Revue de la Maison Française d'Oxford Volume I, n° 2, 2003
CENTRE AND PERIPHERY REVISITED. THE STRUCTURES OF EUROPEAN SCIENCE, 1750-1914
Sous la direction de Robert Fox, Modern History Faculty-Oxford Colloque tenu les 26-27 avril 2002
HOW TO USE CENTRES IN THE PERIPHERY: ITALIAN GEOLOGY
IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Pietro Corsi
The question of centre and periphery in science, as with any similar, wide-ranging issue, requires a fair amount of specification, if we are not to risk of being meaningful at the price of being empty. Different disciplinary traditions in different times and places have modulated different perceptions of feeling to be “centre” or “periphery”. Often, the dichotomy is the effect of a sort of optical illusion, of historiography rather than of history. “Centres” are at times post-factum constructs, and by a sort of perverse automatism, everything else becomes “periphery”. One might even indulge in a simplistic sociology of contemporary academic professions, where working on “important”, “central” issues allows individuals or groups to marginalize potential competitors, accused of being concerned with “peripheral” issues. Whereas historians can legitimately work on the price of bread in a Parisian street during the early months of the French Revolution, an historian of science working on the presence of scientific quotations in the sermons of parish priests active in Welsh villages of the nineteenth century is still considered to be wasting his or her time.
If mobilised without precaution and care, the concept of “centre” can entail a cascade of conceptual anachronisms, chief among them the conditioned reflex of focussing on what “peripheries” were not doing that they should have done. This can even lead to the corollary that their actual practices and research priorities are of no concern, or of marginal if not deprecatory interest. Finally, the “centre-periphery” dichotomy surreptitiously re-introduces positivist if not a-historical conceptions of scientific practices, resulting in the denial of any relevance for the socio-cultural settings – and “social weight” – of scientific “centres” active in the “peripheries” (universities and museums, medical colleges, scientific societies or fair shows where itinerant lecturers have long demonstrated the wonders of progress for a modest fee). The implication is that the practice of science was and always has been a “search for truth”, where the competition to be the first to get at it automatically partitions the world into “centres” and “peripheries”. Those who got the answers emerge worthy of our attention; as for those who did not… well, why bother? There is of course a sense in which “centres” do matter. Exploding an atomic bomb automatically divides the political as well as the scientific world. But publishing On the origin of species did not do so, as we are increasingly aware; at least it did not do so in the sense of creating “centres” and “peripheries”. The few examples we have given amply illustrate some of the many meanings the couplet “centre-periphery” can assume, and the traps it holds.
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The study of a desperate “peripheral” case, Italian geology in the nineteenth century, will help us to give more substance to the general warnings sketched above. It will also allow us to see the ambiguity of the dichotomy at work, at different and apparently contradictory levels. Italian geologists of the nineteenth century knew they no longer counted among the major reference points of the discipline, as they had done for at least a century and a half. [1] Many of them remained convinced that they were not on the periphery at all. They constantly referred to, or boasted of, recognition from “centres” for the purposes of internal
consumption: for fighting enemies, securing funds, claiming a place of distinction within local social, cultural or even political settings. Briefly to anticipate my conclusions, I shall argue that whereas one might formulate a satisfactory working definition of “centres” and
“peripheries”, one should at the same time be careful to avoid the risk of anachronism that comes from imputing to individuals (and scientific institutions) of the nineteenth century later assessments of the distribution of authority and legitimacy within European or Western science. Though everyone – or almost everyone – knew where innovative research was being conducted, it did not necessarily follow that a large majority of people working in a given discipline in the “peripheries” felt the need to conform to, imitate, follow or even to get in touch with the “centres”.
Let me start with a classic, albeit extremely rapid narrative of Italian geology in the nineteenth century, a subject that has attracted growing scholarly interest in the last decade or so. It is well known that Italian geology from the late seventeenth century through to the first two decades of the nineteenth century occupied a prominent position within the citation index of the time. Antonio Vallisneri (1661–1730), Anton Lazzaro Moro (1768–1764), Giovanni Arduino (1714–1795), Lazzaro Spallanzani (1729–1799), Alberto Fortis (1741–1803), Scipione Breislack (1748–1826), down to Giuseppe Marzari Pencati (1779–1836) and Giovanni Battista Brocchi (1772–1826), an author who found his way into Charles Darwin's notebooks for his theory of species senescence, were household names in European natural history. [2] Brocchi's historical sketch of the development of the discipline, heavily biased towards Italian contributions to the field, persuaded Lyell – who relied on it in his Principles of Geology – to declare geology “an Italian science”. [3] Recent monographs and articles published by Luca Ciancio and Ezio Vaccari have substantiated, I venture to say, Brocchi's bias. In particular, Ciancio has argued that the theoretical geology that was developed in the Venetian region during the 1760s and 1770s, with the diplomat, antiquarian and amateur naturalist John Strange acting as intermediary, was probably a leading influence on Hutton's cyclical concept of earth history and of the role of pressure and heat in shaping the surface of the globe. [4] Through Alberto Fortis, this same tradition was in fruitful dialogue with French contemporary “vulcanists”, Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond in particular. Breislack, Marzari Pencati, and Brocchi gallantly opposed the early advances of catastrophism and the theory of mountain formation through sudden massive elevations of the earth's crust, a theory then fashioned by Leopold von Buch (1774–1853) and Elie de Beaumont (1798–1874) , and cautiously endorsed by Georges Cuvier. Yet the fall of the Napoleonic regime caused
institutional havoc in Italy; the few paid jobs in geology and mineralogy were abolished, and locally reinstated princes often shared the common view that too much attention had been paid to scientific pursuits, to the detriment of piety and social order. [5] Whatever the general, historical and political reasons, one conclusion can hardly be disputed: by the middle of the nineteenth century geology was anything but an Italian science.
It would be wrong to apply a simplistic “decline” model to describe Italian geology and geology-related disciplines – palaeontology in particular – during the nineteenth century. Local traditions of collecting and describing fossils or studying particularly dramatic features of Italian geomorphological and geodynamical phenomena (think of the volcanoes of Etna and Vesuvius, for example) remained strong and continued to appeal to distinguished representatives of European earth and natural sciences. On 9 September 1834, to quote just one among scores of such instances, Elie de Beaumont and Leopold von Buch visited in Naples the young student of Vesuvius Leopoldo Pilla (1805–1848) and admired his collection of lava samples and volcanic rocks. [6] Pilla, who was made to understand where the wind was blowing, abandoned his uniformitarian approach to the formation of volcanic cones through successive lava flows and embraced the doctrine of “cratères de soulèvement”
fiercely and dogmatically advanced by his distinguished guests. He was rewarded, a few years later in 1841, with the support that was necessary for him to secure the chair of geology at Pisa University . Charles Lyell relied on his friends and colleagues in Naples and Catania to exploit fossil shells found in recently elevated volcanic terrain, to counteract the catastrophist conclusions that his German and French critics drew from the study of Italian volcanoes. Later in the century, Swiss, German, English and French luminaries of the discipline repeatedly visited Italian museums and private collections, took an active part in the “Congressi” of Italian scientists that started in 1839, and fought harsh geological battles on the very mountains that between 1915 and 1918 witnessed the carnage of the First World War. [7] Even though the Italian contribution to the war was far from negligible, its
contribution to the development of geological doctrines that took the Alps as their privileged testing ground certainly was.
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During the nineteenth century, Italian geologists knew what was going on in the European “centres” of geological research and innovation; they corresponded with their colleagues, and often guided them in excursions to particularly significant sites. Nevertheless, their
contribution to European geological debates was minimal, bordering on the insignificant. This did not prevent acrimonious local debates on how to interpret local stratigraphical puzzles – and there was, and there still is, no lack of these. In these debates, the great names of
European geology were often called upon to confirm, endorse, prize or indeed refute the thesis proposed by one contender, thereby pouring scorn on adversaries accused of provincialism and of defending old-fashioned views. Translations of foreign books or memoirs closely followed local political concerns and agendas and often occurred at crucial moments of heightened scientific rivalry and open confrontation.
In 1834 Paolo Savi (1798–1871) , professor of zoology at the University of Pisa, translated one of Louis-Constant Prévost's (1787–1856) contributions to the Dictionnaire classique d'histoire naturell e edited by Jean-Baptiste-Geneniève-Marcellin Bory de Saint-Vincent (1778–1846). [8] The article selected for translation was designed to provide a guide to geological nomenclature and to enhance Prévost's anti-catastrophist views. Savi shared his colleague's theoretical leanings, and sided with the French geologist in what at the time was an unpopular critique of de Beaumont and von Buch. The word “translation” is however inappropriate: Savi interspersed the Italian rendering of the French text with long personal comments in inverted commas, to signify, he informed the reader, that these paragraphs were his own contribution to the issues the article was dwelling upon. He also stressed that he could not be considered a mere follower of Prévost, for the simple reason that his own research had provided him with a class of facts that advanced contemporary understanding of geological
phenomena. His forte was the theory of metamorphosis. Drawing on the tradition of Italian geological doctrines alluded to above, and studied by Luca Ciancio, Savi maintained that fire – heathland, to be precise – played a far greater role than water in shaping the earth's crust. Materials slowly deposited at the bottom of the sea were subjected in the course of countless ages to tremendous pressure, coupled with the heath emanating from the central core of the earth, where temperature – again generated by pressure – reached unimaginable levels. Granite and crystalline rocks were simply the result of the transformation – metamorphosis – that pressure and heath induced in strata originating through deposition.
The greatest part of the so called Primary Rocks [he wrote] or primitives or primordial, are not considered by us as substances pre-dating the formation of sedimentary rocks, nor as sui generis substances, but as the result of the more or less perfect alteration of sedimentary rocks, brought about by the concurrent action of all the active principles emanating from the bowels of the earth, such as caloric, the electric fluids, acids, metallic vapours, and so on.[9] Savi distanced himself from Abraham Gottlob Werner as well as from James Hutton. He agreed with Prévost that fossils could never be that important in determining the chronology of rock formations, since the “baking” that strata were subjected to destroyed all traces of life in extremely thick strata, until then wrongly taken to be very ancient precisely because they were crystalline and azoic. In any case, he warned, geologists should be wary of general theories. Sound geology had to keep its feet on the ground, or more precisely beneath it. To understand a region, the toil of a lifetime was sometimes insufficient. This was particularly true of Tuscany , where huge crystalline formations and calcareous valleys, extinct volcanoes and active hot springs , mineral ores and the repeated subsidence and elevation of the coast-line turned every square mile into a puzzle. In short, his geology was up-to-date, it relied on an undisputed, if controversial international authority, but it was autonomous and original: true geology could never be but local, in spite of individual pretences to dominate the whole of the earth's crust and the minds of its students.
In 1841, a complex series of events that I have described elsewhere brought the Neapolitan Lepoldo Pilla to Pisa. [10] As we have seen, the southern mineralogist and geologist (a professional of hypochondriac lamentations in a perennial search for recognition) had placed himself under the protection of de Beaumont and Von Buch and given up earlier views not dissimilar to those defended by Savi. [11] Thanks to his new patrons, Pilla was able to obtain letters of recommendation, addressed to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, from Alexander von Humboldt and Louis Arago, and to secure the well-paid job at Pisa , a university that Leopold II aspired to modernise.
Savi could not stand Pilla: personally, socially, ideologically, theoretically. At the human and social level, Savi was austere to the verge of dullness, rich and well established in the
arcadian world of the Tuscan provinces, with plentiful introductions at court, where the Grand Duke had hoped that the zoologist-turned-geologist (probably at Leopold's request) could unveil the treasures hidden under the mountains and hills of his domains. By the end of the 1830s, the decision was taken to look for another geologist, more experienced in the search for coal and minerals, and Pilla appeared to fit the job description. Savi opted for the chair of zoology, and gave up geology: at least, the chair, not the field, as the Neapolitan new
professor soon discovered. Pilla was poor, exuberant, prone to flights of imagination fired by unlimited reserves of a baroque rhetoric that Savi could not tolerate. Pilla even dared to apply the very geological doctrines to which Savi was opposed to the explanation of features of Tuscan geology that Savi had successfully explained otherwise – or so he thought. [12] Pilla
actively canvassed and obtained the support of French and German colleagues to legitimise his views. In the early 1840s he successfully presented his views to leading members of the Société Géologique de France and obtained the support of the society's influential Bulletin. [13] Early in 1848, during one of Sir Roderick Impey Murchison's visits to Italy , he interested the celebrated British geologist in his chronology of Tuscan formations: not that Murchison, or de Beaumont, or von Buch, for that matter, completely agreed with him. They did, however, declare that Pilla was working on quite interesting new ideas capable of throwing new light on the complex Tuscan stratigraphy. [14] Savi could not hide his
frustration, and he submitted Pilla to all sorts of social and theoretical harassment, to the point that the Neapolitan “lost the favour” of the Grand Duke. [15] To counteract his colleague's manoeuvres, Pilla planned in detail a long journey to the “centres” of European geology: London, Paris, Brussels, and Vienna .
Luckily for Savi, and unfortunately for Pilla, political events intervened, patriotic feelings were aroused, and students and teachers at Pisa formed battalions ready to march against the Austrian armies gathered in the Northeast of the peninsula. Pilla forgot his hypochondria, gave inflammatory speeches to crowds of pupils, enjoyed the camaraderie of night watches, and in May 1848 lost his life on the battlefield of Curtatone at the head of a battalion of students taking part in the second Italian war of independence from Austria . [16] In the hundreds of manuscript pages and letters preserved in the archives of the Department of Geology and the University Library at Pisa , as well as in the thousands of pages published by Savi's pupils up to the 1880s, the name of Pilla is mentioned no more than ten times. [17] Of these, five appear in the second and last translation that Savi oversaw, of Murchison's memoir on the geological structure of the Alps , the Apennines and the Carpathians, first published in 1849. [18] As is well known, Murchison had no sympathy (to say the least) for Lyell's
uniformitarianism – towards which the Pisa geologists were increasingly inclined after the death of Pilla – nor for Constant Prévost, Savi's first theoretical mentor. Yet, to Savi's delight, a few paragraphs of the memoir by his English colleague were devoted to the refutation of Pilla's stratigraphical doctrines. [19] Murchison paid homage to the recently deceased geologist and patriot (though, personally, he was not inclined to condone insurrection and independence movements of any kind). Human feelings, however, could not make up for Pilla's mistakes: the good man was wrong. This time, Savi did not dare to interpolate
Murchison's text. Instead, he wrote an appendix, longer than the memoir that his new friend Giuseppe Meneghini, Pilla's successor in the geology chair, had translated. Punctiliously summing up the results achieved in more than twenty years of work on “his” Tuscany, he made it clear that he had not waited for Murchison to get things right. Indeed, as he pointed out in a rather abrupt though typical aside, Murchison had came to the correct conclusion only thanks to the fortuitous discovery of a single fossil, during his only visit to the contentious strata: sheer luck, as the painstaking and tedious appendix demonstrated in more than necessary detail. [20]
Savi's use or misuse of knowledge produced by “centres” – Paris or London , Berlin or Vienna – was therefore highly opportunistic, being dictated by local academic or scientific politics more than by the wish to take part in an international debate. In his view, there were no centres of production of knowledge in geology, and there could never be. Geology was intrinsically, epistemologically and socially local – where the word “social” simply means that you have to know who is a reliable collector and who is not, who had consumed his shoes on the field and who was indulging in literary fantasies. Was the initial sympathy that
Being a member of the local social élite also made it easier to secure the right information at the right moment, so avoiding the inevitable mistakes that resulted from appealing to one's wits and pet theories in matters requiring observation and the careful comparison of data. In August 1844, a violent earthquake caused extensive damage and loss of life in Tuscany . Pilla rushed into print with a pamphlet, the title page of which imitated in broken typographic characters the effects of an earthquake, in order to forward his favoured theory of the origin and cause of the phenomenon, based on a comparison between atmospheric phenomena and “underground meteorology”. He even speculated that in the near future a new volcano might emerge in the prosperous Valdichiana region. The pamphlet sold almost two thousand copies, and a second edition was soon called for. [21] Savi felt he had to answer, and he did so in his own style, theoretical and social. He wrote a questionnaire to almost 200 landowners, doctors, pharmacists and schoolteachers in the areas hit by the earthquake, ordered the information received, followed the trajectory of the seism village after village, and warned against
believing in people who were irresponsibly prophesying the eruption of new volcanoes simply to promote sales. Once again, geology could not be but local. Geological phenomena had occurred and were occurring in a given territory; they were witnessed and interpreted by people of variable reliability, and conclusions could be drawn only after carefully contrasting testimony with previously acquired knowledge: These were tasks that only Savi, the
landowner who knew the terrain, stone by stone and witness by witness, was able to perform. [22]
In his life, Savi travelled no more than one year in all, when young, accompanying his Prince, who wanted to have geology taught at his University, mines improved, and natural resources found and exploited. Mines in Saxony , Werner's Academy in Freiburg , the Muséum
d'histoire naturelle in Paris were all on the itinerary. [23] Savi could read French and German with difficulty, but he had no familiarity with the English language. After Pilla's death in 1848, until his own, in 1871, he wrote little on geology, leaving the task of proving the soundness of his stratigraphy to Meneghini, Pilla's successor.
Palaeontology was then becoming increasingly crucial to geological investigations, and was creating serious problems for catastrophists in general and in particular for supporters of the theory of elevations, who invoked the sudden subsidence of vast masses of land and the equally sudden elimination of floras and faunas. They predicted that palaeontology was bound to provide evidence of abrupt gaps in the succession of faunas and floras. Mounting evidence was pointing to a gradual succession of forms, critics argued, over long periods of time. Sudden, massive extinctions appeared local at best: at worst, they were a gross blunder. Hence the accurate determination of fossil forms was essential for the establishment of the relative age of strata. Lithologically and structurally different strata did not necessarily belong to different ages, whereas different faunas did. The lithological features of strata were not therefore always a good indication of their antiquity or modernity. As a paradoxical consequence, one did not need to visit endless localities to gain a rather precise idea of the chronology of a formation, since reliable information on the fossils that were preserved there was all that one needed. [24] There was a crucial problem in this, however: it became
increasingly necessary to possess large collections of specimens and books, if one wanted to identify a fossil with reasonable accuracy, or to travel to where libraries and museums existed and stored information sufficient to one's needs.
This is what Igino Cocchi (1827–1913), the first graduate student of Giuseppe Meneghini, immediately understood when arriving in Paris for his first (two-year) stay in July 1854. Alcide d'Orbigny (1802–1857), the authoritarian and unpopular would-be master of French palaeontology, did not mince words with the young Italian colleague:
He [d'Orbigny] told me that in Italy we do not have enough books, and therefore
palaeontology could not be that developed; to the extent that he takes no account of our identifications if he does not see the specimens for himself, or drawings of them, though even the ones executed with utmost care are often mistaken. [25]
Cocchi spoke to d'Orbigny of his teacher Meneghini, and the French master ironically paid homage to the results achieved by his Italian colleague in the study of algae; a book by Meneghini on this subject had just been published by the Ray Society in London . [26] Cocchi became acquainted with all the top naturalists, palaeontologist and geologists active in Paris or visiting institutions there in the middle decades of the nineteenth century: Gérard-Paul Deshays (1795–1875), pupil of Lamarck; the infernal couple of Pierre Armand Dufrenoy (1792–1857) and de Beaumont, masters of geological appointments and theories; the
d'Orbigny brothers, Charles (1806–1876) and Alcide; Claude-Emile Bayle (1819–1897); Jules Haime (1824–1856); Hardouin Michelin (1786–1867); Franz von Hauer (1822–1899);
Murchison's French travel-companion Edouard de Verneuil (1805–1873), and so on.
Cocchi's letters to his teachers in Pisa offer a unique and totally neglected insight into French natural history and the institutional allegiances of the time, as well as into the predicament of a proud young Italian naturalist confronted with the arrogant display of mépris by his Parisian colleagues. D'Orbigny again, in the role of torturer:
I do not know whether you [Meneghini] know a little book by Carlo Montagna, from Naples, on a deposit of fossil coal in Agnana; I saw it at d'Orbigny's, but we could not understand what formation he was referring to; he has described a lot of ammonites terebratulae, but he gives a new name to each new specimen, and we could not make out what he was saying. D'Orbigny made fun of the work, and said he did not know what to do with it; I felt sorry for that poor man who, deprived of the three essential tools, Books, Collections and Money, had undertaken to publish a work of that nature only for the love of science. [27]
To this, d'Orbigny added insult to injury by emphatically enunciating his rule of thumb, erected into universal law: out of twenty species described in any country as new, he said, sixteen at least are well known to naturalists, and unknown only to the author of the local monograph.
Cocchi had formed very clear ideas on what needed to be done in order to gain recognition in Paris . Not to quote at length, I will only sum up the advice he gave to his Pisa teachers and to Italian geologists and palaeontologists in general: get more money, buy collections, persuade agents to follow the book and specimen trade, come often to Paris, visit people, be visible, publish in French, show your specimens personally to visitors, and engage them in private conversation. [28] Paris, no doubt, was to Cocchi a centre, and his letters show a remarkable perception of the personal, social, economical, and epistemological requirements to be a centre. In the particular case of geology, a centre was where collections and tradesmen, museums and curators, libraries and booksellers were. Even the most travelled geologist had to go back to the centre to make sense of his findings. The great Joachim Barrande (1799– 1883), whom Cocchi equated with Dante for his power of penetration and elegance of style,
spent several months directing excavations of Silurian fossils in Bohemia, but went back to Paris for an equal amount of time each year to compare, discuss, determine, publish, and convince. [29]
Paris was a centre, therefore, and Cocchi did not doubt this self-evident fact. Yet before going back to Tuscany at the end of 1856, he decided to visit London. He had already met several British luminaries in Paris , corresponded with them and read their work. But he could never have imagined what he saw:
To start with, if I had to tell you just something about all the marvels stored at the British Museum, I will never come to the end of my letter: I have seen with great pleasure the leg of the Didus ineptus, closely resembling the leg of a cock, though much bigger; the beautiful skeleton of the digging bird of New Zealand, and countless other marvels within the
vertebrates. My dear professor, we should do better to change job, when from these heights we plunge into our misery: really one's spirits sink, and one is gripped by dismay when one is forced to make comparisons.
Meneghini was working at the time, as he did for the rest of his long career, on the Silurian fossils of Sardinia , which were sent to him by geologists and fossils-hunters active on the island – no more than three people in all. Cocchi generously provided his teacher with all sorts of advice, corrected his mistakes, and tutored him on how to write scientific papers that could be read in Paris or London : in doing so, he made himself far from popular in Pisa and almost risked being thrown out even before he came back.
By now, I hope, the point is abundantly clear. In the natural sciences, large collections and the political and social economy of their constitution, preservation and study constituted a pole of attraction and of real authority, a centre, if you like. It had nothing or little to do with the intellectual stamina of the researcher. It had to do with the body of objects and tools to which the intellectual capacity in question was applied.
The fact that I have acknowledged the presence of “centres” in European natural history in the nineteenth century does not mean that I believe the perspective helps us to understand the actual geographical articulations of the various natural history disciplines – geology and palaeontology in particular – at the time. Indeed, let us briefly see how Italian naturalists reacted to the depressing comparisons in which Cocchi was inviting them to engage. They simply did not do anything about it; nor did Cocchi himself, when it was his turn to act.
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A further revealing instance of the complex relationship between centre and periphery deserves attention. This time, I shall briefly survey the case of a young Italian practitioner of geology blessed by good luck, who started his career by publishing in one of the most prestigious geological journal of the time. The practitioner in question was Gaetano Giorgio Gemmellaro (1832–1904), the son of a remarkable dynasty of Sicilian naturalists and freemasons that maintained close, if sporadic contacts with England from the early years of the nineteenth century. Indeed, Gaetano Giorgio's father, Carlo, had attended Sir Humphry Davy's lectures on the chemistry of volcanoes at the Royal Institution and had served as physician on board British ships during the Napoleonic wars. Carlo had helped Charles Lyell explore Etna during the latter's first visit to the island, in 1827. Back in Sicily in 1857, Lyell had relied on the young Gaetano Giorgio for his excursions and for checking lava flows:
Carlo had felt too old for the honour of accompanying the distinguished guest. Lyell liked Carlo's son and appreciated his proficiency in geology and palaeontology, to the point that Mrs Lyell translated two memoirs by Gaetano Giorgio Gemmellaro, one on the rate of flow on volcanic slopes, a point that at the time was a subject of debate hotter than the object under investigation, and the other on the very Lyellian theme of coastline subsidence and elevation. [30] Lyell persuaded the Geological Survey to ask Gemmellaro to start working on the geological map of the Canary Islands , paid for by the British Government. It was May 1860: on his way to Marseille to embark for Tenerife, Gemmellaro learned of Garibaldi's landing in Palermo . He rushed back to town, his father and brother arranged for him to receive a
certificate of participation in the uprising that helped Garibaldi to take the town, and he was duly rewarded, a few months later, with the appointment to the chair of geology at the University of Palermo. I do not wish for a moment to question the fact that the Geological Society of London was one of the centres of European geology at the time (though it was not the only one, despite what the flourishing British historiography of geology, helped by the almost total absence of competitors, would have us believe); nor did Gemmellaro question it. But he did not pursue his happy early contacts with London and the Geological Society, and he never published a line outside Italy . The vast majority of his production – of excellent quality, by the way – appeared in the bulletin of the Society for Natural and Economic
Sciences of Palermo (Bullettino della Società di Scienze Naturali ed Economiche di Palermo). It consisted of list after list of the fossils of Sicily , compared with similar faunas of the Dolomites, the Urals, Texas. There was never a comment, a theoretical aside, a sentence on what Gemmellaro thought of Darwin, Haeckel, or Gaudry, all authors he read and discussed with his pupils, but never wrote about. Son of a well-known Sicilian geologist, nephew of Mario, who had been a powerful member of the Scottish freemasonry and explorer of Etna, Gaetano Giorgio's horizon of ambition was proudly limited to his own island. He had access to journals, kept exchanging offprints with colleagues all over the world, and yet, with the exception of the trip to Marseille in 1860, never travelled further than the Italian towns where, rather rarely, he attended the annual meetings of the Italian Geological Society.
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Let's go back to Cocchi, and the Pisa school of geology for our conclusions. Pupils of Meneghini occupied almost all the important chairs of geology in Italy. In spite of his
mastering several languages, the complimentary visits that foreign colleagues paid to him, the honours that were bestowed on him at the Second International Geological Congress
organised in Bologna in 1881 by Giovanni Capellini (1833–1922) , his unbearably arrogant and ambitious pupil, Meneghini never abandoned his style of work. No event was important enough, no visit distinguished enough to persuade him to give up the sacrosanct three-month holiday attending his estates in the Colli Euganei, near Padua . Edward Seuss tried to see him in Pisa and warned of his arrival, but Meneghini could not be bothered. He knew that you could not work on Silurian faunas without having on your shelves (you could not have on your table all eighteen volumes at one time) Barrande's epoch-making monographs on Silurian fossils of Bohemia. Though he could manage the expense, Meneghini did not buy them; he only acquired the set in the late 1870s, paid for by the Geological Survey of Italy twenty years after Cocchi had alerted him to the crucial importance of the work of the “Dante of palaeontology” for the determination and identification of Silurian fossils.
Meneghini was an impoverished Venetian aristocrat whom a convenient marriage in 1861 restored to considerable wealth. He was professor of geology in a very distinguished
one of the best universities of the new Kingdom of Italy . Naturalistic pursuits were his leisure, his otium. Citation indexes did not bother him, first because they did not exist at that time, and secondly because he had nothing to do with centres and peripheries. The fact that someone was wealthier than he was did not detract from his status as a gentleman; if Parisian or London collections were richer than the ones piled up in boxes in his little museum, that was a fact of life that in no way impinged upon his status, authority, credibility. And if foreign authorities wanted to consult his collection, then for that moment he became a centre in himself, and luminaries had better watch their manners if they wanted to see and handle the beautiful trilobites he proudly owned. In his town, Pisa , and in his country, Tuscany and Italy, he was a centre, both in prestige and in authority. Everyone in Pisa knew he was a distinguished scientist. He received letters from all over the world. Though not as famous as his pupil Capellini, who once boasted of having received at his Museum in Bologna a
telegram from Paris, simply addressed “Capellini, Professor of Geology, Italy”, letters to him were often labelled “Professor Meneghini – Pisa”. To be present on the international scene was not a preoccupation he shared with today's scientists, even though the dynamics and rhetoric of international exchanges in present-day academia are not, albeit in different circumstances, all that different. His activity ranged from commissions to inspect mines and advise prospectors, to politically sensitive tasks such as protecting Tuscan agricultural interests from Piedmontese economists, financiers and geologists arguing for the need for a geological map of the country, which they saw as the pre-requisite to attract investments and enhance industry and commerce. [31] A seat in the Upper House was his secret ambition, and he obtained one, though late in life. The Pisa Museum, the city council, the speeches and processions at the opening of the academic year, the popular public lectures, the presidency of ministerial committees and of the Tuscan Society of Natural History that he established in 1874, the moderate patriotism he taught his pupils, the cautious openness to novelty (he bought the first edition of the Origin of Species but only admitted in public that it was an interesting work in 1881), the lengthy discussions with his pupils accompanying the decades-long gestation of his articles… there was no need to bother about centres, when you occupied the centre of a central Italian University that Pisa was or was considered to be.
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[1] R. PORTER, The Making of Geology. Earth Science in Britain, 1660–1815, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1977; M.T. GREENE, Geology in the Nineteenth Century. Changing Views of a Changing World, Ithaca NY and London, Cornell University Press, 1982; J. A. SECORD, “The Geological Survey of Great Britain as a research school, 1839– 1855”, History of Science, 24, 1986, pp. 223–75; D. R. OLDROYD, Thinking about the Earth. A History of Ideas in Geology, London, Athlone and Cambridge, MA, Harvard
University Press, 1996; S. J. KNELL, The Culture of English Geology, 1815–1851. A Science Revealed through its Collecting, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2000.
[2] E. VACCARI, Giovanni Arduino (1714–1795). Il contributo di uno scienziato veneto al dibattito settecentesco sulle scienze della Terra, “Biblioteca di Nuncius”, Florence ,
L.S. Olschki, 1993; id. (ed.), Le scienze della Terra nel Veneto dell'Ottocento, Atti del Quinto Seminario di Storia delle Scienze e delle Tecniche nell'Ottocento Veneto. Venezia, 20 e 21 ottobre 1995, Venice, Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 1998, and “Cultura
scientifico-naturalistica ed esplorazione del territorio: Giovanni Arduino e Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti”, in G. BARSANTI, V. BECAGLI and R. PASTA (eds), La politica della scienza. Toscana e Stati Italiani nel tardo Settecento , Florence, Leo S. Olschki Editore, 1996, pp. 243–63; id. , “Wernerian Geognosy and Italian Vulcanists”, in H. ALBRECHT and
R. LADWIG (eds), Abraham Gottlob Werner und die Begründung der Geowissenschaften, Ausgewählte Vorträge des Internationalen Werner-Symposiums vom 19. bis 24. September 1999, Freiberg, Freiberger Forschungshefte, D 207 Montan und Technikgeschichte, 2002, pp. XXI–XXX; D. KOHN, “Theories to work by: rejected theories, reproduction, and Darwin 's path to natural selection”, in Studies in History of Biology , 4, 1980, pp. 67–170.
[3] P. J. McCARTNEY, “Charles Lyell and G.B. Brocchi: a study in comparative historiography”, in The British Journal for the History of Science , 9, 1976, pp. 175–89. [4] L. CIANCIO, Autopsie della terra. Illuminismo e geologia in Alberto Fortis (1741–1803) , Florence, L. S. Olschki, 1995; id. , “Alberto Fortis and the study of extinct volcanoes of Veneto (1765–1778)”, in Rocks, Fossils and History , G. GIGLIA, C. MACCAGNI,
N. MORELLO (eds), Florence, Festina Lente, 1996, pp. 111–28; id., “The correspondence of a virtuoso of the late Enlightenment: John Strange and the relationship between British and Italian naturalists”, Archives of Natural History , 22 (1), 1995, pp. 119–29.
[5] G. BARSANTI, et al. , n. 2; P. CORSI, “Le scienze naturali in Italia prima e dopo
l'Unità”, in R. SIMILI (ed.), Ricerca e istituzioni scientifiche in Italia, Bari, Laterza, 1998, pp. 28–42.
[6] L. PILLA, Notizie storiche della mia vita quotidiana a cominciare dal Imo Gennaro 1830 in poi, ed. M. DISCENZA, Venafro, Edizioni Vitamar, 1996, pp. 202–4 and original ms. at the date, Archivio Pilla, The Library, Pisa University. The edited version contains several misreadings, particularly disturbing in the case of the names of Italian and foreign scientists. For instance, on p. 418, “Professor Bonsen di Marburgo” is obviously Robert Wilhelm Bunsen (1811–1899). The German geologist Hermann Wilhelm Abich (1806–1886)
introduced Pilla to the two distinguished visitors on September 8th, and the visit took place on the 9th.
[7] G. PANCALDI (ed.), I congressi degli scienziati italiani nell'età del positivismo, Bologna, CLUEB, 1983; E. GARIN , “Il Congresso Pisano degli scienziati Italiani del 1839”, in
Giornale Critico della Filosofia Italiana , 6th ser., 10, 1991, pp. 280–92.
[8] On Bory de Saint-Vincent and the complex reasons of the considerable contemporary success of his Dictionnaire, see P. CORSI, Lamarck . Genèse et enjeux du transformisme 1770–1830 , Paris, Éditions du CNRS, 2001.
[9] P. SAVI, Sulla scorza del globo terrestre e sul modo di studiarla , Pisa, Fratelli Nistri e C., 1834, p. 4 and pp. 22–3 : «Fino a questi ultimi tempi si è data un importanza sì grande ai fossili da fondare sulla loro presenza o mancanza, e sulla loro natura, quasi tutti i raziocinj creduti più concludenti per determinare le varie epoche delle formazioni, ed anche la natura
delle formazioni medesime. Ma il Sig. Prevost non pensa dar loro un'importanza tanto grande, e noi stessi siam di questo parere.» ; P. SAVI, Studi geologici sulla Toscana , Pisa, Fratelli Nistri, 1833; BOUÉ, “Résumé des progrès de la géologie pendant l'année 1832”, Bulletin de la Société Géologique de France , 3, 1833, p. xliii.
[10] P. CORSI, “La scuola geologica Pisana”, in Storia dell'Università di Pisa, Pisa, Giardini Editore, 2001, 3 rd part of vol. 2, pp. 889–927.
[11] L. PILLA, “Alcune osservazioni circa la dottrina delle cause geologiche attuali esposta dal Sig. Lyell ne' suoi ultimi Principii di Geologia”, in Museo di letteratura e di filosofia , 9, 1846, pp. 265–80 and 12, 1847, pp. 77–108, 305–37.
[12] L. PILLA, Saggio Comparativo dei terreni che compongono il suolo d'Italia, Pisa, Fratelli Nistri, 1845, and Distinzione del Terreno Etrurio tra' piani secondari del Mezzogiorno di Europa , Pisa, Rocco Vannucchi, 1846.
[13] L. PILLA, “Note de M. L. Pilla indiquant le contenu de son ouvrage sur la richesse minérale de la Toscane”, Bulletin de la Société Géologique de France, new ser. 3, 1845–1846, pp. 444–49; H. COQUAND, “Sur les terrains tertiaries de la Toscane”, Bulletin de la Société Géologique de France , n.s., 1,1844, pp. 421–36, “Notes sur les terrains tertiaries de la Toscane”, Ibid. , n.s., 2, 1845, pp. 58–60, and “Sur les terrains stratifiés de la Toscane”, Ibid. , n.s., 2, 1845, pp. 155–97. Henri Coquand (1813–1881) was then working in Tuscany, and had become Pilla's good friend. L. PILLA, “Sur la vraie position géologique du terrain du
Macigno en Italie”, Comptes Rendus de l'Académie Royale des sciences, 20, 1845, pp. 97– 102.
[14] R. I. Murchison to L. Pilla, 8 January 1848, Pilla Correspondence, The Library, Pisa University , letter n. 639.
[15] P. SAVI, Sulla costituzione geologica dei Monti Pisani, Pisa, Rocco Vannucchi, 1846. [16] G. MONSAGRATI, “Vita, passioni e morte di Leopoldo Pilla venafrano”, in Leopoldo Pilla. Scienziato e Martire del Risorgimento , ed. by Amministrazione Comunale di Venafro, Venafro, Istituto Molisano di Studi e Ricerche, n.p., 1992, pp. 16–51.
[17] G. MENEGHINI, Della Scuola geologica di Paolo Savi, Discorso letto il 4 novembre 1881 a prolusione degli studi nella R. Università di Pisa, Pisa, T. Nistri, 1881, pp. i–xlvi, never mentions his predecessor. G. STEFANINI, “La Scuola di Pisa e i progressi della geologia”, Annali delle Università Toscane , 13, 1930, pp. 129–51; P. CORSI, “The Pisa School of Geology of the 19th Century: an Exercise in Interpretation”, in Palaeontographia Italica , 82, 1995, pp. iii–viii. G. Meneghini, Correspondence, Archivio Meneghini,
Dipartimento di scienze della Terra, Pisa University.
[18] Sir R. I. MURCHISON, Memoria sulla struttura geologica delle Alpi degli Apennini e dei Carpazi, diretta specialmente a provare un passaggio dalle rocce secondarie alle terziarie e lo sviluppo dei depositi eocenici nell'Europa meridionale , Florence, Stamperia Granducale, 1850; first edition, London, Richard and John E. Taylor, 1849; P. SAVI and G. MENEGHINI, Osservazioni stratigrafiche e paleontologiche concernenti la Geologia della Toscana e dei paesi limitrofi. In appendice alla memoria sulla struttura geologica delle Alpi, degli Apennini e dei Carpazi di Sir Roderick I. Murchison , Florence, Stamperia
Granducale, 1851. The Osservazioni were added to a second printing of Murchison's Memoria, and bound together, with separate pagination.
[19] M.J.S. RUDWICK, The Great Devonian Controversy. The Shaping of Scientific Knowledge Among Gentlemanly Specialists , Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1985 . [20] P . SAVI e G. MENEGHINI , Osservazioni stratigrafiche , n. 18; P. SAVI, Saggio sulla costituzione geologica della Provincia di Pisa , Pisa, Tipografia Nistri, 1863.
[21] L. PILLA, Poche parole sul tremuoto che ha desolato i paesi della costa toscana , Pisa, R. Vannucchi, 1846, and Istoria del tremuoto che ha devastato i paesi della costa toscana il dì 14 agosto 1846 , Pisa, R. Vannucchi, 1846.
[22] P. SAVI, Relazione de' fenomeni presentati dai Terremoti di Toscana dell'Agosto 1846 e Considerazioni teoretiche sopra i medesimi Pisa, Tipografia Nistri, 1846, p. 102.
[23] P. SAVI, “Notizie concernenti Paolo Savi”, ms. folios with short notices handwritten on stripes of paper glued in chronological order, Dipartimento scienze della Terra, Pisa
University , Paolo Savi Manuscripts. On Leopold II hopes that Tuscany could become the Saxony of the South, see F. PESENDORFER (ed.), Il Governo di famiglia in Toscana. Le memorie del Granduca Leopoldo II di Lorena (1824–1859) , Florence , Sansoni, 1987, pp. 297 and 482, and CORSI, n. 10.
[24] M. T. GREENE, Geology in the Nineteenth Century. Changing Views of a Changing World, Ithaca, NY and London, Cornell University Press, 1982; A. HALLAM, Great Geological Controversies , Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989; G. GOHAU , Les sciences de la terre aux XVII et XVIII siècles. Naissance de la géologie, Paris, A. Michel, 1990.
[25] I. Cocchi to G. Meneghini, Paris, 7 April 1854, G. Meneghini, Correspondence,
Dipartimento scienze della Terra, Pisa University. Initially an admirer of d'Orbigny, Cocchi soon changed his mind, under the influence of the very negative opinion Bayle, Prevost and Haime had of their colleague .
[26] G. MENEGHINI, Botanical and physiological memoirs, ed. by A. Henfrey, London, Ray Society, 1853; G. MENEGHINI, Alghe italiane e dalmatiche illustrate , Padova, A. Sacco, 1842, facsimile ed., Vaals, A. Asher, 1970.
[27] I. Cocchi to G. Meneghini, 1 August 1855, G. Meneghini, Correspondence, Dipartimento scienze della Terra, Pisa University.
[28] I. Cocchi to G. Meneghini, 28 December 1855, G. Meneghini, Correspondence, Dipartimento scienze della Terra, Pisa University .
[29] I. Cocchi to G. Meneghini, 29 January 1856, G. Meneghini, Correspondence, Dipartimento scienze della Terra, Pisa University .
[30] P. CORSI, “Gemmellaro, Gaetano Giorgio”, in Dizionario Biografico degli ita liani , vol. 53, Rome , Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1999, pp. 63–64; “Gemmellaro, Carlo”, Ibid. , pp. 59–62; “Gemmellaro, Mario”, Ibid. , pp. 64-65.
[31] P. CORSI, “The Italian Geological Survey: the Early History of a Divided Community”, in G. B. VAI et W. CAVAZZA (eds), Four centuries of the word “Geology”. Ulisse
Aldrovandi 1603 in Bologna, Minerva Edizioni, Bologna, 2003, pp. 255–79, and “Which instruments for Geological mapping? The Case of the Italian Geological Survey”, in
M. BERETTA, Paolo GALLUZZI and Carlo TRIARICO (eds), Musa Musaei. Studies on the History of Scientific Instruments and Collections in Honour of Mara Miniati, Florence, Leo S. Olschki, 2003, pp. 433–42.
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