On Visual Desperation and the Bodies of Protozoa
James Elkins
Representations, No. 40, Special Issue: Seeing Science. (Autumn, 1992), pp. 33-56.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0734-6018%28199223%290%3A40%3C33%3AOVDATB%3E2.0.CO%3B2-N
Representations is currently published by University of California Press.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained
prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in
the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/journals/ucal.html.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic
journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers,
and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take
advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
http://www.jstor.org
Wed Nov 14 17:30:30 2007
JAMES ELKINS
On Visual Desperation
and the Bodies of Protozoa
C O N S I D ETRH E S C Y T H I A N
L A M B or borometz, a creature that lived
on a stalk (fig. 1). As it grew, its trunk stretched, and soon it could only look down
on the grass that once nourished it. Eventually it starved and died, and its body
became a husk.' As Claude Duret shows it, the borometz is eating the top few
inches of meadow grass, and its coat is already going to seed. It is a sad creature,
something of a melancholy hunger artist among the vigorous fanciful monsters
of the medieval bestiaries. Yet it is easy to understand, because it is constructed
by analogy: its stalk is like a tree trunk, and in that sense it is a plant; but the stalk
is also like an umbilical cord, and in that sense it is an animal. A young borometz
is a lamb, tethered to the ground. It becomes more plantlike when its desiccated
organs, muscles, and wool become a vegetable matrix for borometz seeds. Hence
it is both plant and animal, though it is never entirely one or the other.
As A. 0. Lovejoy has pointed out, in the Middle Ages creatures conformed
to a "chain of being" that was imagined as a succession of species, each in analogy
to the ones before and after it. From God Himself to the lowliest worm, creatures
paraded in sturdy succession." The great chain of being is not a rope, with fibers
inextricably entwined, but a chain, with clearly articulated links. Both real and
invented creatures had to obey these laws of fixed difference. The gryllus was the
operative principle of monstrous construction: monsters were formed by conjoining nameable parts taken from nameable creatures. Thus a centaur is a man
and a horse, a borometz is a tree and a lamb, and a heraldic wyvern is a twolegged dragon, derived from four-legged dragons, which are in turn derived
from lizards, snakes, and bats. Grylli are always formed by this ars combinatoria of
parts.3 The borometz is predicated upon clear, illogical comparisons between
lamb and seed pod, trunk and umbilicus, animal and plant.
It is my contention here that analogic reasoning is what allows us to perceive
the borometz at all: to see that it is one creature, that it has a mode of life, that it
is, in the most fundamental sense, a body. Lovejoy's history can be reread as a
handbook for the conditions of the possibility of seeing bodies at all, since it is an
extended study of the ways that linguistic construction made creatures comprehensible? Analogic thought is resilient and resourceful, and as long as it can
unearth a term for comparison we can perceive a body in comprehensible contrast to our own. Analogies allow us to see bodies where we might see meaningless
REPRESENTATIONS
40
Fall 1992 O THE
REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
33
FIGURE
1. The Scythian lamb or borometz.
From Claude Duret, Histoire admirable
des plantes (Paris, 1605); in John M.
Priest, The Garden of Eden: The Botanic
Garden and the Re-Creation of Paradise
(New Haven, 1981), p. 51, fig. 37.
aggregates, formless matter or "substrate," and I take it that the need for analogies is deep-rooted in our habits of seeing? The mechanical collage in Max Ernst's
Elephant of the Celebes is a body, and so are Arcimboldo's maniera conceits. The
analogic principle holds good for most bodies in pictures, mythologies, bestiaries,
and dreams; for the classical gryllus or monstrum; and even for the most shocking
teratology.
Yet there are also the rare cases in which our capacity to complete the analogy
fails, and we cease to comprehend what we have seen, or cease to see bodies at
all. This has happened most recently in the case of the Burgess shale, the Cambrian strata in British Columbia that yielded creatures so bizarre that they were
at first mis-seen and classified as members of familiar phyla. Only in recent
decades have we been able to comprehend that some have gelatinous blobs in
place of heads, hollow mouthlike tails, spikes for legs, or feeding tubes that
deposit nutrients in hoppers arrayed along the back. One such creature is named
Hallucigenia in honor of its capacity to disrupt expectations? But the most radical
challenge to our capacities to analogize, and to the dependent ability to comprehend the presence of bodies, came in the Enlightenment. That was the time of
the great microscopical discoveries, when creatures were found that did not seem
to be constructed by analogy with other creatures at all. Their appearance engen-
dered a phenomenon I will be calling "visual desperation" as the microscopists
struggled to find suitable analogies that wouM allow them to make sense of what
they were seeing. Visual desperation is not a common problem, and when it
occurs it reveals how widely and naturally we rely on anaiogrc thinking. I take it
that our ability to understand the bodies we encounter, whether they are humans,
grylli, o r borometzes, depends on finding workable analogies. "Visual desperation" is a name for a peculiarly strained and anxious seeing that casts about, trying
to construct analogies and retrieve an unknown form into the fold of vision.
When it succeeds, we complacently classify the bodies as humans, other animals,
plants, and fabulous beasts of various sorts. When it fails, we become blind; we
see only chaos or trackless monstrosity.
Ealightement Microscopy as Conceptual Anarchy The history of magnification-and especially its exemplary moment,
the invention and elaboration of the idea of "protozoa"-recapitulates many
ideas that preoccupied the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in other spheres.
To some early microscopists, the microscope was an instrument of entertainment:
its slides were magic lantern transparencies, and its brilliant "stages" boasted the
most wondrous actors. Microscopic life was nothing short of "microscopic
theater," a "spectacle tres rejouissant," in which condensed lights revealed astonishing underwater comedy.' The hieroglyphic acrobatics and "joyous leaps, frisky
contortions, and vaults" of "the harlequin, or insect [found in] muddy water,"
reminded one amateur scientist of lusty springing in the commedia dell' arte (fig.
2): Barbara Stafford's Body Criticism looks at the history of Enlightenment microscopy from this vantage, bringing out its connections with theatrical ruse, deception, phantasm, confusion, and "visual q~ackery."~
The microscopic spettacoli were also implicated in the Enlightenment search
for origins, both spatial (in Louis Pasteur's and Lazzaro Spallanzani's experiments, which attempted to isolate the living from the sterile)1° and temporal (in
the question of the "potential immortality of the protozoa" popularized by
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and "proved" in the 1920s);'' the entire problematic of
the primitive and its nature (and here we recall that one of the myriad names the
protozoa went under was Urtkrchen);the disruption of classical beauty, propriety,
and decorum (here Anton van Leeuwenhoek's early observation of frog feces
"swarming with little animals" is exemplary); and the insoluble obstacles the new
creatures presented to moral, sexual, physiological, and morphological classification.lPPuzzlement about taxonomy is reflected in their many names: astonished
discoverers called them inuisibles, animalcules, dzerken (little animals), fish (a French
O n Visual Desperation and the Bodies of Protozoa
35
FIGURE 2.
The harlequin worm. From M. F. Ledermiiller,
Mikroskopische Gemuths- und Augen-Ergotzung
(Nuremberg, 1760), p. 145, tab. 75. Photo:
Univ. of Chicago Library (UCL).
favorite, poissons), prohta, protozoa and Urtierchen (primitive little animals), insects,
Zellinge (little cells), molecules, and infusoria (inhabitants of stinking "infusions" of
rotting animal and vegetable matter)?%
Consider as an example a single issue, the eighteenth-century preoccupation
with the dividing line between species and in particular between man and animal.
The interest in "pongoes" (immature orangutans) and calmucks (legendary
inhabitants of North and Central Asia) are signs of the concern about the dividing
line between human and animal?4Medieval grylli like the borometz, with its tame
collage of animal and plant parts, could no longer staunch the flood of transgressions. Eighteenth-century microscopical investigations showed how hopeless it is
to place the line between animal and human, by doubting a far more basic, and
equally hopeless, proposition: to distinguish between animal and plant. A group
of free-swimming creatures, the phytoflagellates, have chloroplasts like green
plants but swim like animals. Sometimes they appear as primitive "trees,"
coalesced from creatures that had been freely swimming moments b e f ~ r e Some
?~
creatures change from animal-like motile forms to sessile plantlike forms in a
single generation; rapid swimmers can become "seeds" (cysts) that "germinate"
when conditions are improved; and many display a range of sexual and asexual
forms of reproduction. As the nineteenth century recognized, the origins of both
animality and sexuality are microscopic.
The early writers were faced with an array of questions that strained the limits
of analogic thought. Do protozoa have "bodies" without limbs or organs? Are they
trunks or fragments? Can an arm or a finger be alive, function as a body? Can a
"body" lie open and transparent to investigation? Isn't a "body" properly something with opaque skin dividing its inside from the outside? Is a "body" something
that can be continuous with other bodies or with the outside world? A body-at
least a human body-is potentially beautiful, and its skin can be ideally smooth,
"like ivory" in the classical trope. Microscopy also challenged that, because it made
humans disgusting. William Cowper's Anatomia corpmm humanmm includes a
minute, fascinating, and nauseating examination of skin pores?6The microscopic
eye surfaces again in Jonathan Swift's repulsive, misogynist itinerary of oils,
flakes, "Pomatum, Paints, and Slops" in "The Lady's Dressing Room." The hero,
sneaking into his Lady Celia's boudoir, finds towels "Begumm'd, bematter'd, and
beslim'd / With Dirt, and Sweat, and Ear-Wax grim'd," and he inspects her magnifying glass, "that can to sight disclose, / The smallest Worm in Celia's Nose."
Low-level magnification (which suited the blurry optics of the early microscopes)
maximized the alien monstrosity of everything human, and by extension that of
everything which lies just below our notice. The most "wretched creatures"
I
.
/
-I
I
I
FIGURE 3.
TWOZee-diertjes:
the Zee-scherminkel (Physica
marina) and the Zeeduizadbeen (Scolpendra
marina). From Martinus
Slabber, Natur-kundige
verlustigingen behelrende
microscopise waarneemingen
van in- en uit-lundse water- en
land-dieren (Haarlem, 1778),
pl. 10. Photo: UCL.
/'
E
On Visual Desperation and the Bodies of Protozoa
37
FIGURE 4. Der kleine
Proteus. From August
Johann Rose1 von
Rosenhof, Der monutlichherausgegebenen InsectenBeliistigung, vol. 3
(Nuremberg, 1741-55),
tab. 101. Photo: UCL.
(schlechte Kreaturen) were those barely visible to the naked eye (marine larvae,
young polychaete worms, the hydra) rather than truly invisible forms. Tinier
animalcules were considered less "malformed" in part because they lacked
observable form altogether. Some books inventory repellent creatures, each with
a minuscule smudge to show its life-size appearance (fig. 3))' Microscopy showed
horrors far worse than the monstrous births, distorted animals, and Hyperboreans of ancient and Renaissance lore, and forced questions on the nature of
monstrosity. Can the nine orifices of medieval medicine be multiplied indefinitely? Can a body include Mty stomachs migrating freely in a milky interior? Can
it be only mouth and stomach, with no tissues to nourish? Can urine and phlegm
float around a body together with brains and stomach, and then pierce a makeshift anus and escape? Can a hundred eggs live together with a heart in a transparent body, itself "living" inside a coffee louse?'*Protoplasm is a strange word. Is
it a substitute for brain or soul? Is it a kind of "sensitive" tissue, something that
corresponds to our own "irritable" nerves?lgWhen is an arm a paddle or a fin?20
Does a ciliated protozoan have a thousand tiny arms, or are they mechanical helpmates like oars? And what does it mean to say a body has oars? Can a body be
parasitized by homuncular slaves, each pulling at a built-in prosthetic paddle?
T h e amoeba, called "little" or "blind Proteus" and "animalculum singulariss i m ~ m , spills
" ~ ~ its "arms" into its "legs" continuously, churns its "stomachs" into
"bladders," and moves its anus to any spot on its "body."22The observers were
dumbfounded. A. J. Rose1 von Rosenhof, the amoeba's discoverer, waited
patiently for "a head, feet, or even a
At times he was sure he saw turtleforms, antlers, or at least flippers (fig. 4). John Turberville Needham watched a
"Proteus" decapitate itself and then put forth a "wheel-like Piece of M a ~ h i n e r y . " ~ ~
As we look through this strange history, we will encounter two related strategies for retrieving visually intractable forms. Analogy was a shaky epistemological tool because it rarely provided satisfying explanations and because it risked
seeming inappropriate or fanciful. Especially preposterous analogies tended to
collapse, so that they were not so much permanent insights as heuristic devices
that were in a sense constructed in order to be discarded. If an odd body is seen
indistinctly, at a distance, or in a memory, we might say it looks like another thing,
even if we do not really believe what we are saying-for example, that it is a
human who looks like a table. In saying that we do not mean that the form is
actually an impossible hybrid; instead the statement allows us to keep looking, to
keep seeing something while we think. The propaedeutic function of analogies
will be evident here, as will the more considered and permanent attempts to
rewrite the unruly protozoa as true analogues of other forms. The second
strategy avoids known analogies in favor of neologisms: instead of saying the
apparition is a human who looks like a table, we might choose to see it as an
integrated form, and coin a term for it-say, a tabular human. T h e newly named
creature defeats further analysis: it is simply an enigma, something new with a
new name, a sphinx. Neologism, I will argue, is the principal strategy that modern
science uses to paper over problems that analogies continue to provoke; but I
want to begin by considering an earlier episode in the history of microscopy, in
which both far-fetched analogy and taxonomic neologism served as ways to talk
about bodies that seemed utterly unacceptable.
Pushing Sperm off the Edge of the World Sperm are still called spermatozoa, literally "sperm animals." The first
people to see spermatozoa recognized them as living creatures, but they balked
at the thought that human bodies might be in perverse commensal partnership
with mindless vermin. Calling them by the more obvious analogic names-tadpoles, worms, snakes, and so forth-was often not enough, since it was difficult to
accept that the male body might harbor, and possibly even depend on, such animals. The simplest and most radical solution to this dilemma was to deny that
On Visual Desperation and the Bodies of Protozoa
39
spermatozoans were analogous to bodies at all. In a letter of 31 May 1678, Leeuwenhoek again raises the question of the differences between these "dierken" in
dogs and other animals, but most of his attention is consumed in an effort to
record the "vessels" (vaten) he had first seen in the seminal fluid a year before (fig.
5). His ephemeral vaten have never been explained, and they have vanished from
the l i t e r a t ~ r e Leeuwenhoek
?~
protests that he is "not an expert" at drawing, and
he drew relatively little in comparison with Christian Huyghens or Robert Hooke
(his first descriptions of protozoa are not illustrated), but he tries hard to show
at the bottom of
the ways the vaten lie in obscure tangles. The letters D-D-D-D
figure 5 represent a dense interweaving that "the eye cannot follow." Four such
drawings survive, looking like nothing so much as student exercises or doodles;
the sperm themselves, which could have been shown swimming in this labyrinth,
are absent-they appear in other plates, lined up with specimens from other species. To Leeuwenhoek the d i e r h in seminal fluid were "nothing but the vehicle
[voenuage] of a certain extremely volatile animal spirit [seer vollatile animale geest],
impressing on the conception, i.e., the ovum of the woman, the perception of life
[het levende gevoelen]." The vaten, on the other hand, are nothing so immaterial:
they are "nerves, arteries, and veins," and indeed every organ of the body is
nascent in the seminal fluid ("Once I fancied I saw a certain form . . . which I
fancied I could compare with some inward part of the b ~ d y " ) ?In~ this way the
body remains intact across generations; the father bequeaths the components of
his body in dissected form (hence the interest in how the fibers of the vaten are
related), together with the principle of motion, the "volatile spirit" embodied by
FIGURE 5. Leeuwenhoek's
vaten. From The Collected Letters
ofAntoni van Leeuwenhoek, vol.
2 (Amsterdam, 1941), pl. 19.
-r.. T-', --
.
3
f .
s
-
.+,I
,-
FIGURE 6.
Milt vessels of
the calamary. From John
Turberville Needham, An
Account of Some New
Microscopical Discoveries
(London, 1745). pl. 3.
Photo: UCL.
the dierken. But in this disembodied transmission of body from one generation to
the next, the missing part is the spermatozoan itself; nothing in the vaten corresponds to disembodied sperm. The spermatozoa become incomprehensible as
bodies, since they themselves would require their own vaten to ferry them from
one generation to the next.
Later observers failed to find Leeuwenhoek's vaten, and without them it
became more difficult to account for spermatozoa without having recourse to
slimy animal metaphors. Whether or not the embryo is contained in the spermand it is far from clear that Leeuwenhoek thought so-the question of the transmission of the body remained vexing. We can pass over the hallucinations and
misguided illusions of Nicolaas Hartsoeker, who saw the head of the sperm as a
womb (such solutions were too literal to be widely believed), but like Leeuwenhoek's interest in the vaten, many early theories were bound up with the demotion
of spermatozoa to accidental or mechanical intrusions?' Turberville Needham's
New Microscopzcal Discoveries (1745) offers a description of the "milt vessels of the
calamary" in entirely mechanical terms (fig. 6): they consist of an "outward
transparent case," "round head," "screw," "sucker," and a "spongy substance"
On Visual Desperation and the Bodies of Protozoa
41
containing the calamary's semen. The mechanisms undergo a complicated
mechanical involution to release the fluid, and Needham wonders if Leeuwenhoek's "supposed Animalcules" might not be "nothing more than immensely less
Machines analogous to these Milt-vessels."28Needham's solution is, of course,
incomplete, since these calamary sperm cases would presumably release tiny
sperm, which would themselves have to be mechanical in order to preserve the
separation of "sperm" and "body." There would be no living bodied sperms at all,
just machines housing machines without end. The fact that Needham did not see
this infinite regression might be read as willful ignorance. The Panspermist movement (whose proponents held that every substance contains a "seminal nature"
o r "seeds" ready to sprout) cannot be understood apart from this anxiety about
the status of spermatozoans. Three years later Needham wrote "A Summary of
Some Late Observations on the Generation, Composition, and Decomposition of
Animal and Vegetable Substances," in which he denies that the spermatozoans
are bodies composed of "head" and "tail":
These Tails were so far from being Members given them to swim and steer by, that they
evidently caus'd in them an unstable oscillatory motion; and were in effect nothing more
than long filaments of the viscid seminal substance which they necessarily trailed after
them?9
P. L. S. Miiller's expanded edition of Linnaeus (1773-75) recounts one of Needham's experiments showing a root fibril with its characteristic "horns" (Kolben) that
generate animalcule^.^^ "Horns" and "heads" were more acceptable as spermatozoa, in particular when they could be assigned to miscellaneous "Animal and
Vegetable Substances" instead of the insides of our own inviolate bodies.
These accounts show the strain of invention, and there is something of Rube
Goldberg in the overcomplicated vaten and iterated pneumatics of the calamary
milt-vessels; but at least vaten, machines, and inanimate parts were more acceptable as partners in male bodies than wormy tadpoles. If we choose to read this
from a Freudian point of view, we might say that male scientists took offense at
being violated or polluted in an "unmasculine" fashion, and certainly the outlandish constructions and theories are in line with the urgency of that desire for
inviolate purity. In a sense, these explanations are all neologisms, since they had
to be elaborately shored up in order to fend off the immediate apparition of
swimming worms.
When all else failed, the spermatozoa themselves could be herded into the
corral of scientific neologism, a strategy that we will see again at the close of the
paper. One of the most striking of these denials occurs in an early edition of
Carolus Linnaeus's Systema naturae i t ~ e l f .There,
~'
in order to find the spermatozoans, we must turn to the last of the six classes of Animals, the class of Worms
(Vermes), and to its final genus, provocatively titled Chaos. There, among the
lowest, unclassifiable members of animalila, is the amoeba Proteus and the even
stranger slime molds, called Chaos fungorumfeminum and imagined as transsexual
animal spores that turned vegetable and produced mushrooms (this species is
credited to the comically unbelievable name of Baron Miinchhausen). At the end
of the short list of the members of Chaos is a miscellaneous category, the obscurae,
a darkness within a chaos, under which we read the one-line entry:
d. Spermatici vermiculi Leeuwenh.?
Spermatozoa are therefore animals in their own right, with bodies; but they are
practically pushed off the edge of the world of taxonomy: class Worms (Vermes),
genus Chaos, species unknown (obscurae), Spermatici vermiculi (spermatic worms),
discovered by Leeuwenhoek.
Hacking Up Hydras
The first decades of our awareness of sperm witnessed a tumultuous
effort to avoid applying the principle of analogy at all-to deny the possibility
that we might be related to "spermatic worms." That virulent revulsion did not
come into play with animalcules less intimately associated with human bodies.
Instead it became a matter of testing the limits of analogic thinking in order to
comprehend new forms of life. The freshwater hydra is a well-studied cause ce'lebre
(fig. 7 ) . At first, it appeared to be a plant, since it spends most of its life fixed to
underwater leaves and stalks. But then it was observed to "walk," by pulling up
its "roots" and tumbling slowly end over end. The monstrous "Polype" seemed
even more so when it was "dividedn-that is, its "arms" were cut-and each fragment grew into a whole creature. It seemed to have no internal organs, only a
cylinder within a cylinder, sometimes filled with green "curds." One researcher
decided that the "curds" were neither "blood" nor "sap" but something
- else, not
confined to animal or plant "vessels" but free to roam throughout the body like
curds in milk.32Consider the monstrous possibilities of the Polype from the late
eighteenth-century standpoint: a single "limb" (a limb, we may note, with no
bones, no hand, no muscles, and no skin) could regenerate into a whole Polype,
which might then develop "buds" on which smaller Polypes would grow and then
swim or "tumble" away.33Even plants did not propagate that way. Those Polype
"children" would be "sons" and "daughters" of arms. Budding did not seem
normal (though there are plant species that grow miniatures of themselves rather
than seeds), and for animals it has always been a traditionally monstrous possibility. Its equivalent in humans is not the hidden womb but the psychotic fantasy
(think of David Cronenberg's film The Brood, with its budding mother), the
swelling boil, the malignant tumor.
Hydras appeared to be sexually and anatomically deviant, but at least they
had a "mature" form that could be described analogically (as a headless, footless,
On Visual Desperation and the Bodies of Protozoa
43
skinless, boneless trunk and arms). Other animalcules could not be so easily
described, since they seemed to be toying with the more basic idea that a body
should have a canonical form proper t o its species. Heinrich August wrisberg's
Obsmationum de animulculis infirsoriis satum (1765) includes a description of infusoria that have no single form (fig. 8). One such group of "molecules" (probably
bacteria) exists in seven forms: in groups (A), lines and triangles (B, C) that swim,
aggregates of "four, five, or more" (D, E), as an "animalculum sphaericum" (I),
and as globules with a "tail of little bladders" (cauda vesiculan'; H). The groups, as
"individuals," can themselves become gregarious, as at K and L, where "two of
the animalcules grow together" (duo eiusmodi animulcula, coalitioni proxima), and
this opens the way to larger groups: an infinite scale leading toward man-the
animal who had recently credited himself with inventing the "social contract."
Wrisberg's animalcules apply the principle of atomism to living bodies. A human
body becomes nothing more than a magnetic aggregate of primal spheres, and
that in turn implies the loss of an essential quality of the body as it had been
known: its unity, the dependence of its parts.
The Polype could be hacked apart into slices and shreds, but each scrap was
FIGURE 7. The freshwater
hydra. From Rose1 von
Rosenhof, Der monatlichherausgegebenen ZnsectenBeliistigung, tab. 86. Photo:
UCL.
FIGURE 8.
Znf~(oriu.From Heinrich
August Wrisberg, Observationurn
de animalculis infusoriis satum
(Giittingen, 1765), pl. 3.
still, in some unknown sense, a full body; and Wrisberg's "globules" could build
into any kind of body without themselves being bodies. Between the two
extremes, comprehensible analogic bodies were being compressed into a narrowing space.
Breaking the Chain of Being
This incipient conceptual chaos was meliorated somewhat by the
thought that there might still be a continuum of forms from most complex to
most simple. Martin Frobenius Ledermiiller illustrates a drop of carp semen, in
which he is pleasantly surprised to find "millions of little egg-shaped creatures"
describing sinuous paths through the seminal fluid.%Circulating granulated protoplasm was taken for alarming numbers of gestating embryos. Some thought the
fecundity of protozoa was unnatural, "especially if we consider the infinite
number of young ones which are visible to us through the transparent skins of
their bodies."S5 The Chain of Being encouraged the imagination to see bodies
within bodies, composed of bodies, surrounded by bodies. Needham wondered
how such things were generated: "If in the common Way . . . the Process will be
boundless," he thought, "and [each] in their seed have others."s6 Perhaps most
eloquent is John Hill, in the Essays on Natuml History (1752):
It is not to be doubted but Creatures, even below the minutest of those we see in the
common Fluids, may have existence there, and that Gradations infinite between these
Atoms of Existence and nothing, may have Being?'
On Visual Desperation and the Bodies of Protozoa
45
William Turton's edition of Linnaeus (1806) ends not with the obscurae we considered above but with another meditation, a painterly evocation of the last visible
things:
Termo . . . a most minute simple gelatinous point . . . in most animal and vegetable infusions: of all known animals the most minute and simple, being so extremely delicate and
transparent as often to elude the most highly magnifying powers, blending as it were in
the water in which it swims.38
Such evocations of the Chain of Being exemplify a holistic sense of analogy:
if beings continue toward the atoms or the stars (and the astronomers' conjecture
of infinite stars is significant
then one must be related to another
according to a universally applicable analogical comparison. But the wholesale
reinterpretation of protozoa as small creatures "like" other bodies could not be
satisfying, if only because it was also a dodge, a way of avoiding their unsettling
differences. Louis Joblot's Descriptions et usages de plusiers nouveaux microscopes . . .
(1718) attempts to salvage analogic explanation by giving his "poissons" names
like "Gold and Silver Bagpipe," "Turtle" (a "fish" that has "horns" "like a stag"),
and "Water Caterpillar" (chenille aquatique)?O Henry Baker's "Bell-Animals,
Wheel-Animals [and] Funnel-Animals" are similar s0lutions.4~The end of this
literal metaphorization is anthropomorphic delusion, as in Joblot's "perfect
Mask" that has six "legs," a "tail," and a "singular coiffure" (coeffuresinguli&re;fig.
9, bottom). There is no question of literal belief here, but of a delicate and loose
relation between observation and representation that misuses fantasia for explanation. Ledermiiller, too, does not think his "Harlequin worm" is dressed to
dance, but neither does he suspect he may be making something other than useful
description.
T h e next generations were irresistibly attracted to these stretched analogies,
though they tended to use them with greater precision. At the same time, each
improvement in accuracy was an attack on the continuous Chain of Being. Typically only a few parts of an animalcule could be assigned analogic meaning, so
that the explanations tended to sound wrong. Thus Henry Baker finds a "body"
on his Polype, along with a "head" with "mouth or a "kind of snout" and possibly
"teeth" (or at least a "fine scale"), a "gut" with a "stomach and an "anus," and a
"tail," but he allows that the "body" "has no Part that can be called either Back or
Belly.""' In a footnote he defends the use of "arms" for the Polype's tentacles: "As
these Parts serve the Purposes of Arms rather than Horns; I shall chuse all along
to call them by that Name." He names the "head" not because it looks like an
animal's head, but because it is "that anterior part which raises in the center
between its Arms," and asks that the reader understand it is not "like" the heads
of other animals. More monstrous combinations are even less convincing. Hill
recorded "lobster's claws" on microscopic animalsP3 Vorticella campanella, a bellshaped animalcule, uses flagella to sweep a vortex of water and nutrients into its
FIGURE 9.
Poissons. From
Louis Joblot, Descriptions et
usages de plusieurs nouveaux
microscopes . . . (Paris,
1718), end plate. Photo:
UCL.
bell-shaped mouth. The swirling flagella are a confusing sight: Leeuwenhoek saw
"horses' ears" (hoorntgens)and Baker imagined a "bearded tongue."44 To use a
Panspermist metaphor, these far-fetched analogies contained the seeds of their
own destruction, since each one spoke eloquently about its own insufficiency.
As soon as it became impossible to conceive of simple protozoans with "an
Apparatus of Limbs more elaborately formed than those of the largest animals,"45
it also became impossible to retain the once-continuous Chain of Being. Some
Panspermists, ready to accept different seeds for different creatures, were among
the first to articulate the new position:
For tho' . . . Nature seems everywhere to . . . go off by almost imperceptible Gradation;
yet, in our present Ignorance of the entire Chain of Being, we are so liable to mistake
distant species for the most immediate ones to each other, that the Analogy is thereby
nearly extinguished, and its Traces almost effac'dP6
One of the last natural philosophers to hold the eighteenth-century views is
Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg, whose Infusion Animals as Fully Developed Organisms: A Look into the Deeper Organic Life of Nature (1838) has become proverbial as
On Visual Desperation and the Bodies of Protozoa
47
l
_.
A-
b
FIGURE 10. Leucophrys
patuh. From Christian
Gottfried Ehrenberg, Atlas
. . . uber Znfusionsthierchen
(Leipzig, 1838), tab. 32,
fig. 1.10.
I
I
an example of biased observation?' He saw a continuous gut with many stomachs
where others saw formless protoplasm (sawode). He discovered "over fifty" stomachs (Magen) in Leucophrys patuh, and proclaimed protozoa must have digestive
tracts on the model of higher formsP8To do this, he had to imagine connecting
stretches of gut, since protozoa have free-floating "vacuoles," "stomachs" without
tubes. Ehrenberg's long texts and intricate observations are innervated with the
quality of visual desperation: he could not bear to see what lay plainly before him,
and so he strained to see a familiar form in the shifting translucent jelly (fig. 10).
The stomach plays a strange role in Ehrenberg's writing, since it is a metonym
for the body. When a stomach (with its attendant esophagus and intestine) is
present, the creature suddenly has a body like a bird, a cow, or a person. Without
the stomach, there is only the almost invisible sarcode, mysteriously moving and
alive.
The Difference Between an Eye
and an Eye-Spot
The analogic Chain of Being finally broke under the pressure of these
microscopic infractions, and at the same time the animalcules' bodies became
incomprehensible. Felix Dujardin, one of Ehrenberg's many critics, is careful not
to separate animal and plant too rigorously, though the temptation to do so must
be counted as an inexorable human instinct. Instead he implies it is a matter of
continua punctuated by gaps. He is skeptical of the "eye" that had been seen on
the "monoculous Insect" Cyclops. The red or black eyespot (stigma) that we would
like to consider an animal feature is made from "plant" structures like chloroplasts. We could say, in eighteenth-century terms, either these stigmata are "plant
eyes" proper to plants, or our own eyes are descended from plant parts, so that
vision itself is vegetal-a barely conceivable alternative, but one that was seriously
entertained in eighteenth-century discussions about the possibility that minerals
might be kinds of vegetables, with their own "seminal matter." The "red spot"
(tache rouge) had also been cited as a primary characteristic of the protozoan
Euglena, an animallplant that can swim but also pause and make energy for itself
using inbuilt chloroplasts. Dujardin says the "tache rouge" is "extremely variable,
sometimes multiple and sometimes made up of irregular groups of grain~."~%arl
Theodor Ernst von Siebold, another critic, remarks that the "simple pigment
point" "has no cornea, and contains no body capable of refracting light" and
therefore is not an eyejOOther red spots in protozoa turned out not to be eyes,
and some protozoa thought to be sensitive to light showed no evidence of eyes.
Eventually, these critiques of dissective analogies turn on the illogical nature of
analogy in general:
Mr. Ehrenberg, following his methodology, assumes the significance of his "red spots," and
must then explain certain white spots . . . which he takes for a brain or at least a nerve
ganglion . . . [but] that is all that the Infusoria have in the way of a nervous system; all the
rest has to be provided by analogy?'
The frontal attack on analogy leaves little room for the likes of Leeuwenhoek or
Joblot (whose observations Dujardin finds "so strange and fantastic") and, more
important for the future, it transforms a psychologically and epistemologically
helpful reaction (seeing tentacles as arms) into a problem. What exactly is the
"tache rouge" if it is not an eye, or even the analogue of an eye? Can it really be
satisfying to claim it is a variable concatenation of unknown properties? Dujardin
remarks that Ehrenberg and others are wrong to assign human structures to
microorganisms. Instead protozoa should be said to possess a "degree of organisation in proportion to their mode of existence" (en rapport auec leur maniire de
uivre). Instead of judging protozoa to be like humans (or turtles or bagpipes), or
giving them arms (or horns or fins), Dujardin carefully speaks of structures and
parts "like" others or "reminiscent" of them. But note the weight that these words
are forced to carry. The analogies are unworkable, but without them the bodies
are incomprehensible.
Current microbiology has not resolved these problems. Analogies still occur,
but they are confined to schematic illustrations and to introductory passages. T h e
former strategy is common in older texts, before photographs could be cheaply
reproduced. Ernst Haeckel's idealized plates of Radiolaria imagine them as
machines or geometric constructs, even though he does not say so in the text (fig.
11). When analogies occur in modern texts, they tend to be confined to parenthetical passages, or simplified pedagogical texts, where it is clear that they are
only for the purposes of initial comprehension. Siebold, in a modern voice unafraid of technical neologism, speaks of "a round, pulsating cavity," the "vacuolae"
and "oral aperture," and "vesicular, irregular contracting cavities." Contemporary
On Visual Desperation and the Bodies of Protozoa
49
microbiology is more thoroughly grammaticized, with its caryogamy, syzygy, heterothallism, and automixis instead of undifferentiated copulation. Many fossils of
analogic thought are embedded in our current jargon; one need only recall spermatozoa, with its echoes of Linnaean classification.
I would like to stress that the proliferation of neologisms does not solve the
problem of analogy but rather defers it, pushes it outside the texts. It is still necessary to think analogically in order to achieve an initial comprehension. Karl G.
Grell, in one of the best recent textbooks, notes that independent fission in mitochondria and plastids has been observed, thereby making them strongly "reminiscent" of free-living organisms "trapped in cells; but he doubts that organelles
can be equated with organs or organisms, since organelles "are not a 'cell within
a cell'" but "have to be regarded as 'semi-autonomous."' A plastid is "like" a cellthat is the classical analogy, the one that would have captivated Enlightenment
observers-but it is also not like a cell, since it is only "'semi-autonomous."' Why
is semi-autonomous in quotation marks? Because everything living is semiautonomous, and the purpose here is to escape from the analogy without interrogating it too closely. The quotation marks, and the strict phrase "have to be
regarded," are the formalized residue of eighteenth-century dilemmas. Protozoans, he says (and his detachment here might well have seemed insouciant to the
early workers), "generally reach a higher degree of differentiation than metazoan
cells."52This emphasis (the italics are his) skirts a philosophic problem, as recalcitrant as ever: What are our own bodies, if not structures with a "high degree of
differentiation"? The shimmering "infinite number of young" that thronged
inside transparent "mothers" would today be explained as a characteristic of protoplasm. Protoplasm commonly circulates, and the conjunction of that circulation
11. Radiolaria.
From Ernst Haeckel,
Erliiutermngstafeln zur
vergleichenden Anatomie
(Berlin, 1855).
FIGURE
I
Kakabekia.
From S. M . Siege1 et al.,
"Living Relative of the
Microfossil Kakabekia,"
Science 156 (1967): 123134.
FIGURE 12.
with Brownian motion causes the appearance of vivid, conflicted life-but note
how anemic, and psychologically if not scientifically dishonest, that modern
description is; What is that "circulation" if not life?
Kakabekia
The sense of desperation that overcame the early investigators as they
watched orderly creation breaking apart into a myriad perversities can only be
recaptured for us in rare, peripheral cases. Kakabekia is one such (fig. 12). It is an
"umbrella-shaped" organism, found only in two soil samples in the courtyard of
Harlech Castle in Wales. It lives in an ammonia-soaked environment-an ancient
horse stable-that would be disastrous to any other organism. Still, it is not utterly
alone in creation, because it has also been found in a wildly different place: in the
two-billion-year-old Gunflint Chert formation in Ontario. The connections
between the two remain hypothetical. As a fossil, it is called Kakabekia umbellata;
as a living organism, Kakabekia sp.: the same genus, two billion years apart, unrelated to any others in the interim?gA "green helical organism," described in 1940,
"moves by growing," recycling itself like a tank tread. It remains unclassified,
though it may be related to spirochaete b a ~ t e r i a ? ~
For the most part, one has to go beyond science to find more extensive parOn Visual Desperation and the Bodies of Protozoa
51
allels to Enlightenment wonder. Wilhelm Reich's The Bions (1938)revives the Panspermists' position: "Life can burst forth anywhere." This may be an unwitting
revival, since Reich was compelled to ignore the history of science in order to
proceed the way he did. If samples of organic matter are heated to incandescence,
and then cultured on sterile media, then according to Reich they produce "bions,"
pre-living, motile units that then develop into "org-animalcules," what we call
protozoa and infusoria.j5 Heat and swelling are the keys to the germination of
the nascent "spores": "I could not help but think," he writes, "that all known types
of spores must have formed when the earth was still hot."
The eccentric position of such discoveries underscores the decisive linguistic
transformation that has affected mainstream scientific inquiry. The process of
analogical thinking now occurs below the horizon of scientific publication, and it
is there we have to look to find what has become of Ehrenberg's "stomachs" or
Leeuwenhoek's "horses' ears." The early microscopists looked at dierken and wondered "Who are we?"; the recent protozoologists look at the same organisms,
which possess the same power to call into question concepts as fundamental as
the nature, form, and sexuality of the human body, and they ask about "semiautonomy" and "degrees of differentiation." Scientific terminology, italics, and
quotation marks have become the procrustean beds of analogic thinking and
imaginative metaphor. At the same time, they have effectively quelled the visual
desperation that threatened early accounts by redescribing the failure of analogy
as a matter of linguistic construction.
Notes
1. John M. Priest, The Garden of Eden: The Botanic Garden and the Re-Creation of Paradise
(New Haven, 1981), 51-52, nn. 47-50.
2. A. 0. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass., 1936).
3. See Duncan G. N. Barker, "Grylli, Verstand, und Unsinn" i n Classical Glyptics (M.A. thesis,
Department of Art, University of Chicago, 1989); and Barbara Stafford, Body Criticism:
Imaging the Unseen i n Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, Mass., 199 I), 2 1 1 and
passim.
4. T h e connection between the eighteenth-century breakdown of the analogic Chain of
Being and microscopy can also be followed in Bishop Berkeley's "argument from
microscopes": blood appears solidly red, but under the microscope it is part red cells
and part clear fluid. But either one or both of these impressions must be wrong, and
therefore color is a secondary quality, so that "the colors which we see [do not] exist
in external bodies." This approach was made famous in another form and for our
century by Bertrand Russell's argument about the various "real" tables shown us by
our eyes and by our microscopes. See Berkeley, Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous (Indianapolis, 1979), esp. 20; and Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford,
1975), 10. David R. Hilbert, Color and Color Perception (Stanford, 1987), 23ff. and 29ff.,
argues that "at heart, Berkeley's argument depends on a failure to take seriously the
partial nature of perception."
The generality of analogic seeing is pursued in relation to painting and sculpture in
my work in progress, James Elkins, Picturing the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis.
T h e identification of Hallucigenia's parts is disputed. See the exposition in Stephen J.
Gould, Wonderful L$e (New York, 1989); and for Hallucigenia, S. Conway Morris, "A
New Metazoan from the Cambrian Burgess Shale, British Columbia," Palaeontology 20
(1977): 624.
Louis Joblot, Descriptions et usages deplusieurs nouveaux microscopes. . . (Paris, 17 18), 55.
For the connection between microscopy, sophistry, and fraud, see Stafford, Body Criticism, 341-98.
"Lacherlichen Sprunge and hupfenden Verdrehungen und Wendungen . . ."; see
Martin Frobenius Ledermuller, Nachleese seiner mikroskopischen Gemiiths- und AugenErgotzung (Nurnberg, 1760), 145, tab. 75. See also Ledermuller's Mikroskopische
Gemiith- und Augen-Ergotzung (Nurnberg, 1760); and his Physicalische Beobachtungen
derer Saamen-thiergens (Nurnberg, 1756).
Stafford, Body Criticism, 362.
O n Pasteur, see for example Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France (Cambridge,
Mass., 1988);and on Spallanzani, see Giulio Vassale, Lazzaro Spallanzani e la generazione
spontanea: Discorso inaugurale letto nella R. Universita di Modena (Modena, 1899).
T h e idea was that animalcules need never die because they could divide themselves
instead of returning to dust. Critics of this notion thought that sexual reproduction
would eventually be necessary, so that the animalcules could spawn and then die. (The
psychology of this is immediately apparent: sex involves death, and the researchers
wished to be sure microscopic animalcules had not found a better way.) Eventuallyin the first decades of this century-L. L. Woodruff completed exhaustive experiments
to prove that Paramecium sp. could regenerate indefinitely without needing to resort
to sexual reproduction. A single individual, therefore, is effectively "immortal": it
splits part of itself, which goes on living until it is ready to split; there is no dissolution,
no "death," and no need to find another organism to perpetuate life. See Woodruff,
"A Summary of the Results of Certain Physiological Studies on a Pedigreed Race of
Paramecium," Biochemical Bulletin 1 (19 12): 396ff. For a review of sexual reproduction
and an excellent bibliography see David Henry Wenrich, "Sex in Protozoa: A Comparative Review," in Wenrich et al., Sex in Microorganisms (Washington, D.C., 1954),
134-65. Sigmund Freud was aware of the earlier literature and puzzled over it in
"Beyond the Pleasure Principle," The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works,
ed. James Strachey, 22 vols. (London, 1953-74), 18:45ff.
For the sacred nature of microscopic images, see Catherine Wilson, "Visual Surface
and Visual Symbol: T h e Microscope and the Occult in Early Modern Science,"Journal
of the History of Ideas 49 (1988): 85-108.
Until Carl Theodor Ernst von Siebold, synonyms seem to multiply as quickly as the
organisms themselves. Dierken is Leeuwenhoek's term; Henry Baker, Of Microscopes, 2
vols. (London 1744-53), 1: 68, calls them "Invisibles." For protozoa, see Georg August
Goldfuss, Handbuch der Zoologie (Nurnberg, 1817). For protista, see Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie (Berlin, 1866). On infusoria, see Ledermuller, Mikroskopische Gemuths- und Augen-Ergotzung.
See Willem R. H. Koops, Petrus Camper (1722-1 789): Onderzoeker van nature, exhibition
catalogue (Groningen, Neth., 1979).
O n Visual Desperation and the Bodies of Protozoa
53
15. Described for example in E. H. P. A. Haeckel, Das Protistenreich (Leipzig, 1870).
16. For Cowper, see Stafford, Body Criticism, 288.
17. See also Ledermuller, Mikroskopische Gemiiths- und Augen-Ergotzung, tab. 27, pp. 76ff.
(Daphnia, "Ein kleines Wasserinsekt der Dauphin genannt"), and tab. 26, pp. 49ff. (a
louse, "Die Blattlaufe oder Pu~erons");a nd tab. 7, pp. 15ff. ("Die Schwarzer WasserRohe," which gathers little balls of water under its feet).
18. Ledermuller, Nachleese seiner mikroskopischen Gemiiths- und Augen-Ergotzung.
19. With the nineteenth-century realization that no brain was going to be discovered in
animalcules, the protoplasm and its motive force became an object of intense interest.
The investigations take their philosophic force from debates about the senses,
"irritability," and the mind-body problem. These better-known sources should be correlated with more recent research on artificial intelligence and especially proprioception, the body's internal senses.
For visual investigations of protoplasm see Johann Evangelista Purkinje, Protoplasm . . . (Breslau, 1839); Franz von Paula Gruithuisen, Beytrage zur Physiognosie und
Eautognosie fur Freunde der Naturforschung (Munich, 1812); Willy Kiihne, Untersuchungen uber das Protoplasma und die Contractilitat (Leipzig, 1864);and later sources such
as A. Fischer, Fixirung, Fuarbung, und Bau des Protoplasm (Jena, 1899),which are sometimes preoccupied with the most tenuous, "etherial" tissues.
20. T h e early history of Holostycha is exemplary because it "crawls" "like a millipede" but
has no "legs" or "arms." See Leeuwenhoek, letter 26, in The Collected Letters ofAntoni
van Leeuwenhoek, 12 vols. (Amsterdam, 1939-), 2:69 (vols. 2 and 4 contain letters on
protozoa).
2 1. Otto Frederik Muller, Animalcula infusoria jiuviatilia et marina . . . ([Copenhagen and
Leipzig], 1786), 10.
22. Henry Baker's "Proteus" may have been Lacrymaria olor Muller. See Baker, Of Microscopes, 1:260-66. Muller, Animalcula, calls Baker's organism Trichoda proteus (179) and
the amoeba proper Proteus difiuens and Proteus tenax (9-1 1).
23. A. J. Rose1 von Rosenhof, Der monatlich-herausgegebenenInsecten-Beliistigung (Niirnberg,
1741), pl. 101, pp. 622-24.
24. John Turberville Needham, New Microscopical Discoveries . . . (London, 1745), 265; pl.
10, no. 11, figs. 3 and 4. See further S. A. Roe, "John Turberville Needham and the
Generation of Living Organisms," Isis 74 (1983): 159-84.
25. Leeuwenhoek, Letters, November 1677 (277), 18 March 1678 (325), 31 May 1678
(357), and 21 February 1629 (41 1). See also tab. 18-19; p. 295, n. 31; p. 333, n. 9; p.
335, n. 12; p. 363, n. 9.
26. Leeuwenhoek, Letters, 367, 333, 295 respectively. Leeuwenhoek's protest is in a letter
of 31 May 1678,365.
27. There are exceptions. See for example Ledermuller's Physicalische Beobachtungen derer
Saamenthierhens . . . (Niirnberg, 1756), esp. pl. 3, fig. 13, which shows internal structures in the spermatozoa (which he calls "Saamenthiergens" and "Moleculas," following Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon). See also the same author's
Mikroskopische Gemuths- und Augen-Ergotzung (1760), tab. 17, p. 33.
28. Needham, New Microscopical Discoveries, 56. See further Carl Theodor Ernst von Siebold, Beitrage zur Naturgeschichte der Wirbellosen Thiere . . . Ueber Medusa, Cyclops, Loligo,
Gregaria, und Xenos (Danzig, 1839), tab 2.
29. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 65 (1748): 6 15-66, $25.
30. Carolus Linnaeus, L i n n ~ u svollstandiges Natursystem . . . ed. P. L. S. Miiller (Nurnberg,
1775),vol. 6, part 2, Von der Corallen, pp. 917, 924; pl. 36; figs. 4b-4d.
31. Carolus Linnaeus, Systema nature (Stockholm, 1767), vol. 1, part 3. In the second edition (1740),the genus Microcosmus is the last of the three orders (Testacea) of Vermes.
32. mile Guyknot, ed., Correspondance intfdite entre Re'aumur et Abraham Trembley (Geneva,
1943), 15; quoted in Virginia Parker Dawson, Nature's Enigma: The Problem of the Polyp
in the Letters of Bonnet, Trembley, and Re'aumur (Philadelphia, 1987), 101-2, with good
bibliography of secondary sources and transcription of the letters. See also Henry
Baker, An Attempt Towards a Natural History of the Polype: In a Letter to Martin Foukes, Esq.,
President of the Royal Society (London, 1743); Abraham Trembley, in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 42 (1745): 474. Hand-colored illustrations may be
found in Ledermuller, Mikroskopische Gemiiths- und Augen-Ergotzung (1760), tab. 67
("Die Armpolype"), tab. 71 ("Die braunen Polypen mit langen Armen"), and tab. 77
("Die Fortsetzung von Polypen"). Polyps in wax are preserved in Florence's Museo
della Specola; see Benedetto Lanza et al., Le cere anatomiche della Specola (Florence,
1979), 239, fig. ET22.
33. Aram Vartanian, "Trembley's Polyp, La Mettrie, and Eighteenth-Century French
Materialism," Journal of the History of Ideas 11 (1950): 259-86.
34. Ledermiiller, Nachleese deiner mikroskopischen Gemiiths- und Augen-Ergotzung.
35. John Ellis, "Observations on a Particular Manner of Increase in the Animalcula of
Vegetable Infusions . . . ," Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 59
(1719): 143.
36. Needham, New lMicroscopical Discoveries, 5 10.
37. John Hill, Essays on Natural History (London, 1752), 105.
38. Carolus Linnaeus, A General System of Nature . . . (London, 1806) vol. 4, p. 724. See
Muller, Animalcula infusoria, 917: "It seems to have appeared to him as a chaos of
disorder [ein chaos der Verwirrung],or as a primitive substance [Urstoff],from which
other forms could arise."
39. Edward Harrison, Darkness at Night (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), passim. To G. Ehrenberg, protozoa had "surpassed [ube$ugen] . . . all the limits of visible effects";
Verbreitung und Einjuss des mikroskopischen Gellens in Sud- und Nord-Amerika (Berlin,
1843), 5.
40. Joblot, Descriptions et usages de microscopes, pl. 6, pp. 51-58. Joblot's book is the first
independent monograph on infusoria; it continues a continental emphasis on the animalcules that correspond to particular infusions (of hay, vinegar, mullet) and their
particular smells. Smell and taste are intimately connected to the origins of protozoology; Leeuwenhoek's pepper infusions were designed in order to find out how the
pepper odor and taste were preserved.
41. Baker, Of Microscopes, 1:261 and passim.
42. Ibid., 1 6 , 2 4 , 2 7 , 3 1 , 3 2 , 4 1 .
43. Hill, Essays on Natural History, 103, 108-9.
44. Baker, Of Microscopes, 73; Leeuwenhoek, Letters, 2:67. Leeuwenhoek also found "globules," a "tail" with a "bollotge" (a ball) at its end.
45. Hill, Essays on Natural History, 104.
46. Needham, "A Summary of Some Late Observations," New MicroscopicalDiscoveries, 6 18.
47. T h e English renders Infusionsthierchen als volkommene Organismen: Ein Blick in das tiefere
organische Leben der Natur.
48. Ehrenberg, Erlauterungstafeln, 4:5.
49. Felix Dujardin, Histoire naturelle des zoophytes: Infusoires (Paris, 1841).
50. Carl Theodor Ernst von Siebold and Hermann Stannus, Lehrbuch der vergleichende
Anatomie der wirbellosen Thiere (Berlin, 1845), 25-26; trans. W. I. Burnett as Comparative
On Visual Desperation and the Bodies of Protozoa
55
Anatomy (Boston, 1854). Siebold gave the first modern definition ofprotozoa as a group
"without clear separation between organ systems"; he included polyps and medusae.
In his taxonomy, Infusoria and Rhizopoda both constituted Protozoa.
5 1. Dujardin, Histoire naturelle, 111.
52. Karl G. Grell, Protozoology (Berlin, 1973).
53. E. S. Barghoorn and S. A. Tyler, "Microorganisms from the Gunflint Chert," Science
147 (1965): 563-77; S. M. Siegel and C. Giumarro, "On the Culture of a Microorganism Similar to the Precambrian Microfossil Kakabekia umbellata Barghoorn in NH,rich Atmospheres," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A. 55 (1966):
349-53; S. M. Siegel et al., "The Living Relative of the Microfossil Kakabekia," Science
156 (1967): 1231-34. T h e discovery was disseminated in W.V. Brown and E.M.
Bertke, Textbook of Cytology (St. Louis, 1969).
54. "The helical organism forms, as it were, part of an imaginary helix extending in either
direction beyond the limits of the body; at any moment part of this helix is realized. . . . We might say that the green helical organism moves by growing"; L. E. R.
Picken, "On a Green Helical Organism and Its Motion," Proceedings of the Royal Society,
London, ser. B, no. 129 (1940): 89; Picken, Organization of Cells (Oxford, 1960), 94-96.
55. Wilhelm Reich, Die Bione zur Entstehung des vegetativen Lebens (1938), trans. Derek
Jordan and Inge Jordan as The Bion Experiments on the O r i p n of L f e (New York, 1979).
http://www.jstor.org
LINKED CITATIONS
- Page 1 of 2 -
You have printed the following article:
On Visual Desperation and the Bodies of Protozoa
James Elkins
Representations, No. 40, Special Issue: Seeing Science. (Autumn, 1992), pp. 33-56.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0734-6018%28199223%290%3A40%3C33%3AOVDATB%3E2.0.CO%3B2-N
This article references the following linked citations. If you are trying to access articles from an
off-campus location, you may be required to first logon via your library web site to access JSTOR. Please
visit your library's website or contact a librarian to learn about options for remote access to JSTOR.
Notes
12
Visual Surface and Visual Symbol: The Microscope and the Occult in Early Modern Science
Catherine Wilson
Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 49, No. 1. (Jan. - Mar., 1988), pp. 85-108.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-5037%28198801%2F03%2949%3A1%3C85%3AVSAVST%3E2.0.CO%3B2-8
24
John Turberville Needham and the Generation of Living Organisms
Shirley A. Roe
Isis, Vol. 74, No. 2. (Jun., 1983), pp. 158-184.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-1753%28198306%2974%3A2%3C158%3AJTNATG%3E2.0.CO%3B2-G
29
A Summary of Some Late Observations upon the Generation, Composition, and
Decomposition of Animal and Vegetable Substances; Communicated in a Letter to Martin
Folkes Esq; President of the Royal Society, by Mr. Turbervill Needham, Fellow of the Same
Society
Turbervill Needham
Philosophical Transactions (1683-1775), Vol. 45. (1748), pp. 615-666.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0260-7085%281748%2945%3C615%3AASOSLO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-W
NOTE: The reference numbering from the original has been maintained in this citation list.
http://www.jstor.org
LINKED CITATIONS
- Page 2 of 2 -
33
Trembley's Polyp, La Mettrie, and Eighteenth-Century French Materialism
Aram Vartanian
Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 11, No. 3. (Jun., 1950), pp. 259-286.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-5037%28195006%2911%3A3%3C259%3ATPLMAE%3E2.0.CO%3B2-X
53
Microorganisms from the Gunflint Chert
Elso S. Barghoorn; Stanley A. Tyler
Science, New Series, Vol. 147, No. 3658. (Feb. 5, 1965), pp. 563-577.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0036-8075%2819650205%293%3A147%3A3658%3C563%3AMFTGC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-R
53
On the Culture of a Microorganism Similar to the Precambrian Microfossil Kakabekia
Umbellata Barghoorn in NH 3 -Rich Atmospheres
S. M. Siegel; Constance Giumarro
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Vol. 55, No. 2.
(Feb. 15, 1966), pp. 349-353.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0027-8424%2819660215%2955%3A2%3C349%3AOTCOAM%3E2.0.CO%3B2-L
53
Living Relative of the Microfossil Kakabekia
S. M. Siegel; Karen Roberts; Henry Nathan; Olive Daly
Science, New Series, Vol. 156, No. 3779. (Jun. 2, 1967), pp. 1231-1234.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0036-8075%2819670602%293%3A156%3A3779%3C1231%3ALROTMK%3E2.0.CO%3B2-U
54
On a Green Helical Organism and Its Motion
L. E. R. Picken
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, Vol. 129, No. 854. (Jun.
20, 1940), pp. 77-93.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0080-4649%2819400620%29129%3A854%3C77%3AOAGHOA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-K
NOTE: The reference numbering from the original has been maintained in this citation list.