Following Insects Around: The Practice of Natural History in 18^th-Century France

This paper is part of a sprawling project on the daily practices of observation and experimentation that made up natural history in the 18^th century. It draws inspiration from recent work on scientific travel, long-distance networks of exchange, and local dynamics of communities where science was produced. Extending the sensibility of local studies to a network of practice that engaged geographically dispersed localities, I am exploring the dynamics of natural history networks of correspondence, collaboration and competition. In this paper, I examine a few cases taken from the correspondence of René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur. I show how these sources can give us a rather close-grained picture of people observing insects and making knowledge about them. Among other things, I aim to destabilize the center-periphery model that assumes a flow of raw material (data? specimens? measurements? maps? sketches?) toward a center like Paris for processing (the “center of calculation”). Although my examples for this paper exemplify a canonical center-periphery situation – Paris and various provincial locations – I show how the movement of objects and people and ideas belies the notion of a single center of calculation, even in the case where a dominant figure like Réaumur was managing collections and producing authoritative texts in the capital. Further, the provincial settings entailed local contingencies and motivations for naturalists. 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 both (or all) directions. 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 traces of the insects through letters, conversations, specimen jars, drawings, texts and experimental set-ups. My research depends on the accumulation of endless 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 endless details about insects – their physiology, their habits, their structure, their metamorphosis, their place in the human economy and the economy of nature. Ultimately, I suggest that microhistorical cases can illuminate the larger landscapes of natural history.