|9780822967941|Ethnographic Expeditions and the Rise of Anthropology|A man of many talents—naturalist, geographer, anthropologist, and political commentator—Alfred Russel Wallace made seminal contributions to science in the nineteenth century. With Wallace in the Field, Victor Rafael Limeira-DaSilva unpacks the early life of one of the most beloved and famous Victorian scientific figures. Focusing on Wallace’s significant contribution to the emergence of anthropology, Limeira-DaSilva traces the peripatetic trajectory of Wallace’s field work, from his humble beginnings in the suburbs of London to his travels through the Brazilian Amazon and Asia. Challenging traditional portrayals that cast Wallace as Darwin’s sidekick or a casual ethnographer,…

|9780822948575|The Correspondence, January 1878-November 1881|The 500 letters in this sixteenth volume of The Correspondence of John Tyndall document the period from January 1, 1878, to December 31, 1881. They chart a defining stage in the later life and career of an aging John Tyndall with unprecedented detail. Key developments evidence the fragility of a self-fashioned Carlylean hero, one whose sustenance increasingly relied on the companionate, domestic partnership that he enjoyed with his wife, Louisa. While they vacationed in the new summer home they built together in the Swiss Alps, where they experienced a shared reverence for nature, Louisa immersed herself…

|9780822968153|The Theoretical Biology Club and the Roots of Epigenetics|As scientists debated the nature of life in the nineteenth century, two theories predominated: vitalism, which suggested that living things contained a “vital spark,” and mechanism, the idea that animals and humans differed from nonliving things only in their degree of complexity. Erik L. Peterson tells the forgotten story of the pursuit of a Third Way in biology, known by many names, including “the organic philosophy,” which gave rise to C. H. Waddington’s work in the subfield of epigenetics: an alternative to standard genetics and evolutionary biology that captured the attention of…

|9780822968146|Cinchona Bark and Imperial Science in the Spanish Atlantic, 1630-1800|In the eighteenth century, malaria was a prevalent and deadly disease, and the only effective treatment was found in the Andean forests of Spanish America: a medicinal bark harvested from cinchona trees that would later give rise to the antimalarial drug quinine. In 1751, the Spanish Crown asserted control over the production and distribution of this medicament by establishing a royal reserve of “fever trees” in Quito. Through this pilot project, the Crown pursued a new vision of imperialism informed by science and invigorated through commerce. But ultimately this project failed,…

|9780822948186|The Correspondence, October 1873–October 1875|The 499 letters in the fourteenth volume of The Correspondence of John Tyndall cover a number of particularly intense and acrimonious disputes. More notably, this volume spans the period of the composition, delivery, and furious reaction to Tyndall’s famous—or, more accurately, infamous—Belfast Address. This prestigious lecture, which he delivered as the newly inaugurated president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, has long been heralded as one of the most momentous events of the nineteenth century. The letters in this volume provide a new, and unprecedentedly detailed, account of all aspects of the era-defining…