2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

Katharine Anderson York University
HSS Abstracts
Instincts & Instruments
By the end of the eighteenth century, the naturalist Francois Huber and other
observers had amassed impressively detailed information about the behavior
of bees, in part thanks to artificial hives that quite literally shed light into the
recesses of the apiary. Victorian writers transformed those observations into
accounts for an industrial age. Figured as a tiny geometrician and engineer,
the bee embodied a natural precursor to the technical and scientific
accomplishments of modern society. In its enviable and natural precision, the
complex instinctive behavior of some lower forms of life prefigured and even
surpassed the heights scaled by rational man. In many ways, these tributes
merely re-wrote what were essentially familiar parallels between insect and
human communities. But in other ways, these accounts of bees and other insects
raised new concerns about both the nature of instruments and animal
sensibilities. In an age which struggled with the religious and cultural
implications of materialism (defined famously by John Tyndall in 1874 as
“the doctrine of bodily instruments” ) the precise operations of the bees shifted
from a set piece of natural theology into unsettled and unsettling discussions
of the limits of human reason and human tools.
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Nancy␣ A. Anderson University of Michigan
One Complex Amoeba:
Image, Imagination, Cell Theory and the Bioplasson Doctrine
In 1883 Carl Heitzmann published Microscopical Morphology of the Animal in
Health and Disease. One reviewer noted that the book came “in the guise of a
manual of normal and pathological histology” , but was “obviously intended
principally to bring forward the author’s own theories.” Indeed, for years Heitzmann
had opposed the “cell theory” with his own Bioplasson Doctrine. According to
Heitzmann, all organisms (single-celled to complex) were composed of a
continuous reticular network of protoplasm. Thus, Heitzmann concluded, the
human body was “one complex amoeba.” Heitzmann’s theory evolved from various
ideas put forth by his contemporaries (e.g., Rudolf Virchow, T. H. Huxley, Lionel
Beale, Edward Curtis), but my talk will concentrate on reactions to the Bioplasson
Doctrine, especially those of its critics. Much of the debate against the Bioplasson
Doctrine revolved around issues of observation (seeing through lenses as well as
the effects of biological fixers and stains) and the imagination in theory formation.
One critic insists that the reticular structure of protoplasm was either a creation of
the observer’s mind or the result of faulty adjustments of the microscope. Another
detractor denounces the drawings Heitzmann made from tissues, asserting that
“they have their prototype in the author’s imagination.” This paper will look at a
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