Fertile substrate: the rise, fall, and succession of popular microscopy in Great Britain

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the rise and fall of the British popular microscopy movement during the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. It highlights that what is currently understood as microscopy was actually two inter-related but distinct communities and argues that the recognized collapse of microscopical societies in the closing decades of the nineteenth century was the result of amateur specialization. It finds the roots of popular microscopy in the Working Men’s College movement and highlights how microscopy adopted its Christian Socialist pedagogy of equality and fraternity, resulting in a radical scientific movement that both prized and encouraged publication by its amateur adherents, who often occupied the middle and working classes. It studies the taxonomic boundaries of this popular microscopy, particularly focusing on its relationship with the study of cryptogams or ‘lower plants’. It explores how its success combined with its radical approach to publication and self-sufficiency created the conditions for its collapse, as devotees established a range of successor communities that had tighter taxonomic bounds. Finally, it shows how the philosophy and practices of popular microscopy continued in these successor communities, focusing on the British expression of mycology, the study of fungi.

KEYWORDS:

• Nineteenth century
• popular scientific movements
• microscopes
• periodicals
• mycology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Lynn K. Nyhart, ‘Natural History and the “new” Biology’, in Cultures of Natural History, ed. by Nicholas Jardine, James A. Secord, and E. C. Spary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 426–43.

2 See W. T. Thiselton-Dyer, ‘Plant Biology in the Seventies’, Nature, 115.2897 (1925), 709–12 <https://doi.org/10.1038/115709a0>. for the personal account of William Thiselton-Dyer regarding the ‘New Botany’.

3 For more on the concept of the devotee see Robert H. Kargon, ‘The Emergence of the Devotee: The Changing Face of Amateur Science’, in Science in Victorian Manchester (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1977), pp. 34–85.

4 Samuel J. M. M. Alberti, ‘Field, Lab and Museum: The Practice and Place of Life Science in Yorkshire, 1870–1904.’ (University of Sheffield, 2001).

5 William D. Roebuck, Salient Features in the History of the Yorkshire Naturalists’ Union. Being the Presidential Address Delivered at Sheffield 29th J Anuary, 1904 (London: Brown, 1904).

6 David Allen, ‘The Biological Societies of London 1870–1914: Their Interrelations and Their Responses to Change’, The Linnean, 4.3 (1988), 23–38.

7 Boris Jardine, ‘Microscopes’, in A Companion to the History of Science (Hoboken, NJ, USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2016), p. 527.

8 See for example (Kohler, 1982; Stichweh, 1992).

9 Mordecai Cubitt Cooke, ‘What’s Your Hobby?’, Hardwicke’s Science-Gossip: An Illustrated Medium of Interchange and Gossip for Students and Lovers of Nature, 1.1 (1865), 1–2.

10 For more on minority taxa as a concept see Nathan Edward Charles Smith, ‘Minority Taxa, Marginalised Collections: A Focus on Fungi’, Journal of Natural Science Collections, 7 (2020), 49–58.

11 The work was published in 1830 in a paper entitled ‘On Some Properties in Achromatic Object-Glasses Applicable to the Improvement of the Microscope’ submitted to the Royal Society and published in its Philosophical Transactions Joseph Jackson Lister, ‘XIII. On Some Properties in Achromatic Object-Glasses Applicable to the Improvement of the Microscope’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 120 (1830), 187–200.

12 R. H. Nuttall, ‘The Achromatic Microscope in the History of Nineteenth Century Science’, The Philisophical Journal, 11.2 (1974), 71–88.

13 M. J. Ratcliff, The Quest for the Invisible: Microscopy in the Enlightenment (Farnham & Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2009).

14 S. Bradbury, ‘The Microscope in Victorian Times’, in The Evolution of the Microscope (Pergamon Press, 1967), pp. 200–256.

15 G. L’E. Turner, ‘The Origins of the Royal Microscopical Society’, Journal of Microscopy, 155.3 (1989), 235–48.

16 Bradbury; Jutta Schickore, The Microscope and the Eye: A History of Reflections, 1740–1870 (University of Chicago Press, 2007). For contemporary examples of this sentiment, see article contained within M. J. Schleiden, ‘Ueber Die Wichtigkeit Des Mikroskops in Allen Zweigen Der Naturwissenschaft Teil 1’, Archiv Der Pharmacie, 87 (1844), 68–82.

17 P. La Neve Foster, ‘Special Prizes’, Journal of the Society of Arts, 3.115 (1855), 167; P. La Neve Foster, ‘Premiums Awarded—Session 1854–1855’, Journal of the Society of Arts, 3.137 (1855), 589–90.

18 Olivia Brown, ‘Microscopy and the Amateur’, in The Social History of the Microscope, ed. by Stella Butler, R. H. Nuttall, and Olivia Brown (Cambridge: Whipple Museum of the History of Science, 1986), p. 7.

19 William B. Carpenter, The Microscope and Its Revelations, 5th edn (London: J. & A. Churchill, 1875). For the microscope outside of Great Britain see John Harley Warner, ‘“Exploring the Inner Labyrinths of Creation”: Popular Microscopy in Nineteenth-Century America’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, XXXVII.1 (1982), 7–33; Brown.

20 For an introduction to this see Thomas Kelly, A History of Adult Education in Great Britain, 3rd edn. (Liverpool University Press, 1992).

21 Colin Russell, Science and Social Change 1700–1900 (The Macmillan Press Limited, 1983).

22 Richard N. Price, ‘The Working Men’s Club Movement and Victorian Social Reform Ideology’, Victorian Studies, 15.2 (1971), 117–47.

23 William S. Peterson, ‘The Working Men’s College Magazine a List of Attributions for Anonymous and Pseudonymous Articles, 1859–1860’, Victorian Periodicals Newsletter, 11.2 (1978), 58–60 <https://www.jstor.org/stable/20085184?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents> [accessed 4 July 2020].

24 Marcella Pellegrino Sutcliffe, ‘The Origins of the “Two Cultures” Debate in the Adult Education Movement: The Case of the Working Men’s College (c.1854–1914)’, History of Education, 43.2 (2014), 141–59.

25 R. B. Litchfield, ‘No Title’, Working Men’s College Magazine, 1861, iii.

26 Paul Elliott and Stephen Daniels, ‘Pestalozzianism, Natural History and Scientific Education in Nineteenth-century England: The Pestalozzian Institution at Worksop, Nottinghamshire’, History of Education, 34.3 (2005), 295–313; Mary P. English, Mordecai Cubitt Cooke: Victorian Naturalist, Mycologist, Teacher & Eccentric (Bristol: Biopress Ltd., 1987).

27 ‘Report of General Meeting’, Working Men’s College Magazine, 3 (1861), 173.

28 Proceedings of the Society of Amateur Botanists, 1863. Manuscript with the Natural History museum.

29 W. H. Brock, ‘Science’, in Victorian Periodicals and Victorian Society, ed. by J. Don Vann and R. T. Van Arsdel (University of Toronto Press, 1994), pp. 81–96.

30 The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, ed. by Frederick Burkhardt and others (Cambridge University Press, 1988).

31 Ruth Barton, ‘Just before Nature: The Purposes of Science and the Purposes of Popularization in Some English Popular Science Journals of the 1860s’, Annals of Science, 55.1 (1998), 1–33; Susan Sheets-Pyenson, ‘Popular Science Periodicals in Paris and London: The Emergence of a Low Scientific Culture, 1820–1875’, Annals of Science, 42.6 (1985), 549–72.

32 For more on the importance of Hardwicke’s Science Gossip, see Dawson, Lintott, & Shuttleworth, 2015.

33 Geoffrey Belknap, ‘Illustrating Natural History: Images, Periodicals, and the Making of Nineteenth-Century Scientific Communities’, The British Journal for the History of Science, 51.3 (2018), 395–422. For more on Robert Hardwicke, see English, 1986.

34 Worthington G. Smith, ‘The Late Dr. M. C. Cooke’, The Gardeners’ Chronicle, 56 (1914), pp. 356–357.

35 Mordecai Cubitt Cooke, ‘Science-Gossip’, Hardwicke’s Science-Gossip: An Illustrated Medium of Interchange and Gossip for Students and Lovers of Nature, 2.1 (1866), 1.

36 W. Gibson, ‘Proposal to London Microscopists’, Hardwicke’s Science-Gossip: An Illustrated Medium of Interchange and Gossip for Students and Lovers of Nature, 1 (1865), 116. Science Gossip also led to the foundation of another less prominent microscopical club named the Postal-Cabinet Club in 1873 (see Brock 1989).

37 Mordecai Cubitt Cooke, ‘Early Memories of the Q. M. C.’, The Journal of the Quekett Microscopical Club, 7.45 (1899), 229–38.

38 Allen, ‘The Biological Societies of London 1870–1914: Their Interrelations and Their Responses to Change’.

39 Indeed, the Quekett Club in celebrating Lankester’s tenure as President noted that he was ‘[e]ver foremost in any movement having for its object the advancement of popular science’ Anonymous, ‘Proceedings of Societies: Quekett Microscopical Club’, Journal of Cell Science, 2.6 (1866), 277–80.. For more on Edwin Lankester see English, 1990.

40 ‘Quekett Microscopical Club October 25th 1867’, The Journal of the Quekett Microscopical Club, 1 (1868), 20–21.

41 George Edward Massee, ‘The Q. M. C. Fungus Foray’, The Journal of the Quekett Microscopical Club, 7.44 (1899), 133–37.

42 The importance of microscopy to the taxonomy of minority taxa has previously been explored, albeit in a later period, with a historical study on the role of the electron microscope in reformulating viral taxonomy Ton van Helvoort and Neeraja Sankaran, ‘How Seeing Became Knowing: The Role of the Electron Microscope in Shaping the Modern Definition of Viruses’, Journal of the History of Biology, 52.1 (2019), 125–60.

43 Still further diversity has been identified with the genetic revolution revealing yet more cryptic speciation amongst the fungi.

44 David Allen, The Naturalist in Britain, Second (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994).

45 The Scottish Cryptogamic Society was formed in 1875. Notably, it was originally intended to be the Scottish Mycological Society John Ramsbottom, ‘History of Scottish Mycology’, Transactions of the British Mycological Society, 46.2 (1963), IN1-178.

46 Miles Joseph Berkeley, Introduction to Cryptogamic Botany (London: H. Bailliere, 1857).

47 Miles Joseph Berkeley, Outlines of British Fungology; Containing Characters of Above a Thousand Species of Fungi, and a Complete List of All that have been Described as Natives of the British Isles (London: Lovell Reeve, 1860).

48 Mordecai Cubitt Cooke, One Thousand Objects for the Microscope (London and New York: Frederick Warne and Co., 1869).

49 Further examples of the taxonomic bounding of microscopy can be seen in the excursion reports of the QMC, which are largely restricted to the cryptogams and microscopic animal life and in Lois Lane Clarke’s Objects for the Microscope L. Lane Clarke, Objects for the Microscope: Being a Popular Description of the Most Instructive and Beautiful Subjects for Exhibitions, 2nd edn. (London: Groombridge and Sons, 1863).¸ where the majority of subjects suggested from the ‘Vegetable Kingdome’ are cryptogams.

50 Mordecai Cubitt Cooke, Rust, Smut, Mildew, & Mould : An Introduction to the Study of Microscopic Fungi (London: Robert Hardwicke, 1865).

51 Edwin Lankester, Half-Hours with the Microscope: Being a Popular Guide to the Use of the Microscope as a Means of Amusement and Instruction (London: Robert Hardwicke, 1859).

52 Mordecai Cubitt Cooke, One Thousand Objects for the Microscope with Hints on Their Mounting (London and New York: Frederick Warne and Co., 1900).

53 Whilst mention is also given to the terrestrial cryptogams later on in the chapter, Cooke notably groups these with the flowering plants and highlights these taxa only as of interest to the botanist. However, as will be explored later in the paper, it should be noted that at the point of writing this section, independent societies had already been established for the terrestrial cryptogams (fungi, bryophytes, and ferns) and so the remit of microscopy over these groups was limited.

54 Examples of such publications on well-studied taxa include papers on the Kola bean Hahnemann Epps, ‘On The Kola Bean (Cola Acuminata)’, The Journal of the Quekett Microscopical Club, 3.17 (1866), 1–4. and the nature of pig muscle fibres E. M. Nelson, ‘Striped Muscle Fibre of Pg’, The Journal of the Quekett Microscopical Club, 5.31 (1892), 1–3. Interestingly, Nelson, in introducing the latter paper writes that ‘my opinion is that, if anything is to be done towards the elucidation of minute histological structures, we must attack them as if they were diatoms. There should not be such a thing as one way of examining a histological specimen, and another way of examining the diatom; but there is a right and a wrong way of using the microscope, and the right way is the diatom method, and is the one which should be employed on histological tissue’ (Nelson, 1992: 1). This highlights the central importance of minority taxa in the construct of the concept of microscopy. Examples of geological papers include Heinrich Hensoldt, ‘On Fluid Cavities in Meteorites’, The Journal of the Quekett Microscopical Club, 1.1 (1881), 1–14. and examples of methodological papers include E. M. Nelson, ‘A Simple Method of Finding the Refractive Index of Various Mounting Media’, The Journal of the Quekett Microscopical Club, 5.31 (1892), 8–9; T. Charters White, ‘On the Injection of Specimens for Microscopical Examinations’, The Journal of the Quekett Microscopical Club, 1.1 (1881), 15–19.. However, both geological and methodological papers existed that focused on minority taxa Arthur M. Edwards, ‘The Fossil Diatomaceae Older than Those of Virginia and California, Which Are Older Miocene.’, The Journal of the Quekett Microscopical Club, 6.36 (1895), 1–4; Charles Rousselet, ‘On A Method of Preserving Rotatoria’, The Journal of the Quekett Microscopical Club, 5.32 (1893), 205–9; Charles Rousselet, ‘Second Note on a Method of Preserving Rotatoria’, The Journal of the Quekett Microscopical Club, 6.36 (1895), 5–13; H. Morland, ‘On Mounting “Selected” Diatoms on Slip’, The Journal of the Quekett Microscopical Club, 5.31 (1892), 4–7.

55 Brown.

56 Allen, ‘The Biological Societies of London 1870–1914: Their Interrelations and Their Responses to Change’.

57 Jardine.

58 In terms of animal minority taxa, a significant society also formed for the study of molluscs (The Malacological Society of London; 1893), although several entomological societies already existed and whose remit included microscopic animal life.

59 John Ramsbottom, ‘The British Mycological Society’, Transactions of the British Mycological Society, 30 (1948), 1-IN1.

60 ‘The British Bryological Society’, Nature, 153.3895 (1944), 768–768.

61 For examples of Cooke’s wider work see Mordecai Cubitt Cooke, The Seven Sisters of Sleep (London: James Blackwood, 1860) and Mordecai Cubitt Cooke, Our Reptiles and Batrachians: A Plain and Easy Account of the Lizards, Snakes, Newts, Toads, Frogs, and Tortoises Indigenous to Great Britain (London: Allen & Co., 1893).

62 E. M. Blackwell, ‘Fungus Forays in Yorkshire and the History of the Mycological Committee’, The Naturalist, 86.871 (1961), 163–68.

63 English, Mordecai Cubitt Cooke: Victorian Naturalist, Mycologist, Teacher & Eccentric.

64 John Ramsbottom, ‘George Edward Massee. (1850–1917)’, The Journal of Botany, British and Foreign, 55 (1917), 223–27.

65 George Edward Massee, ‘Résumé of the President’s Address’, Transactions of the British Mycological Society, 1 (1896), 15–19. For more on the relationship between Massee and Ramsbottom and Massee see Nathan Edward Charles Smith, ‘Narrative Histories in Mycology and the Legacy of George Edward Massee (1845–1917)’, Archives of Natural History, 47.2 (2020), in press.

66 Charles Crossland, ‘The Study of Fungi in Yorkshire: Part 1’, The Naturalist, 33.392 (1908), 81–96.

67 For examples of early forays into ecology in bryology, see Charles Crossland, ‘The Distribtuion and Association of the Mosses and Hepatics in the Parish of Halifax’, The Halifax Naturalist, 8 (1903), 66–72. For unpublished examples in mycology, see Nathan Edward Charles Smith, ‘Provincial Mycology and the Legacy of Henry Thomas Soppitt (1858–1899)’, Archives of Natural History, 47.2 (2020), 219–35.

68 For Berkeley’s attempts, see Miles Joseph Berkeley, Outlines of British Fungology; Containing Characters of above a Thousand Species of Fungi, and a Complete List of All That Have Been Described as Nativers of the British Isles. (London: Lovell Reeve, 1860); Miles Joseph Berkeley, The English Flora of Sir James Edward Smith Vol. V. Part II. Comprising the Fungi (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green & Longman, 1836). For Cooke’s attempts see.

69 Mordecai Cubitt Cooke, Handbook of British Fungi (London and New York: Macmillan and Co., 1871).

70 Ramsbottom, ‘George Edward Massee. (1850–1917)’.

71 Anonymous, ‘Fungus Foray at Branham and Harewood Parks’, The Naturalist, 13.160 (1888), 321–29.

72 Here successor discipline is used to indicate emerging disciplines that inherited both research remit and practitioners from existing/collapsing research disciplines or communities. In this sense, modern genetics may be viewed as a successor discipline to eugenics or the indistinct ‘plant sciences’ a successor discipline to botany.

73 G. L’E. Turner, ‘Are Scientific Societies Really Neccessary?’, in Essays on the History of the Microscope (Oxford: Senicio Publishing Company Ltd., 1980), pp. 233–45.

74 Cooke, Rust, Smut, Mildew, & Mould : An Introduction to the Study of Microscopic Fungi. pp. 189–190.

75 Ibid., pp. 31–32.

76 George Edward Massee and Ivy Massee, Mildews, Rust And Smuts (London: Dulau and Company, Limited, 1913).

77 Here some level of discretion should be paid to accounts about Massee. The American Mycologist, whilst visiting Massee, wrote that Massee thought ‘microscopic characters of little or no value in such plants, and·that one is just as safe in relying on gross characters as upon microscopic characters’. This is somewhat true for the genus Amanita, the group under discussion, but it should also be noted that Massee was a noted teller of untruths Nathan Edward Charles Smith, ‘A Figure in the Fog: George Edward Massee’, The Naturalist, 145.1103 (2020), 8–12. who, by Atkinson’s own admission liked to ‘stir up the hornets nest’ in people. With such knowledge, Atkinson’s report on Massee’s views on the microscope are also likely to be attempts by Massee to wind up or troll Atkinson.

78 George Edward Massee, ‘Mycology, New and Old’, The Naturalist, 37.371 (1912), 366–67.

79 Charles Crossland, ‘Mycological Meeting at Sandsend’, The Naturalist, 38 (1913), 21–28.

80 Charles Crossland, for example, maintained an active research interest in local history and linguistics.

81 An example of this is Soppitt providing botany lessons to the Bradford Technical College.

82 Crossland, ‘The Study of Fungi in Yorkshire: Part 1’; Charles Crossland, ‘The Study of Fungi in Yorkshire: Part 2’, The Naturalist, 33.393 (1908), 147–56.

83 Charles Crossland, ‘Henry Thomas Soppitt’, The Halifax Naturalist, 4.20 (1899), 31–36.

84 Ramsbottom, ‘The British Mycological Society’.

85 E.M. Blackwell, ‘Links with Past Yorkshire Mycologists’, The Naturalist, 86.877 (1961), 163–68.

86 Blackwell, ‘Links with Past Yorkshire Mycologists’.

87 Richard A. Jarrell, ‘Visionary or Bureaucrat? T. H. Huxley, the Science and Art Department and Science Teaching for the Working Class’, Annals of Science, 55.3 (1998), 219–40.

88 This can be observed in the Chester Society for Natural Science, founded by the Christian Socialist Charles Kingsley, where on outings all members, regardless of class status, travelled second class on the railway. Similarly, when the American mycologist visited Massee and the Yorkshire mycologists he noted they all travelled third class and all mycologists, regardless of class, slept two to a room during the foray.

89 Mordecai Cubitt Cooke, Songs Written for the Excursionists’ Annual Dinners, Q.M.C. (London: Keating, 1878).

90 Smith, ‘Provincial Mycology and the Legacy of Henry Thomas Soppitt (1858–1899)’.

91 Cooke, Rust, Smut, Mildew, & Mould : An Introduction to the Study of Microscopic Fungi.

92 Sheets-Pyenson, p. 551.

93 Matthew Wale, ‘Editing Entomology: Natural-History Periodicals and the Shaping of Scientific Communities in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, The British Journal for the History of Science, 52.3 (2019), 405–23.

94 Graeme Gooday, ‘“Nature” in the Laboratory: Domestication and Discipline with the Microscope in Victorian Life Science’, The British Journal for the History of Science, 24.3 (1991), 307–41.

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