In Show Me the Bone, Gowan Dawson, a literary and cultural historian who studies the intersection of literature and the history of science, traces the history of the eighteenth-century French anatomist and paleontologist Georges Cuvier's claim that he could, if given a single or partial bone from an extinct creature, determine the whole of the animal's skeleton and thus its beastly identity. Cuvier's anatomical principle of the correlation of parts, which he viewed as a fundamental scientific principle akin to those in the physical sciences, found its way into the work of naturalists and paleontologists in Britain and America and formed part of the bedrock (so to speak) of nineteenth-century paleontology. The claim also found life in popular periodicals and literature, grabbing the interest of a reading public. Yet the claim had its critics as well as supporters, as Dawson details in ten chapters taking the reader across the long nineteenth century. He demonstrates, backed by exhaustive documentation, that such a claim can become engrained not only in its relevant scientific circles but intertwined in the social, economic, political, and religious cultures of its time and beyond. “By focusing on a particular concept,” Dawson states, Show Me the Bone “combines detailed analysis with a sweeping historical narrative” to “present a picture of the world of nineteenth-century science” (10–11).
In the first chapter, Dawson describes the origin of Cuvierian correlation and its move across the Channel to England and Scotland during the Napoleonic Wars. Dawson likens Cuvier's desire for authority over comparative anatomy to Napoleon's authoritarian power, and he examines the way in which Cuvier expressed his claim in lectures, letters, and in print. Cuvier understood that having an audience, whether readers, students, or attendees of public lectures, was crucial to testing correlation claims. To show an audience a bone, claim its whole owner, then later determine the veracity of the claim based on new fossil discoveries, was to validate the scientific principle and thus raise his stature—and show its predictive powers, for Cuvier “endeavored to reform natural history and rid it of the hypothetical haziness of Buffon” (29). Cuvier's feats of correlation reached British audiences through printed sources despite the war. Dawson details various translations and reprints of Cuvier's works and how each supported the views of different audiences.
In chapter 2 Dawson shows how Cuvierian correlation attracted Anglican parties at Oxford and Cambridge for its applicability to Paleyite natural theology and scholars at the University of Edinburgh and London radical circles for its apparent relation to atheistic materialism. Among others, Dawson describes the paleontologist William Buckland's appropriation of correlation to further the argument from design and the surgeon William Lawrence's public lectures and his student John Abernathy's writings tying correlation to materialism. But others took on more nuanced views, such as biblical literalists who instead supported Lamarck's transformist views that they felt fell more in line with scripture. As Dawson notes, “the affiliations between particular scientific theories … and the diverse religious and political orientations that characterized early nineteenth-century Britain were considerably more complex than historians have hitherto acknowledged” (75).
The narrative then moves to Richard Owen and his well-publicized success at claiming the existence of a giant prehistoric bird in New Zealand based on a fragmentary leg bone. Whereas Owen claimed, for the rest of his career, that he had identified the animal via correlation from the single bone brought to him in London, the surgeon John Rule claimed credit for the identification, stating that when given the bone Owen was then told of its avian origin. The credit for the Dinornis's identification became a decades-long effort by Owen and others to suppress Rule's story. This chapter shows how a scientific authority could dishonestly control a narrative, manipulating both the scientific and periodical press in order to maintain his status as the “British Cuvier.”
In chapter 4 Dawson discusses similarities between paleontology and the increasingly popular method of publishing known as serialization. Paleontologists such as Owen now could separate their scientific papers into multiple parts, creating a sense of suspense in their reading circles as to whether a claim of identification in one journal issue would be confirmed in a later issue. Both literary authors and paleontologists fashioned whole products from separate parts. They invited readers to join them in building larger imaginative structures from fragments. Dawson provides multiple examples of serialization by novelists, several of whom adopted paleontological metaphors in their works (especially the use of the name Megatherium), and reads these novels alongside instances of “paleontology in parts” from Owen, his supporter William Broderip, and Louis Agassiz, who published his large work on fossil fish in installments. Such experiments with publication format provided yet another example of overlap between imaginative and scientific writing, if not also between fictional and scientific thinking.
In the next chapter Dawson looks at how correlation played in the creation of giant models of prehistoric creatures that were displayed at the Crystal Palace in the mid-1850s (again with Owen controlling its public perception), and in chapter 6 he describes anatomist Thomas Huxley's attack on Cuvierian correlation and his support from Darwin and Joseph Hooker. His attack, claiming that Owen and Cuvier possessed no special skills, sparked a dispute with paleontologist Hugh Falconer. Falconer, however, later came to Huxley's side, as did others who would eschew correlation in favor of “an empirical and secular approach to organic structure to which they could consent alongside the equally naturalistic mode of species transmutation that Darwin began privately revealing to them at precisely this same moment” (241). In chapters 7 and 8, Dawson continues with Huxley through the 1850s and 1860s, describing his failed attempts to influence nonspecialist audiences to disregard correlation and his dealings with new Cuvier supporters, such as the anthropologists Charles Blake and Robert Knox.
In the penultimate chapter Dawson traces correlation through “a variety of new approaches to animal structure during the 1860s,” and shows that Darwin's theory of evolution and an emphasis on finding missing links (such as the dinosaur-bird link Archaeopteryx) did not slow correlation down (336). While this chapter also shares how correlation found an enemy in Australia, the final chapter brings the reader to the United States, where new discoveries of prehistoric monsters in the American West provided new subjects for paleontologists for or against Cuvierian correlation.
Show Me the Bone will engage not only historians of science focusing on natural history, paleontology or the Victorian period, but those with an interest in how scientific knowledge moves geographically, the public perception of science through popular literature and the periodical press, and the use of science in fiction. Dawson's prose is a rewarding read, and his ability to maintain a fluid narrative throughout a work based on a single concept is testament to the concept's power over the scientific community and the public for more than a century that the story in Show Me the Bone covers.
