A century ago, Carl Gegenbaur's program of vertebrate evolutionary morphology faced its greatest challenges. The controversy over the evolutionary origin of the vertebrate paired limbs between 1875 and 1906 illustrates the failure of the traditional methods of comparative anatomy and embryology (supported by Haeckel's biogenetic law) to choose between different phylogenetic hypotheses. The controversy over morphology's status as science intensified at the turn of the twentieth century, when the legitimacy of historical explanation itself as a mode of scientific understanding came under fire. Gegenbaur's intellectual grandson, Hermann Braus, sought to defend the legitimacy of phylogenetic reconstruction while updating it to include experimental and causal-analytical approaches, but was unable to sustain a viable synthetic research program. The article concludes with reflections on approaches to the past used by historians and evolutionary morphologists.

Rudolf Leuckart's 1851 pamphlet Ueber den Polymorphismus der Individuen (On the polymorphism of individuals) stood at the heart of naturalists' discussions on biological individuals, parts and wholes in mid-nineteenth-century Britain and Europe. Our analysis, which accompanies the first translation of this pamphlet into English, situates Leuckart's contribution to these discussions in two ways. First, we present it as part of a complex conceptual knot involving not only individuality and the understanding of compound organisms, but also the alternation of generations, the division of labor in nature, and the possibility of finding general laws of the organic world. Leuckart's pamphlet is important as a novel attempt to give order to the strands of this knot. It also solved a set of key biological problems in a way that avoided some of the drawbacks of an earlier teleological tradition. Second, we situate the pamphlet within a longer trajectory of inquiry into part-whole relations in biology from the mid-eighteenth century to the present. We argue that biological individuality, along with the problem-complexes with which it engaged, was as central a problem to naturalists before 1859 as evolution, and that Leuckart's contributions to it left a long legacy that persisted well into the twentieth century. As biologists' interests in part-whole relations are once again on the upswing, the longue durée of this problem merits renewed consideration.

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How English became the language of science.

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We invite systematic consideration of the metaphors of cycles and circulation as a long-term theme in the history of the life and environmental sciences and medicine. Ubiquitous in ancient religious and philosophical traditions, especially in representing the seasons and the motions of celestial bodies, circles once symbolized perfection. Over the centuries cyclic images in western medicine, natural philosophy, natural history and eventually biology gained independence from cosmology and theology and came to depend less on strictly circular forms. As potent ‘canonical icons’, cycles also interacted with representations of linear and irreversible change, including arrows, arcs, scales, series and trees, as in theories of the Earth and of evolution. In modern times life cycles and reproductive cycles have often been held to characterize life, in some cases especially female life, while human efforts selectively to foster and disrupt these cycles have harnessed their productivity in medicine and agriculture. But strong cyclic metaphors have continued to link physiology and climatology, medicine and economics, and biology and manufacturing, notably through the relations between land, food and population. From the grand nineteenth-century transformations of matter to systems ecology, the circulation of molecules through organic and inorganic compartments has posed the problem of maintaining identity in the face of flux and highlights the seductive ability of cyclic schemes to imply closure where no original state was in fact restored. More concerted attention to cycles and circulation will enrich analyses of the power of metaphors to naturalize understandings of life and their shaping by practical interests and political imaginations.

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