John Sime (University of Pennsylvania), "The Illustration of Nature Recast: Jacob Green's Models of North American Trilobites"
A Monograph of the Trilobites of North America (1832) is a singular experiment in the history of scientific publishing. Each copy included a set of painted plaster-of-Paris casts of fossils to illustrate the descriptions of new trilobite species. Its author Jacob Green (1790—1841), a naturalist and professor of chemistry collaborated with Joseph Brano the artist who produced the casts. Trilobites of North America was one of the earliest classifications of trilobites, enigmatic fossils at the time that were hoped to be found extant. Today, trilobites are well-known icons of extinction. Many of Green’s trilobite genera and species remain in use and scaffolded future work. Trilobites of North America is also among the earliest examples of the use of plaster in paleontology. Green and Brano experimented with depictions of nature in three dimensions to escape the limitations of drawings on the page. Much scholarship has focused on Henry Augustus Ward’s catalogs of fossil replicas. But, unlike Ward’s, Green and Brano’s work was a reported new scientific discoveries. While the novelty of both the subject matter and method of illustration was recognized by American naturalists, today Trilobites of North America is known to few paleontologists or science historians. In this paper, I develop a historical account of how that came to be.
The first part of the paper is descriptive. I document the casts from Green and Brano’s collaboration that are now in collection at The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University. I then reconstruct how Green and Brano assembled their monograph: selecting fossils in collections and making casts of them. I also report on the condition of the original fossils when they could be located, but most are now lost or destroyed. This section reveals that Trilobites of North America was the beginning of a nearly decade long collaboration with more expansive aspirations than first realized.
Next, I develop a picture of the epistemic and aesthetic values and practices that led Green and Brano to produce the Trilobites of North America. Green wrote about the epistemic reason for using casts instead of drawings: to produce more accurate illustrations. Aesthetic values also motivated the use of casts, as stated in Brano’s advertisements. I investigate how the casts reflect these values, comparing them to the fossils and paper illustrations. In addition, I examine what role the casts had in paleontological debates at the time, to see if they were used as intended.
Finally, I explore how the design of Trilobites of North America (text and plaster) gave it different affordances than other kinds of scientific publications (broadly construed) available to Philadelphia naturalists. I argue that this unique combination of affordances along with the increasing specialization of scientific practices led to the sorting of Trilobites of North America into its material components, where the connection between book and casts is often lost. Today, the text sits on the library shelf while the plaster trilobites sit in collection drawers.