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This paper examines the movement of the materials, ideas and practices that went into the construction of natural-historical observations in Paris and the French provinces – in particular, observations of insects. The paired notions of circulation and locality expose the complex dynamic at play in the production of knowledge about these mundane creatures. I show how the movement of things and people problematizes the notion of a single ‘centre of calculation’, even where a dominant figure like Réaumur was managing collections and producing authoritative texts. Réaumur was indeed managing the flow of observations, letters and specimens from his privileged vantage point in Paris, but he was not the only one doing the processing, and the objects and knowledge flowed in all directions. The paper uses correspondence among eighteenth-century naturalists of various sorts to get at the dynamics of circulation, tracing the movements of insects, bits of text or narrative, drawings, letters, questions, apparatus, books and people. My title refers to the activities of naturalists, who had to follow insects around in order to observe them, and to my own activity in following the insects in their movement through letters, conversations, specimen jars, drawings and texts. My research depends on the accumulation of details about experimental and observational practice, culled from the masses of letters that moved continually around Europe, much as the science of insects depended on the accumulation of details about insects – their physiology, habits, metamorphosis and place in the human economy and the economy of nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By looking at the fierce debates in the city of Carlsbad in Bohemia around the fabrication of medical salt by a local doctor, David Becher, from 1763 to 1784, the paper examines the interactions between different spheres or levels of circulation of knowledge in the Habsburg Empire. The dispute crystallized around the definition of the product, about its medical qualities and its relation with the water of the local mineral spring. The city’s inhabitants contested the vision of the medical experts, fearing that the extraction of the medical salt from the spring water and its sale outside the town would have a negative effect on the number of visitors to the spa. Their vision implied a more or less ‘popularized’ form of alchemical thinking as it identified the mineral water with the extracted ‘salt’, conceived as the ‘essence’ of the water, produced by evaporation. The Carlsbad salt dispute highlights the complex interactions among the different networks in which knowledge circulated through the Habsburg Empire in the eighteenth century. The different actors relied on specific networks with different logics of discourse and different modes of circulation. In each case the relation between the local, the regional and the imperial had to be negotiated. The paper thus sketches out the different geographies of knowledge in the Habsburg Empire but also its localization in and around Carlsbad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even during its heyday, American behaviourist psychology was repeatedly criticized for the lack of diversity in its experimental subjects, with its almost exclusive focus on rats and pigeons. This paper revisits this debate by examining the rise and fall of a once promising alternative laboratory animal and model of intelligence, the raccoon. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, psychological investigations of the raccoon existed on the borderlands between laboratory experimentation, natural history and pet-keeping. Moreover, its chief advocate, Lawrence W. Cole, inhabited the institutional and geographic borderlands of the discipline. This liminality ultimately worked against the raccoon’s selection as a standardized model during the behaviourist era. The question of raccoon intelligence was also a prominent topic in the contemporaneous debates over the place of sentiment in popular nature writing. Although Cole and others argued that the raccoon provided unique opportunities to study mental attributes such as curiosity and attention, others accused the animal’s advocates of sentimentalism, anthropomorphism and nature faking. The paper examines the making and unmaking of this hybrid scientific culture as the lives of experimenters and animals became entangled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the role played by Domenico Marotta, director of the ISS (Higher Institute of Health) for over twenty-five years, in the development of twentieth-century Italian biomedicine. We will show that Marotta aimed to create an integrated centre for research and production able to interact with private industry. To accomplish this, Marotta shifted the original mission of the ISS, from public health to scientific research. Yet Mussolini's policy turned most of the ISS resources towards controls and military tasks, opposing Marotta's aspiration. By contrast, in the post-war years Marotta was able to turn the ISS into the most important Italian biomedical research institution, where research and production fruitfully cohabited. Nobel laureates, such as Ernst Chain, and future Nobel laureates, such as Daniel Bovet, were hired. The ISS built up an integrated research and production centre for penicillin and antibiotics. In the 1960s, Marotta's vision was in accord with the new centre-left government. However, he pursued his goals by ruling the ISS autocratically and beyond any legal control. This eventually led to his downfall and prosecution. This also marked the decline of the ISS, intertwined with the weakness of the centre-left government, who failed to achieve structural reforms and couple the modernization of the country with the democratization of its scientific institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Early Victorian analogical arguments were used to order the natural and the social world by maintaining a coherent collective experience across cultural oppositions such as the ideal and material, the sacred and profane, theory and fact. Maxwell's use of analogical argument in ‘On Faraday's lines of force’ was a contribution to that broad nineteenth-century discussion which overlapped theology and natural philosophy. I argue here that Maxwell understood his theoretical work as both a technical and a socially meaningful practice and that embedding his use of analogy in the social and intellectual context of Victorian Britain provides a means of telling a sociocultural history of Maxwell's development of a new cognitive tool: a way of thinking on paper analogous to thinking with objects in the laboratory.And analogy can do no more, immediately or directly, than shew such and such things to be true or credible considered only as matters of fact.Bishop Butler, 17361 [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]