2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
into their theology? Their emphasis on the objects of this world, would seem
surprising given that they were ushering in the world to come.
Charlotte␣ L. Sleigh University of Kent at Canterbury
Brave New Worlds:
Sociological Explanations of the Ants in the 1920s and ’30s
‘Brave New World presents a ... picture of society, in which the attempt to recreate
human beings in the likeness of termites has been pushed almost to the
limits of the possible.’ Thus Aldous Huxley described his celebrated novel of
1932. The ‘picture of society’ in question was by no means unique to Huxley his
own brother Julian had published a popularizing digest of myrmecological
scholarship just two years earlier. The foremost ant scholar at the time of the
Huxleys’ books was an American, William Morton Wheeler (1865-1937). Wheeler
synthesized a top-down model of social explanation—borrowed by the Huxleys—
for the behavior of the ant-colony. Investigation reveals that Wheeler worked to
create his science within a European tradition of group-based ant/human analogy
that may be traced to Espinas and Durkheim from the mid 1920s, Wheeler was
specifically inspired by the elitist Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto. As a thoroughgoing
sociological approach was introduced into myrmecology, it obscured the
significance of the individual ant and, by implication, man. Writers of both
entomological and creative literature hastened to exempt themselves from this,
their own generalization. In the modernist context, the ant-mass was constructed
as the discomfiting mass of civilized society.
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Phillip␣ R. Sloan University of Notre Dame
German Biology Comes to London:
The Role of the College of Surgeons, 1814-1840
Historians of science have often commented upon the importance of German
influences for understanding the early nineteenth century scientific developments
in Britain exemplified by Faraday, Whewell, Davy, Lyell, Babbage, Owen, Barry,
and even Darwin. However, little detail is available on how German thought was
embodied institutionally and concretely transmitted to an Anglophone audience.
Although there had been broad contacts in the late eighteenth century, the
Napoleonic imposition of the Continental Blockade in 1806 had significantly
restricted the interchanges between Continental and British scientists and
physicians. This was also represented by a decline in periodical reports on German
science. With the end of the Napoleonic wars, a new era of contact was initiated
between workers in the Germanies and those in Britain. Travels to the Continent,
renewal of study by British students at German universities, and the reciprocal
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