{"id":3441,"date":"2009-06-27T01:39:34","date_gmt":"2009-06-27T05:39:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/etherwave.wordpress.com\/?p=3441"},"modified":"2009-06-27T01:39:34","modified_gmt":"2009-06-27T05:39:34","slug":"hump-day-history-karl-alfred-von-zittel-and-his-geschichte-der-geologie-und-palaontologie-bis-ende-des-19-jahrhunderts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/2009\/06\/27\/hump-day-history-karl-alfred-von-zittel-and-his-geschichte-der-geologie-und-palaontologie-bis-ende-des-19-jahrhunderts\/","title":{"rendered":"Hump-Day History: Karl Alfred von Zittel and his History of Geology and Paleontology"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Karl Alfred von Zittel ( September 25<\/span>, 1839<\/span> – January 5<\/span>, 1904<\/span>) was a German paleontologist.\u00a0 Henry Fairfield Osborn, the geologist, zoologist, and eugenicist, who authored, in 1936 the two volume, T<\/em><\/em><\/span>he Proboscidea: A Monograph of the Discovery, Evolution, Migration and Extinction of the Mastodonts and Elephants of the World<\/em>, as well as Man Rises to Parnassus, <\/em>eulogized von Zittel as one of the most “distinguished advocates of paleontology.” It was no exaggeration, according to Osborn, to say that “he did more for the promotion and diffusion of paleontology than any other single man who lived during the nineteenth century.”<\/p>\n

Von Zittel, “while not a genius”, nonetheless possessed “untiring industry” as well as “critical capacity” ( <\/em>Science, <\/span>N. S., Vol. XIX. ) <\/em>What then were von Zittel’s achievements?\u00a0 First among them was the multi-volume Handbuch der Palaeontologie<\/em>, issued between 1876 and 1890.\u00a0 While the progress of paleontology in the nineteenth century was “prodigious,” according to Osborn, <\/span>it was nonetheless, “scattered through thousands of monographs and special papers,” a “hopeless labyrinth to the student.” Such was the state of knowledge, detail without system, that it was impossible for even the expert “to gain a perspective view of the whole subject.”\u00a0 Von Zittel’s Handbuch der Palaeontologie<\/em> was a feat of organization and collection.\u00a0 Added to this textual achievement was von Zittel’s apparently fantastic collection of natural historical specimens which he assembled at Alte Akademie of Munich.\u00a0 This collection, assembled from all over the world, illustrated the course of the\u00a0 ” evolution of plants and of invertebrate and vertebrate animals.”<\/span><\/p>\n

It was small wonder that Munich accordingly became “the <\/span>Mecca of paleontologists, young and old.”\u00a0 Such community was fostered by von\u00a0 Zittel due in large part to his “exceptionally charming and magnetic personality.”\u00a0 He\u00a0 was also exceptionally generous with both his time and his natural historical specimens.\u00a0 Von Zittel’s legacy and fame were secure as he could count among his students “all the younger American, most of the German, and many of the younger French and Austrian paleontologists.” <\/span><\/p>\n

There were two types of innovations in nineteenth century natural history, ethnology, palaeontology, and geology: those of system and those of methodology and instrumentation.\u00a0 Von Zittel fits within the scheme of systems innovation by functioning as an organizer of scientific labor and scientific personality. By arbitrating disputes and by cataloging and distilling scientific knowledge, von Zittel ensured that paleontology progressed\u00a0 closer to a store of\u00a0 systematic and useful knowledge, essential to its status as a science. Osborn’s eulogy was exemplary of the progressive sensibilities which accompanied the process of disciplinary formation in the United States and Europe in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the opening decades of the twentieth.<\/span><\/p>\n

Von Zittel, in his own writing (<\/span>Geschichte der Geologie und Pal\u00e4ontologie bis Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts<\/em>), underscored how the achievements of science were outside of the realm of politics, being a phenomenon of the advancement of civilization and the cosmopolitanism of theoretical reason. \u00a0 “All civilized nations shared in the development of the natural sciences,” von Zittel began, and the questions of most importance to the development of paleontology and geology “are in no way affected by political frontiers.”\u00a0 As importantly, the research and contribution of any one member of this vast intellectual community was only to be judged, Zittel believed,\u00a0 when held “in balance with the general position of research at the time and with the discoveries and advances made by other geologists irrespective of nationality.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Von Zittel’s view of the progress of the natural sciences was then historist, judging a contribution according to its emergence within a particular\u00a0 historical context.\u00a0 As importantly, von Zittel,\u00a0 embracing the form of positivism’s account of the sciences, but without political radicalism, divided the history of\u00a0 scientific knowledge into pre-critical and scientific phases, “ancient” and “modern.”\u00a0 The speculative era of science, though it contributed a number of “noteworthy observations,” mostly consisted of hypotheses and\u00a0 lasted roughly from the collapse of the Roman Empire to the second half of the eighteenth century.\u00a0 This era culminated with the cosmologies of Laplace, Cuvier, and Immanuel Kant. <\/span><\/p>\n

Under the rule of the former, science was defined by numerous competing cosmologies. \u00a0\u00a0 The natural sciences, according to von Zittel, had their roots in cosmological systems. \u00a0 Describing this growth and development, achieved before the critical break of a ‘heroic age,’ and the advent of a stricter grounding in empirical judgement, was far less problematic than accounting for the “greater and greater specialization and branching of science which took pace during the later half of the nineteenth century” (<\/span>History of geology and palaeontology to the end of the nineteenth century<\/em>, by Karl Alfred von Zittel; translated by Maria M. Ogilvie-Gordon. London, W. Scott, 1901, v-vi.) This specialization and the difficulties it presented for not only the growth of scientific knowledge but also for the presentation of a useful narrative history was the same encountered by William Whewell in his History of the Inductive Sciences <\/em>(1857.)\u00a0 With both authors, the essential problem was the elucidation\u00a0 of an overall synthetic framework that could serve as an organizing and predictive principle for the progress of the science.\u00a0 Without such, in both history and practice, science would become a disparate account of facts and curiosities, as there could\u00a0 be neither science without system nor history without narrative. \u00a0\u00a0 <\/em>
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Karl Alfred von Zittel ( September 25, 1839 – January 5, 1904) was a German paleontologist.\u00a0 Henry Fairfield Osborn, the geologist, zoologist, and eugenicist, who authored, in 1936 the two volume, The Proboscidea: A Monograph of the Discovery, Evolution, Migration and Extinction of the Mastodonts and Elephants of the World, as well as Man Rises<\/p>\n

Continue Reading… Hump-Day History: Karl Alfred von Zittel and his History of Geology and Paleontology<\/span>Continue Reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[429,893],"class_list":["post-3441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-ewp-primer","tag-karl-alfred-von-zittel"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3441"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3441\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}