While developmental series were increasingly widely treated as self-evident frameworks for showing specimens and objects, many naturalists and physicians either vehemently denied the validity of unitary or parallel series or studiously avoided the problem altogether. By no means all science either embraced claims about series or depended on serial images and arguments. We would rather understand seriality as a range of practices, of the same order perhaps as those of standardization, 3 that pose a set of pervasive and prominent questions about continuity versus discontinuity, the play of difference through standardized objects, and the sequential display versus the array that could be seen at a glance.įor though serialization was often represented as an obvious response to matters of fact, it actually offered a technique for pressing a partisan claim that might be questioned, modified, rejected or ignored. 2 Nor did the combination of periodical publication, museum display and commodity production determine the new sciences of evolution and history. We start from a reluctance to use seriality as a grand explanatory cause, as if somehow, in the terms of the intellectual historian Arthur Lovejoy, a generalized “temporalizing of the chain of being” simply transformed a static scale of beings into a ladder of progress, an inventory into a developmental programme. How were these supplementary resources, which the term ‘seriality’ implies, developed and used to produce knowledge? What significant connections were there between different kinds of series, and especially between serial modes of organization, production and communication and the serial contents of nature? Beyond mere juxtaposition or the compilation of a list, some important extra meanings and powers are involved in the disposition of elements in series. This introduction sets out our questions and draws some interim conclusions. This special double issue of History of science is the first attempt to investigate series’ manifold properties and relations across the sciences. How can historians best approach their relations in nineteenth-century science? Behind the subtly graded and reliably calibrated sequences was often the sense that the world was serial in its basic structure, but series were also fiercely debated, as Maxwell’s warning suggests. Progressive or evolutionary schemes commonly traced development from the primordial nebula to present society, via the formation of the Earth and the ages of life through human evolution and history. Practitioners arranged embryos or electric sparks, fossils or flint weapons in terms of formal or functional resemblance, and related the resulting order to changes of state or of time. From periodical publication to the cinema, tabulation to industrialized screening, series feature in major innovations in scientific communication and the organization of laboratories, clinics, libraries, museums and field sites. Series represent much that was new and significant in the sciences between the French Revolution and the First World War.
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