• Home
   
• Unborn
  1300–1800s
• Development
  1770–1800
• Learning
  1800–1860
• Evolution
  1860–1930
• Remodelling
  1870s–1910
• Standards
  1900–1960s
• Monitoring
  1900–1980s
• Intervention
  1960s–2000s
• Visibility
   

• Introduction
• Anatomy of human embryos
• Setting standards
• Publishing in wax and print
• An embryological empire

An embryological empire

Once poorly understood, human development was now a model for describing a veritable empire of vertebrate embryos.

Anatomists in the generation after His used his methods to reinvestigate Haeckel’s questions. Evolutionary embryology was in trouble towards the end of the nineteenth century, while new experimental approaches made big waves. Historical accounts usually follow the experimentalists, but a great deal of ‘descriptive’ work not only continued, it also promoted technical and institutional innovation. Influential figures in the generation after His used his methods to reinvestigate Haeckel’s questions. They hoped that detailed studies would recover more complex evidence of evolution than Haeckel’s glib generalizations allowed.

The Freiburg anatomist Franz Keibel organized an international project to produce normal plates of various vertebrates plus tables showing individual variations. The authors collected biologically, geographically and socially diverse objects. Previously seen in very varied terms, they framed them all as embryos and subjected them to roughly equivalent analyses. Though no new synthesis emerged, the network helped embryology gain institutional independence and confirmed normal plates as essential laboratory aids.

Collecting lungfish embryos. Intrepid embryologists exploited imperial networks to bring home ‘missing links’, ancient species with ranges outside Europe and the United States. One of the most successful collecting trips was in the early 1890s by the German zoologist and Haeckel-student Richard Semon, to Australia, ‘land of the “living fossils”’. He was particularly keen to find the lungfish, Ceratodus forsteri, a link between fish and amphibians that now lived only in Queensland. This photograph shows Semon as a solitary explorer ‘in search of the Ceratodus spawn in self-made canoe’, but he acknowledged a great deal of settler and aboriginal help. From Richard Semon, Im australischen Busch und an den Küsten des Korallenmeeres. Reiseerlebnisse und Beobachtungen eines Naturforschers in Australien, Neu-Guinea und den Molukken, Leipzig: Engelmann, 1896, photograph facing p. 82. By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Collecting Australian lungfish embryos, early 1890s

Normal plate on the development of the South American lungfish. The Cambridge-trained zoologist John Graham Kerr travelled to the swamps of the Gran Chaco in Paraguay in search of the South American lungfish, Lepidosiren. Here he met the Paisiapto or ‘black-food people’ cooking their supper, and devoured ‘a plate of the cooked lungfish … “con mucho gusto”, for the flesh, rich with its deep orange red fat, was most tasty’. Kerr’s old Cambridge professor was scandalized by his report of the lungfish dinner, a ‘sacrilegious use of the sacred Lepidosiren’, but the Indians helped find abundant spawn. In this normal plate the regular arrangement heightens the sense of confident mastery of the whole of early development. Lithograph by Adolf Giltsch after drawings by A. Kirkpatrick Maxwell from John Graham Kerr, Normal plates on the development of Lepidosiren paradoxa and Protopterus annectens, Jena: Fischer, 1909, plate I. Original dimensions of border 26.3 x 20.0 cm. Normal plate on the development of the South American lungfish, 1909

© Tatjana Buklijas and Nick Hopwood 2008–2010. Last reviewed 2014.
An online exhibition developed by the University of Cambridge with support from the Wellcome Trust