened it long ago, dominated the polemics, if not the actual work, of turn-of-the-century zoology. 36 This was the context for Richard Hesse’s approach to the unification of ecology and biogeography, which he fi rst presented in a multipart article in 1913 and then expanded into his massive Ecological Basis of Animal Geography in 1924. Hesse (1868–1944) was never a museum man; instead, he was an institute zoologist, who worked as a Privatdozent and then ausserordentlicher Professor of zoology at Tübingen in the late 1890s and early 1900s. He built his reputation on a series of comparative morphological studies of the organs of sight in invertebrates, tracing them from a simple form of light-sensing cell in the skin to forms that 35. Chun, Aus den Tiefen (1900). 36. On the “revolt from morphology,” see G. Allen, Life Science in the Twentieth Century (1978); Maienschein, Rainger, and Benson, “Special Section” (1981); and more specifically on historical versus causal explanation in Germany, Nyhart, “Learning from History” (2002).

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added pigments and lenses. This work combined technical expertise in microscopic anatomy, of a kind highly valued and much practiced among zoologists at the time, with physiological and comparative analysis of light sensing in different invertebrates, all with the aim of establishing the evolution of the eye, an organ so complex that it had long been used to support the proposition that God must have created it. His research gained him an appointment in 1909 as professor of zoology at the agricultural college in Berlin, from which he moved in 1916 to Bonn, eventually receiving and taking up a call to the University of Berlin, where he would direct the zoology institute from 1926 to 1935. 37 Unlike Dahl, whose ecological interests were nurtured from the beginning of his career by Möbius and Hensen at Kiel, Hesse turned toward ecology because of his interest in evolution and physiological anatomy. His obituarist Max Hartmann, having identified Hesse’s orientation as physiological, expressed some surprise that Hesse never took up experimental work. Yet Hesse’s interest in physiology was closely tied to anatomy: he sought to answer the teleological question of why an organism was structured the way it was—a question for which Hesse’s underlying answer was always evolution. Moreover, Hesse’s inclinations tended toward the synthetic. This combination gave impetus to both Hesse’s fi rst small book, an overview of evolutionary theory for beginners published in 1902 (so successful that it would go into seven subsequent editions), 38 and his fi rst big book, a 1910 volume called The Animal Body as an Independent Organism, which laid out for a broad educated audience the structures through which animals carried out the essential physiological tasks of life—movement, metabolic processes, reproduction, and sensation. It was dedicated to the memory of Carl Bergmann and Rudolf Leuckart, authors of a similar book published nearly sixty years earlier, which by 1910 had fallen into near oblivion (except among the schoolmen, whom Hesse credited with keeping this “biological perspective” alive while it was out of fashion in the universities). This was the fi rst volume of a two-volume project on the connections between animal structure and animal life: whereas Hesse concentrated on the organism as an autonomous whole, the second volume, by his friend Franz Doflein, fo37. For biographical information on Hesse, including his work on the eye, see Hartmann, “Nachruf auf Richard Hesse” (1950). Hesse was called to Bonn in 1914 but went there only following military service in World War I. 38. Hesse, Abstammungslehre und Darwinismus(1902; 8th ed., 1942).

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cused on the relations between the organism and its surroundings—that is, on ecology. 39 Even as he was working on this book, Hesse, too, was embarking on a synthetic ecological project. In August 1904, Alfred Hettner, editor of the Geographische Zeitschrift, suggested that Hesse write an overview of ecological animal geography for his journal. When Hesse fi nally published it in 1913, under the title “The Ecological Foundations of Animal Distribution,” he noted that he had never lost sight of that idea in the intervening years; surely his connection to Doflein while the latter was working on his text helped to keep his eye on the prize.40 Although Hesse never became an experimentalist, his orientation gradually became more physiological and less sympathetic to the evolutionary-morphological approach that had dominated zoology during his early career. By 1913, when he published his long, four-part article on ecological animal geography, he chose to place ecology on the side of physiology and causal-mechanical analysis against morphology and historical analysis. Although in theory, he said, the ecological and historical approaches to biogeography “necessarily complement each other,” the article’s title itself revealed his allegiance, and the way he framed their relationship was telling: “Just as one can view animal structure from two different viewpoints, from the morphological and the physiological, just as one can inquire into a particular organization on the one hand with regard to its development in the ancestral series, its history, and on the other hand with regard to the way the parts work together and their adaptation to particular conditions of existence, so too can one consider animal distribution from the historical and from the ecological standpoint.” 41 Although these words may seem descriptive to us, in the context of the time, they were hardly neutral. Hesse was inserting animal geography squarely into the dispute over what constituted a valid and satisfying explanation in biology. In contrast to the historical approach to animal geography, which Hesse explicitly associated with Darwin, Wallace, and the spinning of hypotheses, the ecological approach, which had hardly begun, promised a fruitful future. By aligning ecology with physiology and experiment, Hesse clearly signaled his claim that ecolog-

39. Hesse, Der Tierkörper als selbständiger Organismus (1910). 40. Hesse, “Die ökologischen Grundlagen der Tierverbreitung” (1913), 243 n. 1. 41. Ibid., 241.

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ical analysis offered a modern scientific approach to animal distribution, and stated it in terms that anyone in the German biological community would have recognized. Indeed, in his 1924 textbook, he went considerably further, arguing that historical explanations were hopelessly uncertain, whereas studies of ecology could yield much more secure results and should therefore fi nd scientists’ favor.42 And so we come to Hesse’s synthesis, The Ecological Basis of Animal Geography. Like Dahl’s Fundamentals of Ecological Animal Geography, it drew heavily on prewar research, and its 1924 publication marked a reestablishment of social, political, and economic stability after the war, revolution, and hyperinflation. But although he drew on many of the same technical concepts as Dahl, including the steno-eury distinction and the biotope and biocoenosis concepts, it was an altogether different kind of book. Synthetic, to be sure, like many earlier “biological” writings, it was much more technical and self-consciously rigorous than earlier works, reflecting the perspective of a texbook-writing zoology professor, not a museum man aiming at a mixed audience. Hesse’s six-hundred-page volume was the most complete synthesis to date of the previously scattered technical literature in ecology. It was divided into four sections: one on the ecological principles that undergirded the book and the other three devoted, respectively, to organisms living on land, in fresh water, and in the ocean. In structuring his book this way, Hesse elevated both marine and limnological research to the same analytical level of generality as research on land organisms—the fi rst major work to do so (though Ortmann’s literature reviews had already been structured along these lines). It thus brought together what were still three largely distinct literatures, one of the features that made it such a well-received synthesis. The actual categories of each section, however, would have been familiar to anyone who had followed at all closely the work of the schoolmen and museum writers over the previous decades. Thus, Hesse’s section on the distribution of marine animals fi rst introduced the physical and chemical influences upon animals, after which he discussed marine distribution in the benthic, pelagic, and deep-ocean realms—categories drawn from Johannes Walther and Arnold Ortmann. Similarly, his section on the distribution of freshwater animals, which fi rst considered the physical conditions of freshwater bodies, then flowing waters and stand42. Hesse, Tiergeographie auf ökologischer Grundlage (1924), 7.

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ing waters (the latter further divided into seas and smaller bodies of water), followed the divisions and subdivisions already common among limnologists and freshwater biologists such as Kurt Lampert. Most striking is the way he handled the land animals (which he called “air” animals, with reference to the medium in which they breathed and moved). After an opening chapter on the general physical-ecological factors affecting these animals (parallel to such introductory chapters in the other sections), the rest of the section was divided into chapters on the different ecological “animal worlds” (Tierwelten): the forest, the dry open lands, swamps and banks, high mountains, polar regions, islands, the underground, and cultivated landscapes. These chapter topics mirror closely the biotic communities and landscapes identified as distinctive in reformist biological school texts of the early twentieth century and in popular works of natural history and biology such as Karl Kraepelin’s Naturstudien. Hesse’s book was not written for general readers, however. The material content is much more technical in tone than in the earlier, deliberately popular works, and Hesse was rigorous in drawing out the consequences of the different physical conditions of the different biotopes for the animals that lived in them. In his chapter “The Animal World of the Forest,” for example, he not only argued that the key conditions for forests are provided by climate and humidity rather than soil content, but also gave the ranges of temperature, rainfall, and humidity that sustained forest growth, describing the limits of those ranges on the different continents: “The west coast of America from 40ºN to Patagonia and the west coast of Africa south of the equator lack rain and therefore the necessary water in the ground for the forest.” The forest in turn provides its own specific conditions for the animals living in it, not only shaping the temperature and humidity conditions within it but also providing protection from wind, conditions of poor visibility, and above all, a lack of open spaces for movement, which makes it an inhospitable place for many kinds of larger mammals and swarming insects.43 Hesse went on to discuss the functional morphology of organisms adapted to dwelling in the forest—the predominance of brachiating animals, for example—and to mention those animals, such as woodpeckers, that were rarely found outside forests and therefore were absent from places such as Egypt.44 43. Ibid., 434–36, quotation on 434–35. 44. Ibid., 439.

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After differentiating among different kinds of forests—for example, deciduous versus evergreen, woods with a significant understory versus those with open ground—his discussion of the inhabitants of these different types of forests focused on the differing conditions they provided the animals living there. In claiming an ecological basis for zoogeography, Hesse drastically altered the tasks of the latter. Instead of explaining the patterns of distribution of animals across the earth in geographic terms—answering such questions as “Why are giraffes found in Africa?”—he explained animal distribution in ecological terms—“Why are giraffes found on tropical plains?” It was only a secondary matter for Hesse that the tropical plains were found in Africa. As he put it in the introduction, “Ecological animal geography considers animals in their dependence on the conditions of their living area, in their ‘adaptedness’ to their environment, without consideration of the geographic location of this living area, whether it is placed in America or Africa, in the northern or southern hemisphere.” 45 The geographer Leo Waibel, reviewing Hesse’s book in the Geographische Zeitschrift, took note of this remarkable claim, stating, “Actual geographic perspectives, for example, concerning the distribution of the life districts, their regional grouping, and their specific animal worlds, are completely lacking. Therefore I would call Hesse’s book more an animal ecology than an animal geography.” 46 This was an extraordinary redirecting of the goals and principles of animal geography. To explain why animals were found where they were, previous animal geographers had drawn not only on ecological and climatic sources of explanation but also on evolutionary and geological ones. Moreover, a standard task of animal geographers had been to establish geographic regions. Hesse renounced all of these goals. Even though he devoted an entire chapter of his book to historical animal geography, the overall message was to minimize its value, and within that chapter, he brought forward powerful evidence against the possibility of establishing zoological provinces or regions.47 I would suggest that his reason for this, again, lay in his desire to make ecological animal geog45. Ibid., 6. 46. Waibel, review of Tiergeographie auf ökologischer Grundlage (1925), 52. 47. Hesse, Tiergeographie auf ökologischer Grundlage (1924), chapter 7, “Die Ausbreitungsschranken in der Vergangenheit (Historische Tiergeographie)” [The Limits to Distribution in the Past (Historical Animal Geography)], 99–126.

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raphy modern by aligning it with physiology and experiment and rejecting history. Hesse was hardly alone in connecting ecology to physiology—as he noted, he drew explicitly for his title on Andreas Schimper’s 1898 Physiological Basis of Plant Geography, and even earlier, Victor Hensen’s approach to plankton ecology in the 1880s had drawn heavily from his assumptions about the “physiology” of the ocean.48 But Schimper, like other biogeographers before and after him, including museum men such as Dahl, Brauer, and Ortmann, incorporated into his work both general ecological factors and discussions of specific geographic places. Hesse was the fi rst to dispense with the latter and recast the task of animal geography in purely ecological terms. Why could Hesse insist on the sharp divide between ecology and history, and indeed, between ecology and geographic specificity, when others had not? I would suggest that it is because he was not steeped in the traditions of museum zoology shared by earlier workers in ecological animal biogeography. Although tensions can certainly be found among proponents of historical versus ecological explanations to account for particular episodes of distribution, they seem not to have seen these as differences in principle but as case-by-case differences. Thus, Ortmann engaged in a spirited controversy against the Hamburg museum zoologist Georg Pfeffer over the distribution of marine organisms at the poles, arguing for a contemporary ecological explanation opposed to Pfeffer’s historicist account, but he also considered Pfeffer’s very historicism to be one of the features that modernized animal geography by bringing the dynamics of earth history into its purview.49 Both men used both historical and ecological arguments in their work, as was typical of museum men studying geographic distribution. Hesse, by contrast, had spent his early career working as a laboratory-based morphologist. He does not seem to have been interested in moving onto the turf of the museum men; rather, he was moving ecological animal geography onto the territory of the zoological profession as a whole. In doing so, he chose to align it with physiology, an icon of modern science, rather than with sciences that exuded the dusty museum air of geographic or historical explanation.

48. Schimper, Pfl anzen-Geographie (1898); Mills, Biological Oceanography (1989), chapter 1; Cittadino, “Ecology and the Professionalization of Botany” (1980). 49. Ortmann, “Bericht über die Fortschritte . . . (1904–07)” (1908).

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Ecological Animal Geography and the German Natural History Museum Hesse’s Ecological Basis of Animal Geography was an extremely influential book that reflected, among other things, the breadth and variety of recent ecological research that could be connected to zoogeography. It also helped move ecological research in animal geography to the foreground of investigation in the professional zoology community. However, Hesse’s rhetoric, while very much tapping into the hot issues exercising university professors of zoology, did not accurately reflect the ways that most working animal geographers used ecology. The opposition he articulated between historical and ecological explanation was much more blurred in their practices, and few seem to have rejected historical explanation as fully he did. In addition, for those zoogeographers working in museums, a different issue appears to have been more central to the ways they used ecology in explaining animal distribution, namely, the structuring of intellectual work in the museum. As one indication of the place of ecology in animal geography in the second and third decades of the twentieth century, we may look once again to the review literature. After Arnold Ortmann’s report on animal geography in 1908, the editor of the Geographisches Jahrbuch was unable to fi nd another literature reviewer until the late 1920s, and the next report did not come out until 1930, authored by the young evolutionary biologist Bernhard Rensch, then working at the Berlin Museum für Naturkunde. The overview he produced, of nearly nine hundred titles selected from the four thousand works in animal geography that he estimated had appeared internationally in the previous twenty-three years, can only be described as heroic. From this sea of titles, Rensch singled out Hesse’s book as one of the most significant, calling it both “foundational” (grundlegend) and “synthesizing.” Yet he also noted that information on “the dependence of distribution on environmental factors appears in a high percent of all modern zoogeographic works.” 50 The section in his report on “ecological foundations of animal geography” reviewed forty-three titles, many of them foreign. Other than Hesse’s text, the German studies he highlighted in this section represented the diversity of research in this area—on ecological relicts, on plankton ecol50. Rensch, “Tiergeographie” (1931), 60–61 (emphasis in original).

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ogy and limnology, on the ecology of the moor, and on recent changes in distribution attributed to changing climatic and ecological factors. 51 Aimed at an audience of geographers, Rensch’s report did not fully reflect the expansion of ecology as a scholarly endeavor in Germany in the 1920s, 52 and he underreported museum-based studies of animal ecology, for he selected severely among the German writings, cutting out virtually all the individual studies cited in Hesse’s literature-heavy book, many of which had been conducted by museum men. But his report demonstrates that the effort to supply historical explanations for distribution continued to hold the attention of many German zoogeographers. In search of a causal explanation for present-day distribution, researchers continued to invoke long-term changes in climate and geology. Rensch reported on the defi nitive demise of Heinrich Simroth’s “pendulation theory,” which had said that the earth’s axis had wobbled significantly over geological time, causing massive climate changes—a topic of much discussion early in the century. By contrast, theories of land bridges continued to spring up and be debated, and Alfred Wegener’s continental drift theory was the subject of lively discussion among zoogeographers in the second and third decades of the twentieth century (suggesting that the historical claim of the complete rejection of Wegener’s hypothesis has been much overstated). 53 Zoogeographers did not give up their interest in historical causation, despite Hesse’s criticisms of its weaknesses. Given that many zoogeographers found their institutional homes in museums, we may ask what effect the culture and structure of the museum had on the development of ecological animal geography. The answer lies in the ways that ecological and biogeographic inquiry developed in certain directions and away from others. The day-to-day work of museum zoologists remained structured taxonomically. Dahl wrote about many aspects of zoology, but he was curator of spiders; within the museum context, specialization continued to be organized primarily around animal types (rather than, say, geographic locations, ecological habitats, or functional interactions among different animal species). The physical organization of the research collections, which were arranged by taxonomic groupings, and which in Berlin fi lled the vast wings of the

51. Ibid., 58–63. 52. See the discussion of hydrobiology in chapter 8. 53. Rensch, “Tiergeographie” (1931), 54–58.

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buildings that were off limits to visitors, further reinforced the emphasis on taxonomic categories of knowledge. The consequences of this were significant. Whereas the proponents of “biological” approaches to distribution initially took an integrative, holistic view that considered the relations of organisms not only to their environment but also to one another—that is, a multifaceted ecological view—animal geography in the museum setting would be dominated by studies of distributions of individual animal groups, and ecological analysis would be dominated by studies of the relations of a particular animal group to its environment, or autecology. Autecology was more readily studied by experts who specialized in particular taxonomic groups than was community ecology, which depended on studying different kinds of organisms in interaction with one another. This affected even the creation of big-picture claims about distribution. Despite Dahl’s exhortations to animal geographers to consider the relations between animals in their explanations of distribution, syntheses in animal geography were typically built up by overlaying separate studies of individual taxonomic groups, not by starting with a consideration of their interactions. This, too, makes considerable sense in light of the taxonomically organized division of labor in the museum. In fact, the study of community ecology, though introduced by Möbius into the German museum setting, does not seem to have flourished particularly well in it, but seems to have done better among the schoolmen and the limnologists and marine ecologists at independent research institutes such as Plön and the Helgoland biological station, as well as at the newer branches of university institutes. Community ecology flourished much more vigorously among those whose perspectives were not guided so fi rmly along taxonomic lines. In the museum, the flow of ecological and biogeographic interest would be channeled toward autecology, a pathway more compatible with the organization of research in systematics, which remained the institution’s fundamental organizing principle.

chapter ten

Modern Nature

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he emergence of the biological perspective was a significant development in the history of modern biology. In 1850 museum-based natural history was a science of collecting, sorting, and sizing up the similarities and differences among animals, aimed at detecting an underlying taxonomic order in nature; by 1925 these activities served as handmaidens to broader questions about the dynamic interactions of organisms with one another and with their environments. If a major task for reconstructing the history of biology in this period is to understand what happened to museum-based natural history, the biological perspective provides us with one answer. But the biological perspective also had broader cultural purchase than simply being a fashion among museum men. Indeed, it has been the burden of this book to show that the men who developed this perspective sought as much to spread their views among a broad public as to get them accepted by academics. They ultimately succeeded in doing both. By the time that Hesse’s Ecological Basis of Animal Geography was published in 1924, the biological community concept was well known among German schoolchildren; families, school classes, and working-class clubs flocked to view biological groups in museums; and zoo directors were beginning to present animals in more naturalistic surroundings, as Martin had advocated in the early 1860s. Moreover, a “biological” understand-

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ing of organismal interactions, and the community concept in particular, carried much cultural freight, as it was tied to fundamental questions of identity, including the relation of the self to nature and society. What can this German story tell us about the history of natural history and the history of science more broadly? What can it tell us about modern nature? Many features contributing to the biological perspective existed beyond Germany. In fact, it is remarkable how many elements of this story were common to other settings. Artistic taxidermy, the public zoo, the New Museum Idea, biological groups, school nature study, and ecology all appeared elsewhere in Europe and in North America over roughly the same time period as in Germany. At a broad level, this should come as no surprise. Natural history reformers across the Western world operated in conditions that were broadly similar in important respects. Thanks to intensified imperial expansion, they all had increased access to global markets in living and preserved animals. Industrialization, urbanization, and agricultural intensification wrought substantial changes in local environments, including recognizable environmental degradation and species loss. Together, these factors lent cultural value to nature-oriented institutions such as zoos and museums, which in turn were fed by the growth of leisure time and the broadening of civic cultural life. Furthermore, natural history reformers were able to keep abreast of innovations in different countries through their own travels and through the information exchanged in the rapidly growing stream of scientific and professional journals as well as popular magazines devoted to natural history. In doing so, they created international patterns of circulation, emulation, and competition that led to the appearance of broadly similar natural history movements across the European and Anglophone worlds. At the same time, the German story allows us to refine the broad picture of “what happened to natural history” in this period by recognizing its different textures in different countries. Each natural history movement was made up of actors with their own ideas, commitments, and agendas. These people created new institutional structures and career possibilities but were also constrained by existing conditions; such structural features developed differently in different countries. Broader ideological and political commitments also flavored the reforms of natural history in different ways in different settings. Historically specific combinations of individuals, structures, and ideologies thus gave natural his-

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tory in different countries their own character, even as the broad trends drove in roughly the same direction. Individuals provide the fi rst level of historical specificity and idiosyncrasy. Without Martin’s taxidermic skill, his passion for change, and his ability to write, the view that taxidermic practice, museum and zoo design, and animal and nature protection were all part of a package of “practical natural history” might never have been articulated as such. Karl Möbius’s articulation of the living-community concept was crucial to the development of the biological perspective; Friedrich Junge’s transformation of that community concept into a curricular program was integral to its spread across German society. These individuals, their ideas, and those of other actors discussed here mattered. But these men’s voices would not have been heard, and would not have contributed to making the biological perspective, had it not been for the social structures that allowed them to make an impact. Critical to the development and spread of the biological perspective were the institutional and career possibilities open to those interested in doing natural history for a living. In Germany, these were heavily structured by class and education, even in an era when new career paths were opening up. Entrepreneurial practical naturalists in the 1850s and 1860s from modest social backgrounds sought to forge new paths for artistic taxidermy and the appreciation of living nature, but their success was mixed, as they ran into the limits of public support for the blending of art and science that they advocated in museums. They did better, initially, in the commercial realm, and in their connections with zoos, which as new institutions had a much more open and deliberately less scholarly feeling than the older institution of the civic museum. Primary school teachers interested in reforming natural history education to incorporate the biological perspective found their curricular choices structured to some extent by the state and to some extent by the class system that determined both their own and their students’ educational possibilities. As they pushed for both curricular and structural change, their cause gained some support when more powerful secondary school teachers and college professors decided that these reforms meshed well with their own desires and needs. Structural considerations are equally important for understanding the spread of the biological perspective through the museum world. Within the small community of university-educated zoologists, museum curatorship opened up as a viable new career path in the last decades of the

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century. It became an alternative to secondary school teaching that remained linked to both education and research. While not as lucrative as professorships, curatorial positions offered zoologists the chance to stay in the scholarly game in a seriously overcrowded discipline; at the same time, curatorships and directorships of reforming museums offered certain opportunities for exciting innovation in biological education and research, and a way to reach a much broader audience than that reached directly by universities. In the period around World War I, proponents of the biological perspective expanded their foothold in the universities themselves, as the fashions of the most elite levels of scholarship shifted toward a more broadly functionalist approach to the animal organism—a shift that came with the acceptance of animal ecology. The importance of these institutional possibilities and career structures, and their particularity, is thrown into relief by three comparisons with American natural history in the same period, with respect to the production of biological groups, the relationship between taxidermy and nature protection, and the character of nature study. Each example shows ways in which elements of the biological perspective, while shared between the two countries, evolved in slightly different directions— allowing us both to identify what was distinctive in each place and also to underscore the ways in which structures mingled with ideology to develop variant forms of “modern” natural history. Biological groups were an international phenomenon on the museum scene. But their most dramatic form, the habitat diorama, took off in large civic museums in the United States, whereas in most European countries, including Germany, these did not come to dominate so much.1 Why was this so? Setting aside for the moment the greater cultural value placed on wilderness in turn-of-the-century America (to which we will return), a critical difference lay in the structural organization and funding of museums. In the leading American civic museums, the processes of collecting, taxidermic preparation, and display were vertically integrated. This took money. As several historians have noted, in America big-money patrons were willing and able to sponsor collecting expeditions at the major museums, especially if it meant that the patrons could come along to hunt big game. In-house taxidermists traveled along on the expeditions and returned, so that the same scientists and taxidermists were involved in all phases of collecting, preserving, and mount1. Wonders, Habitat Dioramas (1993).

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ing the animals, following the organism from the field to its fi nal resting place on display at the museum. This kept the processes of taxidermy and mounting very close to the aims of the scientist2 and in turn fed into a cult of authenticity that grew as dioramas increasingly depicted real locations. In Germany, although most museums could afford in-house taxidermists, they lacked the patrons that allowed for this sort of vertical integration. Instead, taxidermists tended to work on animals that had been collected by others in the field and donated to museums as gifts, perhaps after the animals had spent the latter portion of their lives in zoos or menageries. A telling example comes from the Hanoverian provincial museum. The lion and lioness unveiled in 1908 as a proud pair had been acquired separately, neither directly from the field: the female had come several years previously from a menagerie, and had been mounted in a stalking pose “in the hope that it might later be possible to acquire a beautiful male lion with whom the female could then be united in an effective group. This hope was fulfi lled last summer, when a valuable [male] lion at the local zoological garden perished of enteritis.” 3 Many provincial and local museums depended similarly on serendipity and donations to stock their collections rather than being able to afford inhouse expeditions. Under these conditions of acquisition, the sort of science that such a group mount promoted could not involve the reconstruction of a real scene, but rather one of typical positions and behavior. The commitment to a more textbooklike museum rather than an “illusion of wilderness” was partly, I would suggest, a consequence of this absence of money. Reinforcing this point is the exceptional case of the private museum of Alexander Koenig in Bonn. Almost uniquely in Germany, in Koenig’s museum the whole process was funded and overseen by its owner. The museum was known for its dioramas rather than its contributions to science.4 Attention to these structural issues suggests new comparisons. Most of the attention to American museums has focused on its leading civic museums. Once we think structurally, it becomes clear that only Ham2. Kohler emphasizes this point especially: All Creatures (2006), 109–17. But note the tensions discussed in Andrei, “Nature’s Mirror” (2006), chapter 4. 3. “Naturhistorische Abteilung” (1908), 6. 4. Koenig could not sustain the costs of maintaining the museum following the fi nancial crisis of the 1920s, and he turned it over to the state in 1929. Wonders, Habitat Dioramas (1993), 98–99. See also Köstering, Natur zum Anschauen (2003), 34–35.

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burg, Berlin, and the Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt were comparable in size and stature to the American Museum, the Field Museum, and the National Museum of Natural History. Of the three German museums, only the Senckenberg was still a civic museum by the late nineteenth century; the other two were administered by the state. None had the same structure of in-house expeditions. Prussia’s policy of not sponsoring in-house expeditions, established with the founding of the University of Berlin, persisted (though this was slightly mitigated in Berlin, since it was the official repository for collections from the colonies). In Hamburg, the museum did fi nd patrons to fund a major expedition in 1892–93 (to the Straits of Magellan), but the aim was strictly scientific, patrons were not on board, and the marine collections obtained did not lend themselves to spectacular exhibits. The Senckenberg was the most similar to the American museums in its direct dependence on rich patrons, and like their expeditions, its patron-sponsored collecting expeditions produced a few major biological groups and dioramas. But neither curators nor taxidermists accompanied the hunts, and the museum’s spectacular dioramas depended on photographs from the scenes for their reconstruction. 5 Most American museums, like the local and provincial German museums, had to make do with far fewer resources. In fact, as Victoria Cain has recently noted, galleries given over completely to dioramas, like the American Museum’s Hall of African Mammals, were beyond the fi nancial reach of the great bulk of American museums, which had to fi nd agendas and exhibit forms within their means. A closer look at American museums before World War I suggests that they were less different from German ones than we might have guessed, and that the habitat diorama and its “illusion of wilderness” shared the stage with many other kinds of exhibits. Some of these were “biological” in the same sense as German exhibits. Presentations and discussions at the fi rst meeting of the American Association of Museums in 1907 show curators interested in creating exhibits around exactly the same functional issues already displayed in Berlin and Hamburg. As one prominent American museum man advocated, modern museums should “display not merely animals, but show where they live and what they do,” along with “the meth5. On Berlin and Hamburg, see chapters 2, 6, and 9; on taxidermy at the Senckenberg, see Becker, Zur Geschichte (1997). On patronage and dioramas at the Senckenberg, with a comparison to the American Museum, see Köstering, Natur zum Anschauen (2003), 208–12.

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ods by which nature attains her ends; variation, mimicry, adaptation to surroundings, the effects of environments, these and many others, are among the things museums seek to teach.” 6 While dioramas could do some of this work, they could not do it all, nor were they expected to—at least, in the early twentieth century.7 Once we tear our gaze away from the diorama and look at a wider range of museums, we see more similarities in the forms and functions of natural history displays in Germany and America, and biological displays that were not, strictly speaking, biological groups or dioramas emerge as a more prominent feature of the early twentieth century museum.8 A second example of the importance of structural analysis involves the relationship between career structures and the impact of taxidermists on nature protection. In both Germany and America, artistic taxidermists were active in the nature protection movement. Philipp Leopold Martin’s passion for saving nature in Germany was matched by that of the leading American taxidermist William F. Hornaday (who, like Martin, was involved in the zoo movement as well). But while practical naturalists like Martin sowed and cultivated the seeds of nature protection in Germany, the efforts of their American counterparts bore greater fruit. Here a critical difference lies in the structuring of careers in natural history in the two countries. In Germany, collecting and taxidermy were occupations available to naturalists whose lack of formal education and social standing generally precluded their becoming curators or directors of civic zoos. Although sometimes a university-educated man might learn these practical crafts (especially true of ornithologists), only 6. Lucas, “The Evolution of Museums” (1907), 87. The list of concepts to be illustrated in exhibits offered by Henry L. Ward was virtually identical: Ward, “The Aims of Museums” (1907). See also Baker, “Some Instructive Methods” (1907), 54. 7. Cain, “Nature under Glass” (2006), 136–55, 258–65. Cain has suggested that the aspects of nature represented in American natural history museums in the early twentieth century were at least as complex and diverse as that which I have described for universal museums in Germany: “Hybridization, wildness and domestication, animals that featured in fairy tales, books, or contemporary news stories, industrial resources, pride of place, even humanized narrative all dictated arrangement” (141). More detailed attention to this diversity of representing and organizing nature in the museum would be a worthy project. 8. Some kinds of collections, such as those produced by the state biological surveys in America, had no equivalent in Germany. On surveys, see McIntosh, The Background of Ecology (1985), 47–50; Ilerbaig, “Pride in Place” (2002); and Kohler, All Creatures (2006). Although Germans did publish local and regional floras and faunas, such works did not tend to be supported by state or provincial institutions in the same way, and they were often compilations derived from more detailed works, rather than comprehensive field surveys.

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rarely did a taxidermist or a collector become a zoo or museum director or even a curator; the latter were occupations that required a standing that in Germany required a university education. In America, by contrast, there was greater fluidity across the occupations of collecting, taxidermy, and curatorship—at least in the 1870s and 1880s, when experience in practical natural history could be a stepping-stone to a curatorial position or even more, especially if coupled with other credentials. Robert Kohler has suggested that the window for this career path in America turned out to be narrow, pretty much closing in the 1890s,9 but the route from taxidermy to zoos remained more open. Hornaday’s ability to advance to a prominent position, fi rst in the National Museum of Natural History and then as a zoo leader, gave him a much bigger platform from which to launch his advocacy of nature protection than Martin was ever able to fi nd. His network of colleagues with similar backgrounds and similar vision gave the American nature protection movement a forceful flank among onetime taxidermists who had advanced in the world of museums and zoos, one that appears to have had only a weak parallel in Germany.10 A third example of a development in American natural history broadly parallel to one in Germany, which yet had significantly different features, is to be found in elementary school nature study. Dismay over the lack of contact with nature among urban schoolchildren was as strong in the United States as it was in Germany. To overcome this ignorance, proponents of nature study in urban schools in both countries promoted field trips into the woods, the use of aquariums and school gardens to bring life into the school setting, and trips to museum collections to view “virtual” nature. Both nature study movements cultivated a love of nature that combined science, practicality, and sentiment with a stress on the child as an independent investigator of nature. Both were embedded in broader ideas about education for citizenship, and both stressed ecological and functionalist ideas. But there were significant differences as well. A particularly striking one has been documented by feminist historians: the association in the United States of nature study with a feminine aestheticism and sentimentalism—“effeminization,” as one early twentieth-century critic 9. Kohler, All Creatures (2006), 205–15. See also Star, “Craft versus Commodity” (1992). 10. Mary Anne Andrei’s excellent dissertation details the important work of taxidermists for environmental protection around 1900. Andrei, “Nature’s Mirror” (2006).

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called it.11 This is something that we simply do not see in Germany. The gendering of nature study as feminine in the United States surely derives from American assumptions that childhood education was the job of the woman, either at home or at school, and is almost certainly connected with the feminization of elementary school teaching in the United States. There, women constituted some 65 percent of the entire teaching profession in the 1890s, and as much as 87 percent of the total number of elementary school teachers in 1921–22.12 In Germany, by contrast, men dominated the schoolteaching profession. As late as 1911, only 20 percent of teachers in German elementary schools were women.13 This contrast reminds us that claims connecting the sentimentalization of nature to the women who taught nature study are culturally specific, even within “Western culture,” and that the idea of nature study as a women’s field depended in part on a history of women teaching children about nature. Career structures, in this case for women, contributed to variations in the elements of natural history that in Germany made up the biological perspective. In Germany, love of living nature (especially animals and the forest) came to be viewed not as gendered sentimentalism but as a national character trait peculiar to Germans. Although as an ideology this view may be traced back to the conservative social theorist Wilhelm Riehl in the mid-nineteenth century, it seems likely that the Heimat movement and its combination of nature study and identity formation, to which the followers of Junge contributed much, reinforced this idea that sentimental love of nature was an essential part of the true German, man or woman.14 As this last point suggests, ultimately, ideological and cultural commitments about the nature of nature and the human relationship to it were what wove the strands of the biological perspective into a unified fabric. One commitment, stressed throughout this book, was that among 11. G. Stanley Hall, “Introduction,” in Hodge, Nature Study and Life (1902), xv. On feminization in the decline of nature study, see Tolley, The Science Education (2003), 182–84; and Henson, “ ‘Through Books’ ” (1998), 125. On nature study more generally, see Kohlstedt, “Nature, Not Books” (2005). 12. Tolley, The Science Education (2003), 141. 13. They constituted 48 percent of the teaching personnel in the small category of middle schools and about 25 percent of all teachers in high schools, where they were clustered in girls’ high schools. Titze, “Lehrerbildung und Professionalisierung” (1991), 364. 14. Radkau, “Germany as a Focus” (2005), 17–18; Imort, “A Sylvan People” (2005); Lekan, Imagining the Nation (2004), esp. the introduction.

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the Germans studied here, nature was not understood to be separate from humanity. Here again the contrast with American ideals throws the German perspective into useful relief. The significant commitment to a distinction between human culture and a human-free wilderness was one leading version of nature in America. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it contributed both to ideas of nature protection and to the habitat diorama that represented nature as excluding the human (which itself was an instrument of the nature protection movement). This way of thinking about American nature was enabled by the existence in the United States of huge swaths of forest, mountain range, and swamp that were sparsely populated by humans, and the fact that these landscapes were now beginning to be threatened with encroachment.15 In Germany, by contrast, preservationist sentiments were tied to an image not of a wild nature untouched by humans, but of a “traditional” past in which humans had lived in harmony with nature. Correspondingly, in natural history museums, group mounts and dioramas tended to be about the nature one could reach by a hike in the woods beyond the city’s fringes. Most theatrical biological group mounts in Germany were located in their Heimat collections, showing domestic scenes of native hamsters, foxes, and birds. It is very much in keeping with this approach that a scene of homeland nature at the Museum of Ocean Studies in Berlin—a diorama of birdlife on a mudflat at low tide—prominently included the bow of a rowboat protruding into the scene from one side.16 If this feature of the biological perspective in Germany was a constant, others changed over time. At the beginning of our story, one of the most prominent aspects of the biological perspective was its outsider, oppositional character: both the natural history of the living animal undertaken by practical and popularizing naturalists in the decades following 1848 and the subsequent development of the biological perspective in the museum setting opposed the domination of “system,” which reformers represented as the dry scholarly treatment of nature associated with the taxonomic approach of the museum. Even if understood as a 15. The urtext on this topic is Nash, Wilderness (1967). On the connections among wilderness, nature preservation, and museums see Wonders, Habitat Dioramas (1993); and Andrei, “Nature’s Mirror” (2006). Kohler, All Creatures (2006), is especially good on the importance of the “inner frontier” that enabled readier access to “wild” nature while also heightening awareness of its fragility. 16. Führer durch das Museum für Meereskunde in Berlin (1917), 25. On the relations of humans to nature embedded in German preservationism, see Schmoll, Erinnerung an die Natur (2004), esp. 111–12; and Lekan and Zeller, “The Landscape” (2005).

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rhetorical stance rather than an actual fact, the perception of an opposition between classification and “biology” was a significant feature of the dynamics of natural history in Germany.17 Gradually, however, as the biological perspective gained legitimacy within the community of university-educated academics and curators to become thoroughly incorporated into the museum context, its oppositional status diminished. Systematics and functionalist biology were remolded into a view that saw them as two sides of a single coin. At the same time, the potential radicalism of creating a natural history for the people, one focused on the living organism in its natural surroundings, was undermined by the continued strength of the taxonomic model and the desire of socially conservative reformers to use natural history to hold German society together against the forces that threatened to tear it apart. Natural history museums were not radical institutions but reformist ones: the very act of going to the museum involved emulating a bourgeois practice, not overthrowing one. While museums may have been great educational experiments, their connection to the world of the educated elite kept those experiments running along pretty safe lines. Two new ideas entered into the story in the 1880s and 1890s, becoming the grains of sand around which the more conservative aspects of the biological perspective coalesced: the community concept and environmental determinism. The practical naturalists of the 1860s and 1870s did not yet organize their ideas around communities, nor were they especially focused on habitats as determining the ranges of organisms—to the contrary, the potential for animals to acclimatize to different environments was a starting point of the zoo movement. The functionalism advocated by the practical naturalists was connected to their desire to refocus attention on the living animal. This functionalist attention gained a new focus in 1877 with Möbius’s biological community concept and spread to new audiences via museums and schools in the 1880s and 1890s. As developed by popularizers and museum curators (often the same people), the important dynamics

17. Historians of biology are familiar with other oppositions structuring the rhetoric of this period: lab versus field, speculative theorizing versus experimental manipulation, historical versus mechanical explanation. Kuklick and Kohler, Science in the Field (1996); Kohler, Landscapes and Labscapes (2002); G. Allen, Life Science in the Twentieth Century (1978); Maienschein, Rainger, and Benson, “Special Section” (1981); Nyhart, “Learning from History” (2002). To these we should now add biology versus system, at least for the German setting.

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of such a community were those that allowed it to function as a whole, and the relationships that were the object of many popular ecological writings and exhibits—family units, commensalism, parasitism, predators and prey, biocoenoses, habitats and their inhabitants—were those that formed the subunits and units of community. While all of these topics could be understood as products (or even agents) of evolutionary change, transformation was almost never made the explicit object of attention among the German biologists under discussion here. If, as Susanne Köstering has claimed, evolution was the thread that tied together the diverse aspects of nature on display at, for example, the Berlin natural history museum, there is little evidence that visitors were being made to understand this, or that competition and natural selection might be major processes at work in the history of life.18 Does this mean that Germans were uninterested in evolution? Hardly. We know that this was a time when controversies about evolution and its mechanisms abounded among scientists and popularizers alike, and these visions of nature, which presented it as a process of progressive change over time, were certainly in the air.19 But the biological perspective that is the focus of this book could be advanced without being closely tied to evolution, and indeed, to its advocates, that may have been one of its advantages. Focusing attention on the variety of functional relationships that made up a community, rather than on, say, the lawful processes by which communities changed over time, reflected a concern to maintain stability even while accepting the reality of change. If Möbius himself wanted to be judged by what he did, not where he came from, and incorporated that hope into his own scientific focus on functional relationships in a way that symbolically liberated him from his past, others readily placed that functionalist focus on relationships within a community in the service of much more socially conservative views. The second new ideological commitment was to a kind of environ18. Köstering, Natur zum Anschauen (2003), 86–90. The Berlin museum guides convey a great deal of ancillary information about the exhibits on display, but no references to processes of evolution. Other university museums were indeed more explicitly evolutionary, including the Phyletic Museum at the University of Jena, and the zoological museum at the University of Breslau, which was refashioned in an explicitly Darwinian sense by Haeckel’s former student Willy Kükenthal in 1904. But many remained mute on the subject. 19. Kelly, The Descent of Darwin (1981); Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung (1998); Bowler, Evolution (2003).

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mental determinism. Much of the functionalist attention of the biological perspective focused on the dependence of organisms on their environment. Scaled up to a regional, continental, or global level, this was especially important among biogeographers, who sought in climatic, physical, and ecological conditions the barriers and gateways that explained animal distribution. Scaled down to an ecological level, these conditions were viewed as necessary (if not sufficient) conditions for the presence of certain kinds of organisms in a community. Conveyed through school texts and lessons, the dependence of the animal on its physical conditions not only helped to explain the adaptive nature of various anatomical structures but also contributed to a typology of communities—forest, field, pond, ocean shore—through which a child could understand his local surroundings. It further contributed to a view that humans, too, were deeply dependent on their environment, not just because it provided resources for use but because the local environment shaped the very person one was—a native of this village, in this province, in this state, in Germany. The local biocoenoses, moreover, had a similar attribute: they were specifically local (our deciduous woods) and at the same time represented a larger type (the deciduous forest)—an attribute that united local allegiances with larger ones (the forest—even the German forest). The attention given to the dependence of organisms on their physical environment thus contributed to the naturalizing of political and social identity in Germany, the linking up of levels of identity, and—in contrast to Hesse’s geographically placeless ecological places—the connections made between identity and place. Indeed, what made the biological perspective’s combination of functionalism, community, and environmental determinism so potent in Germany was the same combination of anxieties, concerns, and hopes that made the Heimat a central concept in the period: its connection to identity. This Heimat-oriented version of identity grounded the self in a particular place, simultaneously signaling local and national allegiances and connecting the individual to a past out of which a future would grow. It was a form of identity that sought to resituate economic relationships— especially those socially threatening, impersonal work relationships of modern industrial society that reduced to the exchange of labor for money—into a larger web of functions and meanings, that sought to deepen the connections of the individual to his or her location, both social and geographic. Alon Confi no has written, “In spite of the imperson-

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alism of modern society, and perhaps because of it, Heimatlers sought to reclaim the individual and believed that through education, instruction, and civic activity one could ameliorate modern society.” 20 To this view I would add that nature provided a potent, if indirect, means for such amelioration, and the biological perspective offered many different routes to support such a stabilizing reform of society. As the Heimat natural history teacher Karl Gottlob Lutz declared in 1889, “Nothing is as suited for tempering the divisions between the different stations of society as the truly human consciousness of belonging to a common earthly home.” 21 What, then, of “modern” nature? The biological perspective, with its commitments to understanding living nature in terms of functionalism, community, and place, dictated no single, unified defi nition of nature. As the biological perspective narrowed into professional ecology on the one hand and dissolved into a general approach to nature on the other, it left behind a legacy of multivalency, accommodating diverse ways to appreciate and live with nature. From the biological perspective, one could look to nature for a source of raw economic materials and a source of identity, for an anchor to the past and a guide to the future, for something humans could control and something humans were inside. If these different views sometimes contradicted one another, people nevertheless found themselves able to live with those contradictions—viewing them, perhaps, in the Kunde way as multiple facets of a relationship to nature too complex to purify into a single theme. Ultimately, the irreconcilability of these many facets—and yet their ability to be held at once—is the most modern feature of nature produced by the biological perspective, and the legacy we continue to live with today.

20. Confi no, The Nation as a Local Metaphor (1997), 123. 21. “Nichts ist so sehr geeignet, das Trennende der Standesunterschiede zu mildern als das echt menschliche Bewußtsein der irdischen Heimatsangehörigkeit.” Lutz, “An die Leser!”(1889).

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Index Page numbers in italics refer to figures. alcoholariums, 284, 285, 287 Altona City Museum: and biological groups, 253, 256, 269, 271–72, 272; and display controversy, 273–74; funding of, 249; and Hamburg, 269; as Heimat museum, 269; and Heimatkunde, 274–75, 278; history of, 269–70; and Kunde, 269, 277–78; organization of, 271, 275, 292; and Otto Lehmann, 212, 268–71; purpose of, 271; representation of nature in, 271, 289–92; and Wissenschaft, 277–78 Altonaer Museum. See Altona City Museum animal ecology: and biological perspective, 4, 6, 20, 358; and biology, 294; in Germany, 6, 20, 34, 295; history of, 30–31, 34, 294–95; and marine research, 326; and Karl August Möbius, 127; and museums, 323; and plant ecology, 30–31 animal geography: and biological perspective, 20, 33, 295; changing focus of, 323–25, 333–35, 350–51; Friedrich Dahl and, 315, 325, 341, 343–44; ecological, 20, 324–25, 340, 344, 350–54; and evolution, 334, 350; and geographic regions, 52–53, 229n60, 333–34, 333, 337, 340, 343–44, 350; Gustav Jaeger and, 121; literature reviews, 352–53; and marine research, 326–28, 333, 335–37; and museums, 323–25, 352–54; Arnold E. Ortmann on, 335, 337, 339–40; Georg

Pfeffer on, 351; and school instruction, 296 Animal Life (Brehm). See Brehm, Alfred: Tierleben (Animal Life) animals: and acclimatization, 108–9; and agriculture and forestry, 113–14; and anthropomorphism, 186–87; arctic, 286; and biology, 323, 326; birds, 95; breeding, 81, 91, 108–10, 116, 122; care of, 80–81, 107–10, 135; destruction of, 113–16; and fi shing, 147, 154–57; and humans, 112–13, 232; and hunting, 115; insects, 231; in Kiel Fjord, 140–42; knowledge of, 36; mussels, 141–42; oysters, 11, 109, 148, 150–57, 232, 233, 317; plankton, 326–27; and practical naturalists, 108–9; snails, 140–42; sponges, 109, 138, 236, 284, 287; squirrels, 302, 303, 304; in The Village Pond, 180–81 Anschauung, 171, 271, 273 Anschauungsunterricht, 164, 170–71 Appun, Carl Ferdinand, 40–41 Apstein, Carl, 330 aquariums: and alcoholariums, 284, 285; Berlin, 100, 119–20; and Bremen Museum for Natural History, Ethnography, and Commerce, 265–67; care of, 135–36; design of, 99, 100, 135, 136, 136; Hamburg, 135; Gustav Jaeger’s (Vienna), 120; Karl August Möbius and, 126, 132, 134–36; Munich, 221

414 art: animal, 40n8; and commercial gain, 76; and science, 76–77. See also taxidermy: artistic Association for Geography and Natural Sciences (Kiel), 148 Association for the German North-Pole Expedition (Bremen), 43 Association for the Study of Nature of the Fatherland (Stuttgart): collections of, 59–60; founding, 58; and Krauss, 58–59; and Martin, 50, 55–56, 71 Association North of the Elbe for the Dissemination of Scientific Knowledge (Kiel), 148 autecology: and biological perspective, 294; and biology, 295, 316; defi nition of, 294; in Germany, 295; and museums, 354 Baltic Sea: and aquariums, 135; conditions in, 141; fauna of, 140, 149–50; fi sheries in, 326; and Karl August Möbius, 144, 148–50, 157; and oyster cultivation, 157; museum displays, 233, 287; research on, 140, 148–50 Berlin: agricultural college, 320, 346; schools, 189, 191, 192; university, 46, 127, 128, 198, 278, 279, 346. See also Berlin zoo; Berlin zoology museum Berlin zoo, 84, 86, 211; exotic buildings, 104, 105; under Martin Hinrich Lichtenstein 40, 92 Berlin zoology museum, 225; curatorial positions, 211, 245; and imperial collections, 241–42; under Martin Hinrich Lichtenstein, 46–48, 55–56, 106, 129, 227, 229; under Karl August Möbius, 198, 205, 223–35; museum guides, 227–29, 231, 242n81, 366n18; under Wilhelm Karl Hartwig Peters, 48, 56, 76, 144, 148, 224; state-university relations of, 41, 46 biocoenosis. See living community (Lebensgemeinschaft) biogeography: and biological perspective, 367; August Brauer on, 339; Friedrich Dahl and, 8, 10, 332; evolution and, 324; Richard Hesse on, 324, 345, 347, 351; historical works on, 324; Alexander von Humboldt and, 26–27, 30; and

index Kunde, 288; and museums, 77, 218, 240; Arnold E. Ortmann on, 330–31, 336. See also animal geography biological community. See living community (Lebensgemeinschaft) biological group displays, 76–78, 200, 201, 220, 251–53, 289–92; in Altona, 253, 256, 269, 271–74; in Berlin, 233, 235; and biological perspective, 355–56; in Bremen, 253, 256, 262, 265, 266, 267; in Hamburg, 236–37; international comparisons, 358–61; by F. Leven, 66–67, 67; P. L. Martin on, 50, 52–54; in Münster, 122–23; at Museum of Ocean Studies (Berlin), 253, 256, 278–79, 280, 284–87, 364; by Ploucquet, 62–64; in Stuttgart, 57 biological perspective: and biology, 20–25, 355; challenges presented by, 4; change over time of, 31–34, 364–65; defi nition of, 2; as discourse, 7; and environmental determinism, 366–67; and evolution, 23, 26; and Heimat movement, 163; international practices of, 356; and living community concept, 365; origins of, 28, 36; opportunities presented by, 4; and practical naturalists, 25, 81; and school reform, 162; in schools, 26, 165; spread of, 18, 357; and systematics, 22–24, 66, 365; and universities, 358; and zoos, 81 Biologie. See biology biology: animal, 323, 326; ban on by Prussia, 295, 299; and biological perspective, 355; and curators, 294; defi nition of, 293, 315; and ecology, 294, 314–15, 317; and evolution, 297–98, 366; and Hamburg theses, 297–99; history of, 21–22, 295; and popular natural history, 307–8; and school instruction, 299, 302; and school reform, 295–99; as synthetic science, 302, 305; and textbooks, 307; and museums, 293 biotope, 317, 319–20, 340–43, 348–49 Bölsche, Wilhelm, 25 Bonn: Alexander Koenig museum, 359; school instruction, 300; university, 344, 346; zoo, 84 Bowler, Peter J., 324, 334 Brandt, Karl, 329, 344

index Brauer, August, 242, 339–40, 351 Brehm, Alfred, 36–37; and Berlin aquarium, 119–20; early life, 42; and expeditions, 42–45, 119; and Otto Finsch, 206; and Hamburg zoo, 119; in Leipzig, 119; and Philipp Leopold Martin, 37, 39, 47, 49, 95, 121; and Gustav Jaeger, 120–21; and Karl August Möbius, 125–26, 134; natural history reform, 37; and practical natural history, 82–83; Tierleben (Animal Life), 36–37, 42, 44, 115, 172 Bremen: scientific associations and societies, 43, 205–7, 257–58, 268; Otto Finsch in, 43; Hubert Ludwig in, 206, 208–9; and natural history, 205; Johann Wilhelm Spengel in, 207, 209–10 Bremen Museum for Natural History, Ethnography, and Commerce: aquariums in, 265–7; biological group displays, 253, 256, 262, 265, 266, 267; and Bremen commercial community, 258–61, 263; and dual arrangement, 262–63; ethnographic exhibits, 259, 260, 267; history of, 257–61; and Kunde, 268; and living community concept, 266; mission of, 263; nature as dominated by humans, 267, 290; organization of, 261–64, 264, 265–66; and Hugo Schauinsland, 261–63 Bremer Museum für Natur-, Völker-, und Handelskunde. See Bremen Museum for Natural History, Ethnography, and Commerce Breslau: school instruction, 191; university, 106–7, 118, 344, 366n18; zoo, 72, 83, 87, 95, 106–7, 116, 118; zoology museum, 118, 366n18 Britain. See Great Britain British Museum, natural history, 51, 54, 77, 106n54, 107n59, 223, 230–31, 246n88 Bruch, Carl, 90, 94–95 character-building education, 170, 172, 186, 188 Chun, Carl, 28, 327–28, 344–45 Conwentz, Hugo, 111, 212, 243–44 Cosmos (Humboldt), 27, 137 Dahl, Friedrich: on animal and plant relations, 313–14; on animal eating pat-

415 terns, 342–43; on animal geography, 340–41, 344, 354; and biocoenoses, 343; and biological perspective, 313; biotope concept of, 317, 343; and comparative biocoenotics, 341–42; early career, 312; ecological animal geography of, 325, 341; and ecology, 314, 341, 344; and evolution, 33; Fundamentals of Ecological Animal Geography, 315, 332, 340–42; and Victor Hensen, 327; Introduction to the Collection and Conservation of Animals for the Zoological Museum of Berlin, 313; Introduction to Zoological Observation, 313; and living communities, 313; and marine research, 331; and mechanical collecting, 332, 340; and Karl August Möbius, 312, 340; and museums, 312, 331; and Plankton Expedition, 327; and popular natural history, 308, 3111–14; on statistical methods, 331–32; and steno-eury distinction, 319 Danzig museum (West Prussian Provincial Museum), 204–5, 212, 243 Darwin, Charles: and animal geography, 334, 347; and biological perspective, 25; and evolution, 21, 26; and Beagle voyage, 41; Origin of Species, 91; and Rudolf Wagner, 91; and zoology, 25–26 Darwinism. See evolution Doflein, Franz, 317–18, 346–47 Drygalski, Erich von, 327 Ecological Basis of Animal Geography (Hesse): audience for, 349; and biogeography, 345; and biological perspective, 355; and ecological animal geography, 324; and ecology, 33, 315, 345, 348, 352; and marine research, 348; organization of, 348–50 ecology: and animal geography, 5, 325, 340, 344; and biological perspective, 2, 33, 368; and biology, 24, 293–95, 315, 317; categories of, 320; Friedrich Dahl and, 313, 314, 354; in Europe, 356; freshwater, 321; German, 6, 29, 294, 317, 356; history of, 6, 20, 29; history of animal, 30; Alexander von Humboldt and, 26; Karl Kraepelin and, 307; and Liebig’s law of the minimum, 318; and living community, 2, 152; and marine

416 ecology (continued) research, 325, 332; and museums, 77, 218, 239–40, 352–54; and optimum concept, 318; origins of term, 314; plant, 29–30, 315; popular natural history, 322; and school instruction, 302; specialized terminology of, 316–20; Johann Wilhelm Spengel and, 315; in the United States, 6, 356; and zoology, 334, 344 educational reform. See school instruction Eimer, Theodor, 208–10 England. See Great Britain environmental determinism, and biological perspective, 366–67 erziehender Unterricht. See characterbuilding education ethnography, 255; in Altona, 269, 274–75; in Berlin, 264n25; in Bremen, 257–65, 267; ethnographic groups, 221; in Museum of Ocean Studies (Berlin), 283; museums, 5n8, 10, 202, 216 ethnology. See ethnography expeditions: American, 358–60; Carl Ferdinand Appun, 40; Austrian, 41; Alfred Brehm, 42–44; British, 41, 327, 333; Carl Chun, 328, 345; Erich von Drygalski, 327; Otto Finsch, 43; German, 41–42; Philipp Leopold Martin, 40, 45; H. A. Meyer, 149; Karl August Möbius, 149; and museums, 241–42, 268, 286, 330; Arnold E. Ortmann, 330; Plankton, 327, 329, 331, 335, 341 evolution: and animal geography, 334, 350; and biology, 21–22; biological perspective, 23, 26, 240, 366; and Friedrich Dahl, 33, 342–44; and Ernst Haeckel, 298; and Richard Hesse, 346–47; and Friedrich Junge, 188; and Otto Lehmann, 275; Life’s Splendid Drama (Bowler), 324; and Karl August Möbius, 159; and museums, 160, 218, 232, 235, 240, 323, 366; popularizers of, 7; and Bernhard Rensch, 352; Riddles of the Universe (Haeckel), 298; and school instruction, 25–26, 160, 169, 188–89, 296–98, 301–2, 305, 307; and universities, 28 Finsch, Otto, 43, 206 Forbes, Edward, 143

index Fraas, Oscar, 68–69, 70, 74, 101, 213n33 Frankfurt am Main: and Philipp Leopold Martin, 93, 98; and museums, 54, 215, 230, 242n80, 360; natural science institutions, 17–18, 37; and Hermann Ploucquet, 65; Senckenberg Naturforschende Gesellschaft, 28n43, 215, 360; zoo, 80, 83–87, 93, 98, 116; Der Zoologische Garten, 80 Fundamentals of Ecological Animal Geography (Dahl), 115, 332, 340–42 Fundamentals of Marine Zoogeography (Ortmann), 335–37 Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Tönnies), 1, 11 Gemeinschaft, defi nition of, 1 Gemeinsinn, defi nition of, 186 German Commission for the Scientific Investigation of the Sea: establishment of, 149–50; and marine research, 326–27 German Women Teachers’ Association, 182 Germany: and ecology, 6, 29, 294, 317, 356; museums in, 198–201, 230–31, 235, 241, 290–92, 359–61; and natural history, 71–72, 77; and nature, 364; and practical naturalists,109; and school instruction, 165–70, 195–96, 362–63; social identity in, 14; taxidermy, 361–62; and zoos, 79, 83–84, 101–2, 104, 105, 106 Godeffroy, J. C., 130, 132 Göppert, Heinrich, 106–7 Great Britain: and animals, 109; expeditions, 41, 327, 333; imperial context, 41, 109; and museums, 51, 54, 68, 77, 223, 230–31, 276n51; popular natural history, 15–16; taxidermy, 62 Groth, Hans Hinrich, 187 Günther, Albert, 106–7, 246n88 Hackländer, Ferdinand, 94 Haeckel, Ernst, 209, 345; and ecology, 314; and evolution, 25, 169, 189, 298; and Otto Lehmann, 270; Riddles of the Universe, 298; and school instruction, 169, 189, 289 Hagenbeck, Carl, 106 Halle, university in, 45, 217, 270 Hamburg: and Altona, 269; aquarium,

index 134–35, 136; natural history in, 130–32; natural history museum, 207–10, 215, 236–37, 239–42; and school reform, 297–99; theses, 213, 297; zoo, 84, 86, 109, 118–19, 134–35. See also Johanneum (Hamburg) Heidelberg: university, 58, 65, 207; zoo, 117 Heimat movement: defi nition of, 13–14, 162; and living community concept, 163; and national identity, 13, 363, 367–68; and nature, 163; and teachers, 163–64 Heimatkunde: defi nition of, 163, 254; development of, 212; and Otto Lehmann, 212; and living community concept, 196–97; in schools, 164, 196–97. See also Heimat movement; Kunde Helgoland biological station, 28n43, 330, 354 Hensen, Victor, 147; and Carl Apstein, 330; and Association for Geography and Natural Sciences (Kiel), 148; and Karl Brandt, 344; and Friedrich Dahl, 327, 333; and fi sheries, 327; and German Commission for the Scientific Investigation of the Seas, 149; and marine research, 147, 326–27, 330–31; and Plankton Expedition, 327 Herbart, Johann Friedrich, and characterbuilding education, 172–73, 184, 185, 187 Hertwig, Richard, 209 Hesse, Richard, 319, 324–25, 345–51; and biological perspective, 320; and biology, 347; career of, 345–46, 351; and Friedrich Dahl, 348; The Ecological Basis of Animal Geography, 324, 345, 348–51; and ecology, 346–47; and evolution, 346; and optimum concept, 319 Humboldt, Alexander von: and biogeography, 26–27, 30, 143; and biological perspective, 25, 176; Cosmos, 27, 137; ecology, 26–27; and Friedrich Junge, 176–77; Karl August Möbius on, 128, 143–45; and ocean voyages, 41; and worldview, 27 Jaeger, Gustav: and aquariums, 120; as educator, 120; and Albert Günther, 107; Kosmos, 120–21; later career, 121; and

417 Philipp Leopold Martin, 94, 120; on museums, 78; and Johannes Nill, 94, 120; and Hermann Ploucquet, 121; and practical natural history, 37–38, 82; and University of Tübingen, 107, 120; and Vienna, 94, 107, 120–21; and David Friedrich Weinland, 107; and zoos, 82, 94, 107, 120–21 Jardin des Plantes. See under Paris Jena: Phyletic museum, 366n18; university, 43, 203n10, 270 Johanneum (Hamburg), 129, 130; and aquariums, 135; and school instruction, 129, 137, 146, 302 Junge, Friedrich: on animals, 180–81; early career, 173–74; early life, 173; and evolution, 188; family, 167n11; and Heimat movement, 162; and Heimatkunde, 192; and Herbart-Ziller school, 184, 187; and Alexander von Humboldt, 176–77; laws of nature of, 177–79, 188, 190; living community concept of, 161, 164, 173–74, 177, 187, 357; and Karl August Möbius, 161, 174, 195; and moral education, 184–85; and religion, 187; and Ludwig Schmarda, 177; and school instruction, 161, 166, 173–75, 178, 185–90; and school reform, 162, 164, 168, 173, 175–76, 179; The Village Pond, 162, 174, 179–81 Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, and Plön limnological station, 321 Kaiser Wilhelm II. See Wilhelm II, Kaiser (German emperor) Kiel: description of, 11–12; museum, 149; school instruction in, 165–66, 179, 184, 192–94; university, 2, 10, 125, 147–49, 151, 174, 340, 344; zoology museum, 149, 223 Kiel Commission. See German Commission for the Scientific Investigation of the Sea Kiel Fjord, 134, 138, 139; fauna of, 140–43; as microlevel regions, 143; zones of, 141 Koch, Rudolf, 122, 211 Koenig, Alexander: museum (Bonn), 359 Kosmos (Humboldt). See Cosmos (Humboldt) Kosmos (Jaeger), 120–21

418 Kraepelin, Karl: on animal and plant relations, 306–7; and biology, 26, 297; and August Brauer, 242; and dual arrangement of museums, 236, 247; and evolution, 305; in Hamburg, 208, 212, 241–42; and Rudolf Leuckart, 305; and living community concept, 237; and museum as archive, 239, 241; and museum exhibits, 236–37; and museum organization, 240; and museum reform, 246; and museums, 208, 212, 306; Nature Studies of, 308–9; and optimum concept, 319; and popular natural history, 308–9; and queries to museums, 245–46; and research, 236–37; and school reform, 297; textbooks of, 305–7; and zoology, 212 Krauss, Ferdinand von, 58–59, 70–71 Kunde: and academic knowledge, 255; and biological perspective, 368; defi nition of, 253–55; and museums, 256, 268 Lampert, Kurt: career of, 212, 309; and freshwater ecology, 321; Life of the Inland Waters, 309–11; and museums, 212; and popular natural history, 308, 309–11 Landois, Hermann, 83; and museum-zoo relationship, 122–23 Lauterborn, Robert, 321 Lebensgemeinschaft. See living community (Lebensgemeinschaft) Lebensraum: and biology, 316; defi nition of, 276, 316; and ecology, 316, 319–20; in popular natural history, 317 Lehmann, Otto: and Altona City Museum, 268–71; and Anschauung, 273; biographical background, 270–71; and biological group displays, 271–74; environmental determinism of, 276–77; and Heimatkunde, 212, 274–75; and heredity, 276–77; as museum curator, 212; on museums’ purpose, 271–73; as teacher, 270; and Volkskunde, 274–76; and zoology, 212 Leipzig: schools, 119; university, 28, 208, 216n37, 312, 344; zoo, 83, 87 Leipziger Illustrirte Zeitung: and exhibits, 219, 221, 222; and museums, 286 Leuckart, Rudolf, 25, 27–29, 312, 344;

index Anatomical-Physiological Overview of the Animal Kingdom, 28, 346; and Karl Kraepelin, 208, 305 Leven, Franz: and animals, 117; early career, 65; in Frankfurt am Main, 54, 66, 117–18; and Heidelberg, 65, 117–18; later career, 66; and natural history, 37, 74, 117; and private commercial museum, 65–66, 67, 72, 75–76; and taxidermy, 65–66, 67; and Vienna, 66; and zoos, 117–18 Lichtenstein, Martin Hinrich: and Berlin zoo, 92; and Berlin zoology museum, 46–48, 50, 55–56, 92–93, 106, 129, 148, 227, 229; and Albert Günther, 106; and Martin, 40, 46–47, 92–93; and Karl August Möbius, 129; and museum arrangement, 227; and museum labels, 229; and Wilhelm Karl Hartwig Peters, 148 Liebig’s law of the minimum: defi nition of, 318; and optimum concept, 318–19 Life of the Inland Waters (Lampert): and biological perspective, 311; and popular natural history, 309–11 living community (Lebensgemeinschaft): balance of nature and, 157–58; and biology, 315; changing meaning of, 317; defi nition of, 125, 153–54; and ecology, 152; and Heimat movement, 162–64; and Heimatkunde, 192, 196–97; introduction of, 151; Friedrich Junge and, 162, 164, 177; lasting power of, 160; Karl August Möbius and, 151–54, 157–59; and moral education, 184; and museum exhibits, 232, 266; and school instruction, 161, 162, 164, 174, 196–97; and social status, 160; spread of concept, 181–83, 355; teacher reaction to, 186–92 Lloyd, William Alford, 99, 135 Loew, Ernst, 183n48, 189 Lübeck museum, 213, 218n40 Ludwig, Hubert, 206–7, 209–10 Lutz, Karl Gottlob, 163, 249n93, 368 marine research: and animal ecology, 326; and animal geography, 326–29, 333; and ecology, 325, 332; and fi sheries, 326–27; methodological issues, 330;

index and museums, 326, 329, 331; ocean voyages and, 327–30, 333; and plankton, 326 Martin, Philipp Leopold, 39; and acclimatization, 96; and agriculture and forestry, 114; and animals, 82; on animal destruction, 116–17; antimodernism of, 112–14, 115; on aquariums, 99, 100; and the Association for the Study of Nature of the Fatherland, 50, 55–56, 71; and Berlin zoology museum, 46–48, 92; and biological group displays, 251; early career, 45–46; early life, 115; expedition to Venezuela, 45; and Gustav Jaeger, 120; and Rudolf Koch, 122; later career, 74; and Martin Hinrich Lichtenstein, 46–47, 92; and Karl August Möbius, 129; Museum of the Primeval World, 69–74, 76, 101; on museums, 122; and nature protection, 111–15; and Johannes Nill, 72, 94, 120; and practical natural history, 31, 35–36, 82, 357; and practical zoology, 94–95; and prehistoric nature, 50, 68–69, 73, 99, 101; and private, commercial museum, 67–74; and proposed taxidermy school, 55; relation with Ferdinand von Krauss, 70; relation with Wilhelm Karl Hartwig Peters, 48; social status of, 159; in Stuttgart, 48, 50, 56–57, 57, 72, 92–93; and taxidermy, 39–40, 50; on taxidermy displays, 50–55; and teaching, 166; and Vienna, 95; and Württemberg Association of Bird Lovers, 95; on zoo design, 96–99, 98, 100–102, 104, 106, 109; and zoos, 92–93, 95–96, 110–11, 122. See also Praxis of Natural History (Martin) Matschie, Paul, 211–12 mechanical collecting, 332, 340 Meereskunde: defi nition of, 278, 283; as new science, 281, 288; as popular project, 254–56. See also Museum of Ocean Studies (Berlin) menageries: personal, 42, 72, 118; traveling, 221, 359; versus zoos, 84–85, 88, 96 Meyer, Heinrich Adolf: and aquariums, 135; Der Fauna der Kieler Bucht, 138, 140–43; and Kiel Fjord, 138; and German Commission for the Scientific Investigation of the Sea, 149, 326; and

419 Hamburg zoo, 134; and marine research, 326; and Karl August Möbius, 134–35, 138 Möbius, Karl August, 126; as advisor to state, 156–57; and animal ecology, 127; and animal geography, 334; and aquariums, 126, 132, 134–36; and Baltic Sea, 144, 148–50, 157; and biological perspective, 32–33; in Berlin, 127, 128–29, 198, 223–24, 232, 235; and biology, 315; and Friedrich Dahl, 312; death of, 164; and dual arrangement of museums, 223–24, 226; early career, 125–29; and ecology, 151, 319; Die Fauna der Kieler Bucht, 138–44, 147, 151, 157; and Edward Forbes, 143; and the German Commission for the Scientific Investigation of the Sea, 149, 326; in Hamburg, 129–30, 132–38, 144–47, 151–52, 223; and Alexander von Humboldt, 128; and the Johanneum,129,132, 135, 137, 150; and Friedrich Junge, 161, 174, 195; in Kiel, 147–52, 157–58, 174, 223; and Kiel Fjord, 134, 138, 140–43; and living community concept, 151, 153–55, 157–59, 232, 315–16, 357; marine research of, 138, 140–42, 147–59, 152–54, 157, 326; and Martin Hinrich Lichtenstein, 129; and Philipp Leopold Martin, 129; and Paul Matschie, 211; and Heinrich Adolf Meyer, 134–35, 138, 326; as museum director, 198, 211; and museum exhibits, 231–32, 235; and museum labels, 229; on museum reforms, 198, 212, 223; and natural history, 132–33, 148; and nature, 127–28; The Oyster and Oyster-Culture, 150, 152–58; periodical publications of, 144–45, 147; and practical natural history, 82, 125–26, 150; as professor, 2, 125, 144; research of, 133–34, 138, 143–44, 149; social status of, 125, 127–29, 145–46, 158–59; stenoeury distinction, 319; and systematics, 141; and teaching, 127–29, 136–37, 146; zoos, 126, 134–35 modernity, 4, 7, 10, 11n14, 24, 367–68; in museums, 251, 289–92; and school education, 171 Munich: aquarium, 221; museums, 54, 219, 317; university, 206, 209; zoo, 87

420 Münster: university zoology, 321; Westphalian museum and zoo, 122, 204, 211 museum curators: and biology, 293–94; and museum reform, 217–18, 289; and pay issues, 208, 210; professionalization of, 202–14, 248–50; role of, 249; and university zoology, 208–9, 213 museum displays, 247–48: aesthetics of, 76–77; biological, 229–37; in Germany and the United States, 358–62; in Great Britain, 62; Franz Leven’s, 64n66, 65–66, 67; Philipp Leopold Martin on, 39–40, 50–55; paleontological, 68–69, 77–78; in Paris, 55, 69n76; scenic settings, 66, 67; systematic, 22–24, 76. See also biological group displays; museums; taxidermy Museum der Urwelt. See Museum of the Primeval World Museum für Meereskunde. See Museum of Ocean Studies (Berlin) Museum für Naturkunde (Berlin). See Berlin zoology museum Museum of Ocean Studies (Berlin), 291; and alcoholariums, 284; and biological group displays, 253, 256, 278–79, 280, 284–87, 364; history of, 278; and Kunde, 278, 288; location of, 281; and Meereskunde, 278, 281; organization and purpose of, 282–84, 287–88; as propaganda vehicle, 281–82, 286–88; and Prussian government, 279, 281; and research, 279; and science, 285–86; and the University of Berlin, 278–89, 288 Museum of the Primeval World, 69–74, 76, 101, 121 museums: and adult education, 218–19; “American” approach, 272; as archive, 239, 241; and associations, 240; and biological perspective, 201, 247, 356–58, 365–66; and biology, 293; as book, 226– 27, 229; and colonial collections, 241– 42; competition for audiences, 219, 220, 221–22; and dioramas, 123, 259, 280, 285–86, 358–61; dual arrangement in, 201–2, 223, 224–26, 229, 239; and ecological animal geography, 352–54; and evolution, 250; in Germany, 198–201, 230–31, 235, 241, 290–92, 359–61; in

index Great Britain, 51, 54, 68, 77, 223, 230– 31; and Kunde, 256; labels in, 227; and living community concept, 235–36; management of, 203–5; and marine research, 329, 331; as meeting place, 240; and the middle class, 76; modernization of, 216–18; and New Museum Idea, 199–200, 252; organization of, 200n5, 226–27, 229–31, 236, 238–40; origins of public, 60; overcrowding in, 214–17; and paleontology, 77–78; panopticons, 219, 221, 252; and pay issues, 208; private commercial, 75–76; and the public, 75, 218, 249; queries to, 245; and reform objectors, 252; reform of, 200–202, 207, 223, 289; research by, 20; and royal collections, 77; and school instruction, 176, 237–38; in Sweden, 77; and taxidermy, 358–59; in United States, 77, 201–2, 251–52, 272, 290, 358–61; in universities, 208, 213, 216–18; use by populists, 18; and visitors, 226; as world in miniature, 123; and zoos, 83, 110, 121. See also biological group displays; museum curators; museum displays; and individual cities natural history: changing structure of, 49, 71–72, 74–75, 356; commercial connections of, 130–32; and curators, 214; employment in, 80; German museums, 77, 199, 214; in Hamburg, 130–32; international comparisons, 356–57; and paleontology, 77; and public/private museum distinction, 74–75; school instruction in, 137, 168–69. See also popular natural history writing; practical natural history Natural History in the Primary School: The Village Pond as a Living Community (Junge). See Village Pond, The (Junge) nature: accessibility of, 36; in Germany, 364; and humans, 109, 112, 196, 363–64; and modernity, 290–92; preservation of, 196; representation of, 290–92; and school instruction, 175, 192; in the United States, 113, 196, 362–64 Naturwissenschaftlicher Verein. See Natural Science Association

index networks: communicative, 10; personal, 9–10; professional, 10, 201, 362; rail, 4, 11 New Museum Idea: and biological groups, 252, 274; and biological perspective, 356; defi nition of, 199–200; and museum reform, 5, 32, 199–200; and school instruction, 274 Nill, Johannes, private zoo (Stuttgart), 72–74, 94–95, 120 ocean voyages, 327–30; Charles Darwin (Beagle), 41; Otto Finsch, 206; Alexander von Humboldt, 41; merchants, 131; and museum collections, 329; Hugo Schauinsland, 265; Ludwig Schmarda, 333 Origin of Species (Darwin): and animal breeding, 91 Ortmann, Arnold E.: and animal geography, 334–37, 340, 351; career, 330–31; and marine research, 330–31, 335–37, 338; reviews by, 337, 339; and Johannes Walther, 335 Oyster and Oyster-Culture, The (Möbius): on living community concept, 152–56; and practical natural history, 150 Pagenstecher, Alexander Heinrich, 207–8, 236 panopticons. See under museums Paris: Exposition Universelle, 70; Jardin des plantes (zoo), 87, 102–3, 103, 122; natural history museum, 54–55; Société d’acclimatation, 90, 96 Peters, Wilhelm Karl Hartwig, 48, 56, 144, 148, 224 Pfeffer, Georg, 270, 328n8, 351 physiological ecology. See autecology phytogeography. See plant geography, ecological plant geography, ecological, 29–30, 315, 351 Plön limnological station, 321, 354 Ploucquet, Hermann: and biological group displays, 251; Crystal Palace exhibit, 62, 63, 64; biography, 61, 65; and Philipp Leopold Martin, 48; and private commercial museum, 53, 64–65, 72, 75–77; and taxidermic displays, 48, 62, 77, 107n59, 121, 251; and Vienna,

421 65; Württemberg natural history cabinet, 48, 61 popular natural history writing, 15, 74–77; and biology, 307–14, 317–18, 322; Alfred E. Brehm and, 36–37, 119; historiography of, 15–19; Gustav Jaeger and, 120; as occupation, 123–24; works of, 27, 309, 313, 317, 320. See also natural history; popular science; practical natural history popular science: historiography of, 7, 15–17; Kunde as, 253–55; and social advancement, 5 practical natural history, 117; and animal care, 108–9; defi nition of, 35–36; employment in, 38, 49, 121, 123–24, 357; in England versus Germany, 109; and museums, 122; practices of, 35–38, 49, 82, 94, 117, 150; and social standing, 124, 159; versus systematics, 50–52, 124; and zoo movement, 79–83, 122 Praxis der Naturgeschichte. See Praxis of Natural History (Martin) Praxis of Natural History (Martin), 36, 94; on expeditions, 45; Gustav Jaeger and, 120; on museums, 50–54, 66; and prehistoric reconstruction, 101; on nature protection, 111–15; on zoos, 93–94, 96– 102, 104, 109–10 Ratzel, Friedrich, 316–17 Reichenbach, Ludwig, 116 Rensch, Bernhard, 352–53 Richthofen, Ferdinand Freiherr von, 281–83, 285 Schauinsland, Hugo: and biological group displays, 262; and Bremen Museum for Natural History, Ethnography, and Commerce, 206–7, 261–62, 268, 289–90; ocean voyage, 265 Schlegel, Franz, 116, 118–19 Schmarda, Ludwig: laws of nature, 177; and marine research, 333–34 Schmeil, Otto, 229, 301–2, 303–4, 305 Schmidt, Max, 109, 116 school instruction: and adult education, 218–19; and Anschauungsunterricht, 170–72; and biological perspective, 162, 165, 357, 365–66; and biology,

422 school instruction (continued) 169, 295–97, 299–300, 302; characterbuilding education, 170, 172–73; and citizenship, 170; concentric-circle approach to, 194; and evolution, 169, 189, 297–98; and gendering of nature, 362–63; in Germany, 165–70, 362–63; of girls, 299–301; and Heimatkunde, 164, 194–97; and Junge’s village pond curriculum, 174–81, 188–90; in Kiel, 12, 165–66, 179, 192–94; and living community concept, 161–62, 164, 175, 186, 188–91, 193–97, 299–301; and moral education, 184–85; and museums, 176, 237; in natural history, 137, 168–69; and nature, 171–72, 192, 195–96; in Prussia, 191; reform of, 162, 168–70, 175–76, 183, 190–91, 195, 296–98, 300, 362–63; and religion, 187; and systematics, 176; teacher education and, 166–67, 173–74; and textbooks, 229, 300–301, 305; in the United States, 362–63 Schulze, Franz Eilhard, 211, 224 Schulze, Hermann, 191, 300–301 Senckenberg Museum (Frankfurt am Main), 215, 230, 360 Sigel, Wilhelm Ludwig, 118–19 Société d’acclimatation (Paris), 90 Spengel, Johann Wilhelm, 206–7, 209–10, 344–45 steno-eury distinction, 319 Stuttgart: and biological perspective, 9; natural history institutions, 56–60; Ploucquet’s museum, 64–65; schools, 163, 212; zoos and menageries, 72, 84, 89, 92–94. See also Württemberg Sumper, Helene, 182 systematics: hostility to, 22–24, 94, 124, 159, 175–76; museum organization as based on, 59–60, 76, 78, 229–32, 240, 262; in museum research, 323, 354, 365; in school instruction, 190; in textbooks, 300–302; in university collections, 217 taxidermy: anthropomorphic displays, 62, 64, 64; artistic, 19, 23, 38, 50, 58, 77n92, 357; in France, 55, 69n76; in Great Britain, 62; Franz Leven, 64n66, 65–66, 67; Philipp Leopold Martin on, 39–40, 50,

index 55; museum scientists, 38; museums and, 358–59; and nature protection, 361; as occupation, 38–42, 45–49, 57, 61–67, 361–62; Hermann Ploucquet, 48, 61–62, 77, 107n59, 121, 251; Praxis of Natural History (Martin), 51–54; scenic settings, 66, 67; for research and display in systematics, 50–52, 54–55; in the United States, 361–62 Thienemann, August, 321 Thorey, Georg, 131 Tiemann, Friedrich, 118 Tierleben (Brehm). See Brehm, Alfred: Tierleben (Animal Life) Tönnies, Ferdinand, 1–2, 11–12 Tübingen, University of, 58, 107, 208, 345 Twiehausen, Odo, 186–87 United States of America: ecology, 6, 356; expeditions, 358–60; museums, 77, 201–2, 251–52, 272, 290, 358–61; nature in, 113, 196, 362–64; “practical” biology in, 35n1; school instruction, 362–63; taxidermy, 361–62 Vienna: Gustav Jaeger in, 94, 107, 120–21; Franz Leven in, 66; Hermann Ploucquet, 65; zoos, 84, 120 Village Pond, The (Junge): on animals, 180–81; and evolution, 188–89; and living community concept, 184; and Junge’s laws of nature, 189; organization of, 174–75, 180; in the press, 182–83; publication of, 162; reception by teachers, 181–84; and religious instruction, 187; and school instruction, 179–80; and school reform, 177–79, 183–84; structure of, 180 Verein für vaterländische Naturkunde in Württemberg. See Württemberg: Association for the Study of Nature of the Fatherland Wagner, Rudolf, 91 Waibel, Leo, and biological perspective, 320 Walther, Johannes, 316, 335–36, 343, 348 Weinland, David Friedrich, 84, 107, 122 Wilhelm II, Kaiser (German emperor): and Berlin natural history museum,

index 198; and German navy, 281, 283; on schools, 170 William II (German emperor). See Wilhelm II, Kaiser (German emperor) Worster, Donald, and history of ecology, 29, 294–95 Württemberg: Association of Bird Lovers, 95; Association for the Study of Nature of the Fatherland, 50, 55–56, 58–60, 68n75, 71; fossils, 68; institutions of higher education, 120; royal natural history cabinet, 48, 50, 56–60, 74, 121, 203, 215, 309 Württembergische Verein für Vogelfreunde. See Württemberg: Association of Bird Lovers Zacharias, Otto, 321 Ziller, Tuiskon: and character-building education, 172–73; and Friedrich Junge, 184, 187 zoogeography. See animal geography; biogeography Zoologische Garten, Der: on acclimatization, 108; on animal destruction, 116; on aquariums, 135; Carl Bruch and, 90, 94; on domestication, 108; editors of, 84, 94; founding of, 80; on habitat destruction, 116; Phillip Leopold Martin

423 in, 55, 95–96; Karl August Möbius in, 145, 148; on mussels, 145; on protection of animals and nature, 111, 115–17; David Friedrich Weinland and, 84; on zoo animals, 110; on zoo births, 110 zoology, university: and biological perspective, 24, 28; and ecology, 344; laboratories and museums, 148–49, 216–17; lack of professorships, 209; and museum curatorship, 211, 212; research trends in, 329, 344–46 zoos: acclimatization and breeding, 90–92, 108–10; aims of early, 86; Antwerp, 84, 87, 102; and biological perspective, 79–81; design of, 96–99, 98, 100–104, 106; Düsseldorf, 83, 102; economic motives, 90; geographic orientation of, 81, 96–102, 106; in Germany, 79, 83–84, 86–87, 101–2, 104, 105, 106; historiography of, 84, 85–87; management of, 118–19; moral aspects, 82, 108–10; Münster, 122; and museums, 83, 110, 121–23; and nature protection, 81–82; practical natural history and, 80, 117–20; as rational recreation, 85–87; Rotterdam, 84, 96; and systematics, 88; Vienna, 84; unifying plants and animals, 96, 106–7. See also under individual cities