Hist. Sci., xlviii (2010) SERIALITY AND SCIENTIFIC OBJECTS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Nick Hopwood, Simon Schaffer and Jim Secord University of Cambridge Perhaps the ‘book’, as it has been called, of nature is regularly paged; if so, no doubt the introductory parts will explain those that follow, and the methods taught in the first chapters will be taken for granted and used as illustrations in the more advanced parts of the course; but if it is not a ‘book’ at all, but a magazine, nothing is more foolish to suppose [than] that one part can throw light on another. James Clerk Maxwell, 18561 Series represent much that was new and significant in the sciences between the French Revolution and the First World War. From periodical publication to the cinema, tabulation to industrialized screening, series feature in major innovations in scientific communication and the organization of laboratories, clinics, libraries, museums and field sites. Practitioners arranged embryos or electric sparks, fossils or flint weapons in terms of formal or functional resemblance, and related the resulting order to changes of state or of time. Progressive or evolutionary schemes commonly traced development from the primordial nebula to present society, via the formation of the Earth and the ages of life through human evolution and history. Behind the subtly graded and reliably calibrated sequences was often the sense that the world was serial in its basic structure, but series were also fiercely debated, as Maxwell’s warning suggests. How can historians best approach their relations in nineteenth- century science? This special double issue of History of science is the first attempt to investigate series’ manifold properties and relations across the sciences. This introduction sets out our questions and draws some interim conclusions. What significant connections were there between different kinds of series, and especially between serial modes of organization, production and communication and the serial contents of nature? Beyond mere juxtaposition or the compilation of a list, some important extra mean- ings and powers are involved in the disposition of elements in series. How were these supplementary resources, which the term ‘seriality’ implies, developed and used to produce knowledge? We start from a reluctance to use seriality as a grand explanatory cause, as if somehow, in the terms of the intellectual historian Arthur Lovejoy, a generalized “temporalizing of the chain of being” simply transformed a static scale of beings into a ladder of progress, an inventory into a developmental programme.2 Nor did the combination of periodical publication, museum display and commodity production determine the new sciences of evolution and history. We would rather understand seriality as a range of practices, of the same order perhaps as those of standardization,3 0073-2753/10/4803-0251/$10.00 © 2010 Science History Publications Ltd 252 · NICK HOPWOOD, SIMON SCHAFFER AND JIM SECORD that pose a set of pervasive and prominent questions about continuity versus disconti- nuity, the play of difference through standardized objects, and the sequential display versus the array that could be seen at a glance. For though serialization was often represented as an obvious response to matters of fact, it actually offered a technique for pressing a partisan claim that might be questioned, modified, rejected or ignored. By no means all science either embraced claims about series or depended on serial images and arguments. While developmen- tal series were increasingly widely treated as self-evident frameworks for showing specimens and objects, many naturalists and physicians either vehemently denied the validity of unitary or parallel series or studiously avoided the problem altogether. Seriality was thus often a theme of polemic: traces, images and samples in graphic print or exhibitions were worked into arguments that produced or reinforced an experience of seriality in an audience; such dispositions and experiences could then be challenged or displaced. Our period is the long nineteenth century. The notion of seriality seems especially apt in the age of revolutions, when series became central in fields ranging from zoology and political economy to periodical publication and newspaper journalism. The term was first adopted in English in the early seventeenth century for sequential disposition in time and space, such as in lists or catalogues, especially for valuable collections, notably of coins. But its sole technical use before 1800 was in mathematical analysis. Only in the nineteenth century was the word series used within specific sciences to describe the idiosyncratic arrangement and meaning of their objects: in accounts of entities such as strata and crystals from the 1820s, within statistics, palaeontology, chemistry and botany by the 1850s, and soon after in newer enterprises such as anthropology and analytic spectroscopy. The career of the French série is strikingly similar. First used in the mid-eighteenth century only in mathematics, it was not until the late 1700s that it was applied more generally to sequences of philosophical ideas, chemical substances and zoological entities. Série became a keyword in the vision- ary social and philosophical programmes of Charles Fourier and Auguste Comte. The German Reihe is older, in the sense of line and row, and the history of uses in the natural sciences less easily reconstructed, but only in the eighteenth century, it seems, did it begin to refer to temporal succession.4 The decades around 1900, the era of the second industrial revolution and of cultural modernism, then saw major transformations with the emergence of new technologies and systems of knowledge production and communication. The essays collected here examine relations between the arrangement of scien- tific and medical objects in series; the disposition of images and objects in print and museums; the use of such paper technologies as hospital records and library cata- logues to order and analyse natural and social phenomena; and the role of periodical publication in the communication and organization of knowledge. Tracing the work of serial ordering and argument sheds new light on models of development, practices of image and claims making, and responses to serial arrangements and events. Love- joy himself was jokily aware of possible connections between changes in temporal SERIALITY AND SCIENTIFIC OBJECTS · 253 sequences and institutions of public culture. In his reflections on how the chain of being generated fascination with “missing links”, he remarked that, “if Aristotle had been permitted to return … in the eighteen-forties, he would have made haste to visit [P. T.] Barnum’s Museum”.5 Thinking in terms of series and seriality allows us to explore important connections in depth. serialization Scholarship on the sciences of organic development as they emerged around 1800 has only patchily explored series as practical achievements made possible within new spaces of representation. Lovejoy’s canonical account of the temporalization of the great chain of being mentioned the religious and moral difficulties prompted by reflection on the principles of plenitude and continuity, but paid more attention to what he saw as the straightforwardly logical problem of reconciling these princi- ples with evident gaps and discontinuities: “Whenever, in any series, there appears … a different kind of thing, and not merely a different magnitude and degree of something common to the whole series, there is eo ipso [by that very fact] a breach of continuity” (Figure 1).6 Lovejoy’s approach put a premium on the definition of ‘true’ seriality. None of the naturalists and anatomists who so actively debated definitions, such as Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Georges Cuvier and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, features in The great chain of being, but they have played decisive roles in influential analyses of the appear- ance of the sciences of organic form. For Michel Foucault this was when life became Fig. 1. The great chain of being. The Genevan naturalist Charles Bonnet posited an infinitely graded and all-encompassing chain that appeared only imperfectly to human understanding. In this header to his book on the contemplation of nature, the clouds have cleared to reveal a few representatives of the middle part, while the upper and lower reaches remain entirely obscured. From Bonnet, Œuvres d’histoire naturelle et de philosophie, iv/1: Contemplation de la nature (Neuchatel, 1781), 1, by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. 254 · NICK HOPWOOD, SIMON SCHAFFER AND JIM SECORD a property of the internal relations of complex and hierarchized organic structures. Natural history had been characterized by the “solidity, without gaps, of a network of species and genera, and the series of events that have blurred that network”. Gardens and museums obscured anatomy and function in order to display visible forms in tables. Foucault condensed this complex transformation into the “iconoclastic gesture” with which at the end of the eighteenth century Cuvier smashed the glass jars of the Paris Natural History Museum, and so allowed anatomy to substitute for taxonomy and “series for tabulation”. “For eighteenth-century thought, chronological sequences are merely a property and a more or less blurred expression of the order of beings; from the nineteenth century, they express, in a more or less direct fashion, and even in their interruptions, the profoundly historical mode