Robert E. Kohler: All Creatures: Naturalists, Collectors, and Biodiversity, 1850–1950.,All Creatures: Naturalists, Collectors, and Biodiversity, 1850–1950. by Robert E. KohlerReview by: rev. by Mark V. Barrow, Jr.Isis, Vol. 98, No. 3 (September 2007), pp. 650-651Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/524265 .

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650 BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 98 : 3 (2007)

yond Gottingen. Research, development, andproduction became a seamless web in Go¨ttingen,not unlike Koenig’s relationship with physicistsin Paris or Henry Rowland’s with his instrumentmaker in Baltimore.Meyerstein’s workshop remained small, never

employing more than five or six assistants andseveral apprentices, and generally produced onlythe expensive precision instruments required forresearch at the highest level. Meyerstein did notenter the mushrooming market for student lab-oratory apparatus created after 1860 by the in-troduction of practical laboratory exercises inphysics and chemistry at European and Ameri-can universities. For reasons Hentschel does notexplore, Meyerstein’s remained a small work-shop of skilled craftsmen (he did apparently out-source his needs for optical glass), a type thatwould disappear with the rise of large-scale in-dustrial makers like Leybold & Nachfolger inCologne, Max Kohl in Chemnitz, and Carl Zeissin Jena. As such, Hentschel notes, Meyerstein’sworkshop followed a trajectory commonly de-scribed by economic historians for small arti-sanal firms in nineteenth-century Europe: anearly experimental phase followed by expansion,maturity, and then stagnation, as production ei-ther floods the market or is replaced by industrialcompetitors.Finally, Hentschel’s documents and commen-

tary offer bitter and persistent examples of anti-Semitism in Go¨ttingen’s academic life. It tookMeyerstein, the son of Jewish merchants, over ayear to receive permission to move to Go¨ttingenin 1834, as government officials fretted abouthow to swear a Jew into civil service. Not untilafter Meyerstein was baptized did he finally gainofficial appointment, in 1841, as the universityinstrument maker. In 1843, one of Gauss’s stu-dents worried that Meyerstein might steal partsfrom a precision instrument imported from En-gland, writing that “I openly admit to havingprejudices against baptized and nonbaptizedJews” (pp. 102–103). And circumstances sur-rounding the awarding of an honorary doctorateto Meyerstein in 1863 reveal anti-Semitic inflec-tions among Go¨ttingen’s faculty.In making visible “Gaußens unsichtbare

Hand,” Hentschel has richly contributed to ourunderstanding of not only precision physics butalso the nineteenth-century world of the Ger-man university instrument maker and smallworkshop production.

RICHARD L. KREMER

Robert E. Kohler. All Creatures: Naturalists,Collectors, and Biodiversity, 1850–1950.xiii

� 363 pp., figs., bibl., index. Princeton, N.J.:Princeton University Press, 2006. $35 (cloth).

All Creatureschallenges the pervasive assump-tion that natural history suffered a significant de-cline with the meteoric rise of laboratory biologyat the end of the nineteenth and the beginning ofthe twentieth centuries. Far from languishing,Robert Kohler argues, systematics and bioge-ography experienced a phase of “vigorousgrowth and intellectual development” (p. xi). In-deed, the period between the 1880s and the1920s—which the author unceremoniously butaptly dubs the era of “survey” collecting—seems on a par with two earlier, much morewidely known phases of exploration and speciesdiscovery: the Linnaean period (during the sec-ond half of the eighteenth century) and the Hum-boldtian period (from the 1830s to the 1850s).During this third great cycle of biological dis-covery, American museums, government agen-cies, and universities mounted hundreds of ex-peditions with an eye toward expanding studycollections, creating compelling exhibits, andcompleting a global inventory of vertebrate spe-cies. In this deeply researched and prolificallyillustrated study, Kohler focuses on the aspira-tions, practices, and experiences of the “Noahsof nature’s diversity” (p. 45), the American nat-uralists who planned these fruitful expeditions,took to the field, and wrote up the flood of newspecimens they uncovered.The rise of survey collecting, Kohler main-

tains, was rooted in a series of interrelated en-vironmental, cultural, and scientific develop-ments. By the 1880s, North America was amosaic landscape of settled areas punctuated bya series of “inner frontiers” that had escaped de-velopment to remain in a more or less wild state(p. 15). Some of these minimally disturbed areaswere as near at hand as the final stops of newlyconstructed urban trolley lines, biologically richbut endangered sites that the ecologist FredericClements evocatively termed “twilight zones”(p. 31). At the same time, an increasingly dense,constantly expanding network of roads, rail-roads, and waterways rendered even the mostdistant landscapes within reach. For the firsttime, semiwild nature became widely accessible,and naturalists seized the opportunity with gusto.They did so within the context of a larger cul-

ture that increasingly valued both direct and vir-tual contact with the natural world, or “nature-going,” as Kohler calls it (p. 47). By the end ofthe nineteenth century, a growing number ofAmericans regularly ventured to the nation’sfields and forests to camp, hike, fish, and hunt;

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BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 98 : 3 (2007) 651

others sought out the natural world vicariouslythrough reading nature essays or visiting exhibitsat natural history museums. In a kind of positivefeedback loop, the avocational pursuit of naturalhistory helped legitimate the middle-class em-brace of outdoor recreation, while personal con-tact with nature rendered a scientific view of thenatural world more acceptable. Thus “nature-go-ing” enlarged not only the pool of recruits tofield science but also the pool of sponsors willingto support large-scale natural history surveys.Naturalists mobilized this support to establish aseries of new institutions—like the U.S. Bureauof the Biological Survey and seven more or lessofficial state surveys—and to promote more ex-pansive collecting practices in museums. Theclear separation of study from exhibit collectionsand (more important for Kohler) the invention ofhabitat dioramas pushed museum authorities togrant their curators the chance to collect speci-mens on a massive scale.Accompanying these environmental and cul-

tural shifts were transformations in taxonomythat further fueled the drive toward survey col-lecting. A growing interest in species variationand a desire to forge taxonomy into a more rig-orous, exacting science prompted a shift in col-lecting practices. During the Linnaean period,naturalists had been content to amass a limitednumber of representative species, a practice con-sistent with the commonly held view that specieswere both relatively homogeneous and static. Inthe years leading up to the survey period, how-ever, a growing interest in variation within spe-cies (fostered in part by Darwin) led to the riseof serial collecting, which involved gatheringlong runs of individual specimens from acrosstheir geographical range. Serial collecting notonly bolstered naturalists’ confidence in theirability to discriminate between similar speciesbut also led to the invention of subspecies, spe-cies “caught in the act of evolving” (p. 230). Thesubspecies concept was thus a product of surveycollecting, Kohler argues, “detectable only incollections of a certain size and scope” (p. 230).Despite its title,All Creaturesdeals primarily

with the collection of vertebrate species nativeto North America. Still, this is a rich, insightful,and accessible book that demonstrates the powerof embracing interdisciplinary approaches to thehistory of science. It is also a welcome additionto the small but growing body of literature thatgrants the practice of natural history the attentionit deserves.

MARK V. BARROW, JR.

Linda Lear. Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature.xix � 584 pp., illus., bibl., index. New York:St. Martin’s Press, 2007. $30 (cloth).

Revealing what she calls Beatrix Potter’s “life innature,” Linda Lear presents here not just a fa-mous children’s writer but a woman dedicatedto nature throughout her entire life. Like Potter,Lear may already be known to readers ofIsis—primarily through herRachel Carson: Witnessfor Nature(Holt, 1997), which won theMargaretW. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize.In Beatrix PotterLear once again produces a lifeboth readable and authoritative. Her book boastsover a hundred pages of informative endnotesand is rich in other scholarly strengths. Lear hasbeen granted access to several archival sourcesthat enable her to write a fuller biographicalstudy than that offered by Margaret Lane in herTale of Beatrix Potter(Warne, 1945; rev. ed.,1986). Lear is also fortunate in having importantmore recent predecessors for her work. LeslieLinder decoded Potter’s encrypted journal in the1960s and enabled future biographers to read herautobiographical musings from the ages of four-teen to thirty. And Potter has certainly beenserved well in recent years by Judy Taylor’s at-tention to her life and letters and Anne HobbsStevenson’s sensitivity to her paintings, to citejust two examples. But, given all of thesesources, it was time for a definitive biography—and that is just what Linda Lear delivers.Biography, like all narrative, needs a central,

uniting thread like Lear’s “a life in nature.” Per-haps Lear desired to write a book about Potterthat paralleled her biography of Carson. In aninterview she says that one of her aims is “towrite about nature and the natural world andthose who have made a difference in savingit” (http://www.penguin.com.au/lookinside/other/0713995602/Interview.pdf). This is certainly avery worthwhile aim, but to some extent it strait-jackets the multifaceted Potter. It also it fails topresent readers with a sense of the compellingworld of biology in her day.Lear offers us a Victorian/Edwardian life that

more or less divides into three parts. It beginswith a controlled and thwarted girl, misunder-stood and governed by her parents. Certainly oneof the activities that escaped their control wasPotter’s fascination with natural history, a com-mon Victorian pastime and one that Lear mighthave contextualized at greater length. Beatrixand her brother Bertram collected, dissected, anddrew animals. Summer holidays away from Lon-don in various parts of Britain allowed Potter thefreedom to continue with nature study. In Scot-land, she deepened a fascination with fungi thatwould later lead to encounters with scientific co-gnoscenti at the Museum of Natural History andthe Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. There she

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