ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Organizing Forest Experiments, 1868-1890

• In Event: Managing Complexity: Investigating Plants, Forests, and Oceans in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany

English Abstract

Towards the end of the 1860s, a number of German forest scientists pressed for better organization of forest experiments. They felt that their discipline was lagging behind, making much less progress than, for example, scientific agronomy. The main reason, they were sure, was the lack of precise, comparative experiments. When experiments were carried out at all, forest scientists complained, they were often one-sided, superficial and failed to take into account crucial factors. Most importantly, forest scientists were not working to a common plan. As a consequence, published results did not “fit” together, and painstaking work proved to be worthless due to faulty planning (Baur 1868). In 1868, therefore, the Assembly of German Farmers and Foresters decided to co-ordinate their efforts in the experimental study of forest production processes.

What followed was a lively debate about how exactly these efforts should be organized. My paper examines this debate in order to learn more about the methodological views of the authors. I will focus on the attempt to balance the requirements of diversity and uniformity: the historical actors agreed that accurate forest surveys had to be carried out on a large scale and under a wide variety of local conditions (e.g. Hess 1885), but also in a uniform manner regarding their test procedure and the use of the results obtained (e.g. Schwappach 1890).

Author

• Caterina Schürch, Institut für Philosophie, Literatur-, Wissenschafts- und Technikgeschichte, Technische Universität Berlin