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2. What is a botanical author? Pehr Osbeck’s
travelogue and the culture of collaborative
publishing in Linnaean botany
BETTINA DIETZ
Introduction
This essay explores the culture of collaborative publishing in Linnaean
botany by tracing the publication trajectory of Pehr Osbeck’s report of
his journey to Canton in southern China during the period of 1750 to
1752. Osbeck (1723-1805), a Swedish naturalist and student of Linnaeus,
divided his material between a number of publications that appeared
successively, building on and complementing each other. The aim of his
project was to make a first version of his new material available to
interested readers as quickly as possible, while leaving the process of
completing and correcting it to be undertaken in stages at a later date.
This long-term project was conceived as a collaboration from the start,
and involved a number of authors. It began with most of Osbeck’s newly
discovered plants being published first not in his own book but, by
mutual agreement, in Linnaeus’s Species plantarum (1753). After Osbeck’s
travel report was published in Swedish (1757), translations into German
and English gave additional authors a chance to expand and correct the
text. This layering of information, along with the documentation of the
provenance of each individual addition, shaped not only the appearance
of the published text, but also a concept of scientific authorship. The
various editions of Osbeck’s travel report were published under a single
name – his. But, as a botanical author, Osbeck was a ‘composite’, and his
text was an assemblage of contributions by many others.
1
57
1. The physicist Alan Thorndike used this expression in 1967 to aptly describe the trans-
formation of experimental practice in particle physics: ‘Who is the experimenter whose
activities we have been discussing? Rarely, if ever, is he a single individual [...] The
experimenter, then, is not one person, but a composite [emphasis added]. He might be three,
more likely five or eight, possibly as many as ten, twenty, or more. [...] One thing, however,
he certainly is not. He is not the traditional image of a cloistered scientist working in
isolation at his laboratory bench’; Peter Galison, ‘The collective author’, in Scientific
authorship: credit and intellectual property in science, ed. Mario Biagioli and Peter Galison (New
York and London, 2003), p.325-55 (328-29).
An interest in scientific collaboration and the emergence of corre-
sponding forms of scientific authorship was sparked off by studying how
contemporary natural scientists worked. In the late 1970s and 1980s,
ethnographically inspired descriptions and analyses of the working
processes of modern laboratory science, of science in the making, by
Bruno Latour, Karin Knorr-Cetina and others, demonstrated the extent
to which scientific results depend on co-operation between a large
number of visible and invisible actors – scientists, technicians, program-
mers and assistants – without whom laboratory work simply could not be
done.
2
Under the name Actor-Network-Theory (ANT), non-human
actants such as equipment, materials and laboratory animals were
increasingly included in the analysis of factors on which the success or
failure of research depends.
3
The experimental procedures of modern particle physics in particular
allow not only the escalating scale of scientific collaboration to be
studied, but also the impact of a quintessentially collective research
process on the publications it produced, something which is of special
interest here. Starting from the question of the epistemic subject in
collaborations of first a few dozen, then several hundred, and finally
about 5000 scientists, Peter Galison analyses how these sorts of collec-
tives publish the results of their research.
4
He shows that collaborations
in particle physics have developed their own authorship protocols, which
prescribe under what circumstances and in what order the names of
authors are to be listed. And, as in the case of the Stanford Linear
Detector (SLD) guidelines, which Galison cites as an example, they
specify that the achievements of the group in all cases take precedence
over the contributions of individuals.
5
In order to reflect the
collaborative nature of experimental work, the writing process, too, is
subject to strict regulations, especially concerning the publication of the
results of the collaborative project as a whole. Every publication of this
sort originates in a draft drawn up by a small group of authors, which is
58 Bettina Dietz
2. A selection: Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory life: the construction of scientific facts
(Beverly Hills, CA, 1979); Sharon Traweek, Beamtimes and lifetimes: the world of high energy
physicists (Cambridge, MA, 1988); Steven Shapin, ‘The invisible technician’, American
scientist 77:6 (1989), p.554-63; Karin Knorr-Cetina, Epistemic cultures: how the sciences make
knowledge (Cambridge, MA, 1999).
3. For an overview see Bruno Latour, Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-
theory (Oxford, 2005); Bruno Latour, Science in action: how to follow scientists and engineers
through society (Cambridge, MA, 1987).
4. See Galison, ‘Collective author’.
5. ‘There should be no exceptions to the above, such as placing the student’s name first if the
paper originated as a thesis, as our first priority should be the coherence of the group and
the de facto recognition that contributions to a piece of physics are made by all
collaborators in different ways.’ SLD Policy on Publications and Conference Presen-
tations of 1 July 1988, quoted from Galison, ‘Collective author’, p.332.
presented to the whole group for criticism, after several further cycles of
additions and revisions, before it is officially published.
6
While collaboration and, consequently, collective authorship of such
spectacular dimensions grow out of the conditions governing present-
day laboratory work, scientific collaboration as such is nothing new. The
question arises to what extent earlier forms of scientific practice, and not
only those of an experimental nature, were organised collaboratively,
and what impact this had both on the making of scientific publications
and on the concept of scientific authorship. The few works which deal
with these questions mostly concentrate on the early modern period, a
time when the institutionalisation of science progressed with the
founding of academies, learned societies and museums. While this was
an important development, in the medium term it did not change the
fact that many researchers were still dependent on private means. This
explains why at that time the home or household of a scholar was a
central location of research and experimentation, and why domestic
protagonists – wife, children and servants – were often involved. Because
of the demands imposed by the need for observations and the effort
required in collecting, astronomy and natural history were quite often
undertaken as a family project.
7
But there is also evidence of more far-
reaching forms of scientific collaboration, for example, in the way
Galileo Galilei worked. We now know that a large number of people –
patrons, colleagues at the Lincean Academy, students and printers –
were actively involved in the publication of his works as advisers.
8
Yet, as a rule, these forms of early modern scientific teamwork were
invisible to readers; on the publication of their results, they disappeared
behind the name of the scientist who featured alone on the title page as
the author. We do not yet have a history of the scientific author, but the
concept of individualised authorship seems to have established itself as
standard earlier in science than in literature. Research on the function of
literary authorship, encouraged by Michel Foucault’s pioneering ‘Qu’est-
ce qu’un auteur’ (1969),
9
has shown that only in the late eighteenth and
592. Pehr Osbeck’s travelogue and the culture of collaborative publishing
6. See SLD Policy on Publications and Conference Presentations of 1 July 1988, quoted from
Galison, ‘Collective author’, p.332.
7. On this see Alix Cooper, ‘Homes and households’, in The Cambridge history of science, ed.
David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, 8 vols (Cambridge, 2003-2013), vol.3, Early
modern science, ed. Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (Cambridge, 2006), p.224-37 (232-
33.); from a different perspective, Gadi Algazi, ‘Scholars in households: refiguring the
learned habitus, 1480-1550’, Science in context 16:1-2 (2003), p.9-42.
8. See David Freedberg, The Eye of the lynx: Galileo, his friends and the beginning of modern natural
history (Chicage, IL, 2002), ch.5; Rene´e J. Raphael, ‘Printing Galileo’s Discorsi: a
collaborative affair’, Annals of science 69:4 (2012), p.483-513; Domenico Bertoloni Meli,
‘Authorship and teamwork around the Cimento Academy: mathematics, anatomy and
experimental philosophy’, Early science and medicine 6:2 (2001), p.65-95.
9. Michel Foucault, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur’, Bulletin de la socie
´
te
´franc
¸aise de philosophie 63:3
early nineteenth centuries was the literary author stylised into a solitary
individual with the unique ability to create something genuinely new and
original out of himself alone.
10
Remarkably, when it emerged, this
concept was already at odds with the actual creative process of writers
who played a large part in promoting it. Martha Woodmansee has shown
how the English poet William Wordsworth eloquently presented himself
as a solitary author, although his creative process was to a large extent
organised co-operatively and involved his sister and his friend, the poet
Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
11
There are unmistakable similarities between this sort of literary self-
description and the way in which Linnaeus represented his own signifi-
cance for the progress of botany, never hesitant in the use of superlatives,
as is well known. His Genera plantarum had ‘smoothed the path for the
science of the age’ before he embarked on the Species plantarum, ‘the
greatest work in the discipline’.
12
Or in perhaps the most grandiose
exaggeration of his own significance: ‘No one had been a greater botanist
or zoologist, no one had written a larger number of works, no one had
become more renowned throughout the world.’
13
A more moderate
version of this image, but one that still focuses on Linnaeus as supremely
dominating his subject, has long persisted in the research literature, as
William Stearn’s Introduction in Wilfrid Blunt’s widely read biography
of Linnaeus, Linnaeus: the compleat naturalist, demonstrates. There we read:
‘Linnaeus’ essential task was to provide the means of identifying and
naming all the organisms then known. He lived at a time, possibly the
very last time, when one person could accomplish this single-handed – provided
60 Bettina Dietz
(1969); for a correction of Foucault’s chronology of the emergence of modern authorship
from a historical perspective see Roger Chartier, ‘Foucault’s Chiasmus’, in Scientific
authorship: credit and intellectual property in science, ed. Mario Biagioli and Peter Galison
(New York and London, 2003), p.15-31.
10. There is a huge body of literature on this topic. A selection: Paul Be´nichou, Le Sacre de
l’e
´
crivain (Paris, 1973); Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi (ed.), The Construction of
authorship: textual appropriation in law and literature (Durham, 1994), especially Woodmansee
and Jaszi, ‘Introduction’, p.1-13; and Woodmansee, ‘On the author effect: recovering
collectivity’, p.15-28 (16).
11. See Woodmansee and Jaszi, ‘Introduction’, p.2; also Roger Chartier, ‘Publishing
Cervantes’, in Roger Chartier, The Author’s hand and the printer’s mind: transformations of the
written word in early modern Europe (Cambridge, 2014), p.150-57.
12. ‘dem Zeitalter die Wissenschaft geebnet’; ‘ein Werk, welches das gro
¨ßte in der
Wissenschaft ist’. Linne
´
’s eigenha
¨ndige Anzeichnungen u
¨ber sich selbst, mit Anmerkungen und
Zusa
¨tzen von Afzelius, translated from the Swedish by Karl Lappe (Stockholm, 1823; Berlin,
1826), p.53.
13. Sten Lindroth, ‘The two faces of Linnaeus’, in Linnaeus: the man and his work, ed. Tore
Fra
¨ngsmyr (Berkeley, CA, 1983), p.1-62 (57). Lindroth here condenses a longer passage
from Vita Caroli Linnaei: Carl von Linne
´
s sja
¨lvbiografier, ed. E. Malmestro
¨m and A. Hj. Uggla
(Stockholm, 1957), p.145-46.
he was willing to pay the price. The price for Linnaeus was a heavy one:
for much of his life he was financially insecure and his health suffered as a
result of overwork.’
14
This image has only recently begun to be undermined, mainly as the
result of increasing interest in the practices of information-gathering
and data-processing that characterised Linnaeus’s method of working.
Staffan Mu
¨ller-Wille and Isabelle Charmentier have investigated the
paper technologies – the lists, boxes of paper, files, index cards,
annotated books and especially paper slips – with whose aid Linnaeus
organised the constantly growing stream of information about hitherto
unknown plants, animals and minerals for his publication projects.
15
I
myself have demonstrated how Linnaeus’s ambition to record, name and
classify all plants worldwide forced him to adopt a collaborative working
mode, which, in turn, had a fundamental impact on his iterative style of
publication. Behind the self-image of a lonely genius striding on ahead of
everybody else that Linnaeus promoted in his autobiographical writings
lay a collaborative practice and epistemology, which he described openly
in his scientific publications and correspondences.
16
In the following, the significance of this collaborative approach for
Linnaeus’s own working process will first be outlined, from the system-
atic gathering of information by means of correspondence and the
techniques employed, to the iterative cycles of supplementing and
correcting primarily the Systema naturae and Species plantarum, and the
participatory architecture of an evolvable system. It will then be argued
that this collaborative model shaped not only Linnaeus’s publications
but also the working methods of other botanists around him, so that we
can speak of a culture of collaborative publishing in eighteenth-century
botany. The essay will then turn to Osbeck’s report on his trip to China
and show that from the start its publication was planned not as a one-off
act but as a long-term process that involved several authors, produced a
number of different types of publication and required iterative cycles of
updates.
612. Pehr Osbeck’s travelogue and the culture of collaborative publishing
14. Emphasis added. William Stearn, ‘Introduction’, in Wilfrid Blunt, Linnaeus: the compleat
naturalist (Princeton, NJ, 2001), first published in 1971 as The Compleat naturalist: a life of
Linnaeus, p.6-9 (6).
15. Isabelle Charmantier and Staffan Mu
¨ller-Wille ‘Carl Linnaeus’s botanical paper slips
(1767-1773)’, Intellectual history review 24:2 (2014), p.215-38; Staffan Mu
¨ller-Wille and
Isabelle Charmantier, ‘Natural history and information overload: the case of Linnaeus’,
Studies in history and philosophy of science, part C, Studies in history and philosophy of biological and
biomedical sciences 43:1 (2012), p.4-15; see also Staffan Mu
¨ller-Wille and Sara Scharf, Indexing
nature: Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) and his fact-gathering strategies,Working papers on the nature of
evidence: how well do ‘facts’ travel? 36/08, http://www.lse.ac.uk/economichistory/pdf/factspdf/
3909muellerwillescharf.pdf (last accessed 10 December 2015).
16. See Bettina Dietz, ‘Contribution and co-production: the collaborative culture of
Linnaean botany’, Annals of science 69:4 (2012), p.551-69.
The focus here will be on the collaborative process of writing botanical
works. The main protagonists are the European botanists of the eight-
eenth century, who not only shared information to supplement and
correct their own publications among themselves, but also updated and
expanded the works of others, drawing on the material available to them.
In this context, the question of whether Osbeck had help from indigen-
ous or local informants when collecting natural history specimens in
China, and if so, how, will not be discussed here. The sources known to
me contain no direct information on this. But it needs to be stressed that
no botanists alone could accumulate the material for a publication
covering a larger region, not even those who worked on regional
European flora. Albrecht von Haller, for example, employed a whole
host of assistants for his work on a Swiss flora. They systematically
combed regions and mountain ranges on his behalf in order to gather
the necessary plants.
17
This essay concentrates less on the collection of material – an aspect
that has long occupied praxis-oriented historians of science – than on
the collaborative process of writing and publishing Osbeck’s travel
report, and the decentralisation of the botanical author associated
with this.
18
The practice of superimposing layers of information, taken
to an extreme by Linnaeus but also used by other botanists, had the effect
of fragmenting the botanical author, although the general rule of
featuring only one name on the title page of publications meant that
62 Bettina Dietz
17. On this see Bettina Dietz, Das System der Natur: die kollaborative Wissenskultur der Botanik im
18. Jahrhundert, ch.1, ‘Regionale Botanik als kollaboratives Projekt’ (Cologne and Vienna,
2017); Luc Lienhard, ‘‘‘La machine botanique’’: zur Entstehung von Hallers Flora der
Schweiz’, in Hallers Netz: ein europa
¨ischer Gelehrtenbriefwechsel zur Zeit der Aufkla
¨rung, ed.
Martin Stuber, Stefan Ha
¨chler and Luc Lienhard (Basel, 2005), p.371-410; see also Alix
Cooper, Inventing the indigenous: local knowledge and natural history in early modern Europe
(Cambridge, 2007).
18. A selection: Jim Endersby, Imperial nature: Joseph Hooker and the practices of Victorian science
(Chicago, IL, 2008); Emma C. Spary, Utopia’s garden: French natural history from old regime to
Revolution (Chicago, IL, 2000); Anke te Heesen and Emma C. Spary (ed.), Sammeln als
Wissen: das Sammeln und seine wissenschaftsgeschichtliche Bedeutung (Go
¨ttingen, 2001). On the
significance of local informants for the identification and cultivation of economically
useful plants in colonial settings see Deepak Kumar, ‘Botanical explorations and the East
India Company: revisiting ‘‘plant colonialism’’’, in The East India Company and the natural
world, ed. Anna Winterbottom, Vinita Damadoran and Alan Lester (Basingstoke, 2014),
p.16-34 (Kumar here also discusses the precariousness of usable sources); Anna
Winterbottom, ‘Medicine and botany in the making of Madras, 1680-1720’, in The East
India Company and the natural world, ed. Anna Winterbottom, Vinita Damadoran and Alan
Lester (Basingstoke, 2014), p.35-57; on China see the publications by Carla Nappi, ‘Surface
tension: objectifying ginseng in Chinese early modernity’, in Early modern things: objects and
their histories 1500-1800, ed. Paula Findlen (New York, 2013), p.31-52; Paula Findlen, The
Monkey and the inkpot: natural history and its transformations in early modern China (Cambridge,
MA, 2009).
the author continued to appear as a single subject.
19
But the input of
various contributors involved, in the case of Osbeck’s travel report
especially the two translators, was minutely documented, demonstrating
to readers that this text had not been produced by one individual, but
had grown out of a culture of collaborative publishing.
The collaborative culture of Linnaean botany
Linnaeus’s systematic works, such as the Systema naturae and the Species
plantarum, emerged out of a collaborative working process in which
modules of information and knowledge contributed by many people
were put together in such a way that the end product was recognisably
the result of a co-operative effort.
20
For all involved, correspondence was
an indispensable instrument of information-gathering and thus pro-
vided the basis of a contribution-based epistemology. An arsenal of
techniques – reference catalogues, lists, and illustrations, asking and
answering questions, and reporting mistakes to each other – was used to
enable efficient information-gathering, that is, to save time, prevent the
loss of information, allow questions and answers to be precisely
correlated, and the countless details communicated to be located and
used efficiently. The huge input, both quantitative and qualitative, of
information generated via correspondence had a direct impact on the
form of botanical publications. The more ambitious a project’s size, the
more of an aggregate it became.
21
Reference must be made to an essential information technique that
this process of aggregating relied on, namely, reporting errors. Scholars
regularly pointed out errors that they had identified either in the work of
their correspondence partner or in the publications of other natural
historians, to each other by letter. Even botanists such as Linnaeus, who
had abundant resources, could find themselves in the position of not
having to hand a living plant that they urgently needed for purposes of
comparison. Pressed and dried specimens were the necessary alternative,
but the processes of drying and pressing could deform details and make
632. Pehr Osbeck’s travelogue and the culture of collaborative publishing
19. On Linnaeus in this context see Dietz, ‘Contribution and co-production’.
20. This section is compiled from Dietz, ‘Contribution and co-production’, with the kind
permission of the journal’s editors. Central aspects that can only briefly be touched on
here – correspondence as natural history’s information system and the techniques of
efficient information-gathering (especially the reporting of errors), the character of
Linnaeus’s publications as aggregates and the principle of iterative publication – are
discussed in detail there. See also Dietz, Das System der Natur.
21. On accumulation from a global perspective see Lissa Roberts, ‘Accumulation and man-
agement in global perspective: an introduction’, History of science 52:3 (2014), p.227-46;
Lissa Roberts, ‘‘‘Le centre de toutes les choses’’: constructing and managing centralisation
on the Isle de France’, History of science 52:3 (2014), p.319-42.
precise observation difficult. In cases where neither a living nor a dried
specimen was available, recourse had to be taken to illustrations and
descriptions in the botanical literature. As mistakes could and did
happen at every stage of this process – more mistakes than one author
alone could identify and correct – error reports became an essential
component of the correspondence routine. The correct identification of
a plant was therefore, as a rule, the result not only of an individual act of
observation, but to a large extent also of a collective one. The more eyes
were involved in examining the features of a plant that had not yet been
definitively identified, the more quickly was accuracy likely to be
achieved.
This frequently used form of feedback, sent either solicited or unsol-
icited via the botanical correspondence, makes two things clear: first, in
Linnaean botany, precision was often only possible as the result of a long
and co-operative process of correction; and second, it shows that
published work was fundamentally provisional, although to varying
degrees. New material was constantly turning up, new observations
were being made, and new observers were entering the discussion, so
that correcting descriptions, illustrations and classifications was not only
a necessity, but also accepted as such. Publications, especially the largest
ones, were therefore, as a rule, iterative in nature. This means that they
were not intended to be definitive, but were from the start designed to be
published in several editions.
Nobody knew how to instrumentalise this principle as systematically as
Linnaeus, and the consecutive editions of his Systema naturae and Species
plantarum demonstrate how he aggregated information from his corre-
spondents to publish constantly augmented and corrected versions –
twelve of the Systema naturae and two of the Species plantarum. Hardly had a
new edition of one of his works been published before it needed to be
revised and supplemented. New books had appeared in the interim, and
new species and genera had to be extracted from them, checked, and
incorporated at the relevant place. His travelling students and numerous
correspondents constantly sent him dried plants and seeds, which had to
be identified, before also being incorporated.
Given this situation, Linnaeus developed a publication strategy which
took account of the insight that botanical projects with large regional let
alone global aspirations by their nature have to be works in progress, and
require an appropriate publication mode in order to be of maximum
scientific use. In the rapidly growing field of natural history, especially
botany, projects of this magnitude could not be accomplished by an
individual scholar, nor in a single, one-off publication. This would have
meant putting a text on the market, if at all, only after a long process of
correction and enlargement, and it would have become out of date
64 Bettina Dietz
quickly all the same. Publication would happen late, rarely, or, in the
worst case, never. Linnaeus chose a different path. Instead of late and
rarely, he published early and often. Completeness and precision could
be attained only in the long term, through collaboration and iteration.
Linnaeus’s works were long term and evolvable projects, whose success
was based on their structural capacity to grow. While his genera and
species were established in a way that largely guaranteed the stability of
already familiar taxa despite the constant discovery of as yet unidentified
specimens, the strategy of iterative publication made it possible to
incorporate the influx of new specimens and to absorb the stream of
corrections received from correspondents. This perpetuum mobile did not
stop with Linnaeus’s death, but continued to produce updated editions
of his works for decades under the direction of various scholars.
The role of Linnaeus’s systematic works as central registers of a
globally conceived botany gave them a special status among eight-
eenth-century botanical publications. Their topicality and reliability
were essential for the collaborative practice of Linnean botany: the
regular publication of newly identified, classified and named plants at a
central location made it possible to limit, if not exclude, multiple
namings and competing classifications, allowing the work of many
scientists to be efficiently co-ordinated. As a result – and this should
be emphasised here – for many botanists who found themselves in the
possession of rare and sought-after material, sending plants and infor-
mation to Linnaeus so that he could supplement and correct his books
took priority over working on their own publications. This also applied
to Pehr Osbeck, whose strategy of publishing the natural history yield of
his journey to China in stages, and of distributing it between various
authors and publications, will be discussed in the following section.
The mutual transfer of information between
Osbeck and Linnaeus
As a theology student at the University of Uppsala, Pehr Osbeck had
attended Linnaeus’s lectures on natural history for several years before
leaving for Canton (today Guangzhou) in southern China in 1750 as
chaplain on board a Swedish East India Company ship. Stops on this
journey, which Osbeck used to collect plants and other natural history
objects, were made at Cadiz, Java and Ascension Island in the South
Atlantic. The first recipient of his botanical discoveries was Linnaeus,
and the first medium in which he announced them was correspondence.
Immediately on his return, in June 1752, Osbeck began sending plants,
either dried or preserved in alcohol, and seeds, to an impatient Linnaeus.
Linnaeus was not satisfied with this, but also asked for Osbeck’s obser-
652. Pehr Osbeck’s travelogue and the culture of collaborative publishing
vations of living plants – an indication of the dimensions of the infor-
mation transfer expected.
22
When Osbeck returned from China, Linnaeus was in the final stages of
his work on the Species plantarum, a critical overview, organised in line
with his own classification system, of all plant species known to date
which he had, wherever possible, seen and investigated in person.
23
While it is known that a considerable number of the species contained in
the Species plantarum had been collected and sent to Linnaeus by his
travelling students, known as the ‘apostles’, their role as informants and
the mutuality of the information exchange will be examined further
here.
24
Informants in this sense should not be seen as subordinate
suppliers of information who merely followed instructions, but, as we
will see, as partners, advisers and correctors, whose indispensability
made them into co-authors and gave them the right to expect a quid
pro quo.
In the letter cited above, in which Linnaeus asked Osbeck for all the
details he had observed on living plants, he listed those he was most
interested in and asked a number of detailed questions. Osbeck replied
immediately and answered as precisely as he could. For example, in
response to Linnaeus’s question of whether one of the plants he had
received from Osbeck was a Melastoma, Osbeck compared his Chinese
material with Linnaeus’s description of Melastoma, and came to the
conclusion that the plant in question must belong to a new species.
25
Just one week later, Osbeck thanked Linnaeus for another letter and, on
the basis of the botanical descriptions in his travel notes, replied,
sometimes in great detail, to many of the one hundred plus questions
66 Bettina Dietz
22. Letter of Carl Linnaeus to Pehr Osbeck, 21 August 1752, in Carlo Hansen and Anne Fox
Maule (ed.), ‘Linne´s korrespondance med Pehr Osbeck 1750-1753: med inledning og
anmærkninger’, Svenska Linne
´
sa
¨llskapets a
˚rsskrift (1972-1974), p.75-145 (97); facsimile of the
original and an English summary at http://linnaeus.c18.net/ Letter/L1468 (consulted 14
Jan. 2015). Osbeck replied that he had to revise the notes he had made during the journey
to make them legible and useful for another person. See letter of Osbeck to Linnaeus, 23
August 1752, in Hansen and Fox Maule, ‘Linne´s korrespondance’, p.98-99 (98); facsimile
of the original and an English summary at http://linnaeus.c18.net/ Letter/L1467 (consulted
14 January 2015).
23. William Thomas Stearn, ‘An introduction to the Species plantarum and cognate botanical
works of Carl Linnaeus’, in ‘Species plantarum’: a facsimile of the first edition 1753, vol.1
(London, 1957), p.1-176 (97-109).
24. Mariette Manktelow and Kenneth Nyberg, ‘Linnaeus’s apostles and the development of
the Species plantarum’, in ‘Species plantarum’ 250 years: proceedings of the ‘Species plantarum’
symposium, held in Uppsala 22-24 August 2003, ed. Inga Hedberg (Uppsala, 2005), p.73-80;
Carlo Hansen and Anne Fox Maule, ‘Pehr Osbeck’s collections and Linnaeus’s Species
plantarum (1753)’, Botanical journal of the Linnaean Society 67:3 (1973), p.189-212.
25. See letter of Linnaeus to Osbeck, 21 August 1752, in Hansen and Fox Maule, ‘Linne´s
korrespondance’, p.97.
that Linnaeus had asked about numbered plants. For example, Linnaeus
asked how many stamens plant number 4 had (the name of the plant is
not mentioned) and what its fruit was like, and whether number 18 was
the same plant as number 12?
26
Osbeck also reported that by comparing
some of the preserved fish, roots and fruits that he had sent Linnaeus
with descriptions and illustrations in the natural history literature, he
had managed to identify some of them as already known, including the
fruit of a plant that he thought was Crinum from Paul Hermann’s Flora
Zeylanica (1747), edited by Linnaeus. But as he was not quite sure, he
asked Linnaeus to examine the specimens he had, and to tell him of his
findings.
27
Osbeck sent Linnaeus not only plants, seeds and observations, but also
plant names that he had coined himself, following the rules of Linnaean
nomenclature. The project of cataloguing all existing plants worldwide
required not only countless contributors, but also clear rules and stand-
ards to co-ordinate the many contributions. Due to the growing inter-
national success of Linnaeus’s sexual system, a simple method for the
identification and classification of plants in combination with his
standardised binomial nomenclature, a structure and a language were
created that allowed this accumulative dynamic to be efficiently
regulated. Only then did it become possible to overcome the old prob-
lem that, without a binding nomenclature, the same plant was inevitably
given different names by different authors, making it difficult if not
impossible to find relevant information in the botanical literature.
Another factor in the growing success of this procedure for realising a
global project, in addition to the standardisation of modules to be
integrated into the system, was that Linnaeus was not alone in acting
as a nomenclator. He was joined by increasing numbers of other botan-
ists, including those who described many hitherto unknown plants of
non-European, particularly American and Asian, provenance. Osbeck
was one of the first to use Linnaean nomenclature, initially in his travel
notes and later in his 1757 travel report Dagbok o
¨fwer en ostindisk resa a
˚ren
1750, 1751, 1752 [Diary of a trip to East India], to name the plants he
collected on his travels. In this way, the plants he discovered and named
became compatible modules which Linnaeus no longer had to identify
from scratch. After more or less extensive checking and, as a rule,
672. Pehr Osbeck’s travelogue and the culture of collaborative publishing
26. Letter of Osbeck to Linnaeus, 30 August 1752, in Hansen and Fox Maule, ‘Linne´s
korrespondance’, p.102-105; facsimile of the original and an English summary at http://
linnaeus.c18.net/ Letter/L1464 (consulted 14 January 2015). On the use of lists of questions
and answers in the context of the correspondence-based information system of Linnaean
botany, see Dietz, ‘Contribution and co-production’, p.556-57.
27. See letter of Osbeck to Linnaeus, 11 October 1752, in Hansen and Fox Maule, ‘Linne´s
korrespondance’, p.108-109 (109).
retaining their names, he was able to integrate them into his system.
28
Both sides, Osbeck as well as Linnaeus, commented on the dimensions
and efficiency of the information transfer that resulted from the use of a
common language. In the foreword to his travel report, Osbeck pointed
to the compatibility of his names with the Species plantarum and to their
incorporation into it: ‘from this [journal] I gave him [Linnaeus] some
descriptions of new plants found in Spain, China, and other places,
which were immediately incorporated into that capital book then print-
ing under the title of species plantarum, and with which my names of
plants agree.’
29
Linnaeus praised Osbeck’s procedure for naming plants when he
wrote to congratulate him on the publication of the Dagbok [Diary]. He
stressed that, unlike most earlier travellers, Osbeck gave his discoveries
‘precise’ names, with the aid of binomial nomenclature, so that the
learned world could understand him:
most of the voyages hitherto published, by imposing barbarous names on
their discoveries, have rather sharpened our desire after knowledge, than
afforded any real instruction. You, Sir, have everywhere travelled with the
light of science: you have named every thing so precisely, that it may be
comprehended by the learned world; and have discovered and settled both
the genera and species. For this reason, I seem myself to have travelled with
you, and to have examined every object you saw with my own eyes.
30
The urgency of the mutual need for information and the way in which
this was taken for granted speaks out of Linnaeus and Osbeck’s letters,
drawing them into an intensive exchange of objects, names and obser-
vations that made them into indispensable points of reference for each
other. Each was dependent on the other’s knowledge for their own
publication project. In order to identify the new species from China
correctly in his Species plantarum, Linnaeus needed not only Osbeck’s
plants, but also the observations he had made of the living plants during
his journey. Osbeck, in turn, had a substantial interest in drawing on
Linnaeus’s knowledge of plants for the identification, naming and
classification of unknown species in the planned publication of his
own extensive material.
Although Osbeck’s status as a scholar and career as a botanist
68 Bettina Dietz
28. See Elmer Drew Merrill, ‘Osbeck’s dagbok o
¨fwer en ostindisk resa’, American journal of
botany 3:10 (1916), p.571-88 (571).
29. Pehr Osbeck, A Voyage to China and the East Indies, by Peter Osbeck, Rector of Hasloef and Woxtorp,
Member of the Academy of Stockholm, and of the Society of Upsal; [...] translated from the German by
John Reinhold Forster; to which are added a Faunula and Flora Sinensis, 2 vols (London, Benjamin
White, 1771), vol.1, author’s preface, n.p.
30. Letter of Linnaeus to Osbeck, undated, reprinted in the English translation of his travel
report A Voyage to China and the East Indies, vol.2, p.127-28.
depended on the publication of his material on Chinese flora, he allowed
most of his sensational discoveries to be published first in Linnaeus’s
Species plantarum. This was neither the selfless act of a devout disciple, nor
did it signify the end of his career chances. On the contrary, the
imminent publication of Linnaeus’s Species plantarum gave Osbeck and
other botanists who had collected spectacular botanical material while
travelling a unique opportunity to go public with their findings for the
first time in one of the most high-profile and visible publications in the
field. And it allowed them to publish their findings much more quickly
than they could have done in their own books, whether a flora or a travel
report, which could take years to prepare.
31
Linnaeus, in turn, who could
only achieve the global aspiration of his works by systematically
integrating the contributions of others, gave his informants the recog-
nition they deserved by acknowledging them as the discoverers or
observers of plants, or as the authors of published or forthcoming
descriptions of plants. This mutually profitable principle of give and
take was one of the pillars of the collaborative publication culture of
Linnaean botany.
32
After about two months of intense correspondence,
Linnaeus wrote to Osbeck in October 1752 saying that all new species in
the Species plantarum had a reference to him, so that he would soon be
famous;
33
and in December of the same year, when the first printed
sheets of the Species plantarum had been published, he wrote to Osbeck
that he had inserted his description of a tree called Mangha with the note
‘haec [this] Osbeck’.
34
To complete this account of an exchange of information that was
profitable for both partners, it should be mentioned that a few months
earlier, Linnaeus had promised Osbeck a copy of the Species plantarum.
This was a gift of considerable value given the limited availability of
botanical publications, which meant that many botanists did not own a
copy of this key work.
35
Osbeck replied that he was certainly not alone in
692. Pehr Osbeck’s travelogue and the culture of collaborative publishing
31. This was also the case with Nikolaus Joseph Freiherr von Jacquin (1727-1817), for
example, a botanist who worked in Vienna and also first published the findings of his
expedition to the Caribbean in Linnaeus’s Species plantarum. On this see Dietz, ‘Contri-
bution and co-production’, p.561-65.
32. See Dietz, ‘Contribution and co-production’, p.554-59.
33. See letter of Linnaeus to Osbeck, 16 October 1752, in Hansen and Fox Maule, ‘Linne´s
korrespondance’, p.110-111 (111); facsimile of the original and an English summary at
http://linnaeus.c18.net/ Letter/L1496 (consulted 14 January 2015).
34. See letter of Linnaeus to Osbeck, 4 December 1752, in Hansen and Fox Maule, ‘Linne´s
korrespondance’, p.128-29 (129); facsimile of the original and an English summary at
http://linnaeus.c18.net/ Letter/L1503 (last accessed 14 January 2015).
35. On the difficulty or even impossibility of acquiring scientific literature, especially that
published abroad, in book shops, even in a town such as Leipzig which hosted a book fair,
see Bettina Dietz, ‘Making natural history: doing the Enlightenment’, Central European
history 43:1 (2010), p.25-46 (39-41).
eagerly anticipating the publication of the Species plantarum, which indi-
cates its central methodological as well as practical significance in the
field of Linnaean botany.
36
As an up-to-date systematic catalogue of all
plant species known at the time, the Species plantarum functioned as a
register that made clear which plants were known and had been named
and described. This, in turn, explains why a young scientist at the
beginning of his career had a vital interest in having his capital of
botanical objects published for the first time in this work.
Linnaeus’s significance to the publication of Osbeck’s Chinese plants
was not limited to their incorporation in the Species plantarum. His
standing in the Swedish scientific community gave Linnaeus the insti-
tutional authority to encourage the publication of Osbeck’s findings and
observations, something in which not only he, but most botanists work-
ing systematically at the end of the eighteenth century, had a vital
interest. The more species were named, described and classified, the
more precisely plants (and animals) that had not yet been unequivocally
identified could be compared with known ones, advancing the global
cataloguing project. In his letter to Osbeck of December 1752, already
cited here a number of times, Linnaeus announced that he would ensure
that Osbeck’s descriptions of individual species were published in the
proceedings of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm,
the next stage in the long path by which Osbeck’s Chinese material found
its way into print.
37
It was also a further strategy for presenting at least a
few of his species to international experts while he was working on a
comprehensive monograph.
In December 1752 Linnaeus first encouraged Osbeck to start working
on a report of his trip to China.
38
Osbeck replied that if the report were
really to be published, he would have to meet Linnaeus to discuss the
plants, insects and fish that were difficult to identify, and other things,
with him in person.
39
Osbeck now claimed the same services that he had
provided to assist in the completion of the Species plantarum – the supply
of specimens, information, observations and corrections, in order to
produce a work that was as complete and free of errors as possible.
70 Bettina Dietz
36. Letter of Osbeck to Linnaeus, 11 October 1752, in Hansen and Fox Maule, ‘Linne´s
korrespondance’, p.108-109 (109); facsimile of the original and English summary at http://
linnaeus.c18.net/ Letter/L1475 (consulted 14 January 2015).
37. See letter of Linnaeus to Osbeck, 4 December 1752, in Hansen and Fox Maule, ‘Linne´s
korrespondance’, p.128-29.
38. Letter of Linnaeus to Osbeck, 17 December 1752, in Hansen and Fox Maule, ‘Linne´s
korrespondance’, p.131-32 (132); facsimile of the original and an English summary at
http://linnaeus.c18.net/ Letter/L1523 (consulted 14 January 2015).
39. Letter of Osbeck to Linnaeus, 23 December 1752, in Hansen and Fox Maule, ‘Linne´s
korrespondance’, p.132-34 (132); facsimile of the original and an English summary at
http://linnaeus.c18.net/ Letter/L1519 (consulted 14 Jan. 2015).
Linnaeus had, it seems, already promised his support, because Osbeck
thanked him for it in the same letter in which he asked for it.
40
Gained in translation: the translator as co-author
The first version of Osbeck’s travel report was published in 1757, largely
in Swedish, entitled Dagbok o
¨fwer en ostindisk resa a
˚ren 1750, 1751, 1752
[Diary of a trip to East India in 1750, 1751, 1752].
41
It contained
information on everything that early modern apodemic literature con-
sidered worth knowing: the physical appearance, clothing and way of life
of the people; agriculture and commerce; landscape; and above all, as was
to be expected with Osbeck, the natural history, in great detail, of the
places visited. Noteworthy in terms of Osbeck’s publication strategy is
the fact that while the text is mainly in Swedish, Latin passages contain-
ing botanically precise descriptions of hitherto unknown plants and
other natural objects are scattered throughout it. The Dagbok contains, in
two languages, information of varying complexity, so that one work
could satisfy two groups of readers: one that could read Swedish and was
interested in a general travel narrative; and a group of international
botanical experts who were unversed in Swedish, but could concentrate
on the plant descriptions in Latin.
42
In order to make his findings public
as quickly as possible, Osbeck chose a form for his monograph that did
not require too much work. The Dagbok, a revised version of his travel
diary supplemented with additional observations, was published rela-
tively quickly, whereas to prepare a Chinese Flora for publication would
have taken years. This decision also meant that early in his career Osbeck
had a significant publication to his name, one that showed him to be a
serious author and qualified him for scientific awards. In 1757 when
Linnaeus proposed Osbeck as a member to the Royal Swedish Academy
of Sciences in Stockholm, he could point to the sensational natural
history yield of his travels, and to the fact that the report would shortly be
published, something that he had repeatedly urged on Osbeck.
43
712. Pehr Osbeck’s travelogue and the culture of collaborative publishing
40. See letter of Osbeck to Linnaeus, 23 December 1752, in Hansen and Fox Maule, ‘Linne´s
korrespondance’, p.132-34 (132).
41. Osbeck, Pehr, Dagbok o
¨fwer en ostindisk resa a
˚ren 1750, 1751, 1752 (Stockholm, Lor. Ludv.
Grefing, 1757).
42. Linnaeus selected a similar format for the publication of the notes made by his student
Fredrik Hasselquist, who travelled through Palestine and Egypt between 1749 and 1752,
and died in Smyrna in 1752. The general travel narrative was published in Swedish, while
the descriptions of animals and plants were in Latin, although, unlike in Osbeck’s book,
they were not dispersed throughout the text, but placed in a systematically organised
second part. See Fredrik Hasselquist, Iter Palaestinum eller resa til Heliga Landet, 1749-1752
(Stockholm, Lars Salvius, 1757).
43. See Linnaeus to the Secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, 15
The fact that Osbeck’s travel report, so eagerly awaited by the learned
world, was published in a language that practically nobody outside
Sweden could read, meant that within a relatively short time it was
translated into two other languages: in 1765 it was translated from
Swedish into German, and in 1771 the German version was translated
into English.
44
These translations, however, represented far more than
the mere transfer of the original text from one language into another.
They corrected errors of fact and added relevant information, thus
playing a crucial role in a publication process that must be seen as a long-
term and collaborative undertaking.
The initiator and editor of the German translation, Reise nach Ostindien
und China (1765), was Johann Christian Daniel Schreber (1739-1810), a
German medic and botanist who held two professorships, of medicine
and of cameralism, at the University of Erlangen.
45
He had studied with
Linnaeus in Uppsala, and as a champion of his classification system had
translated a number of Linnaeus’s works into German himself, and
produced updated editions of others.
46
He justified the translation of
Osbeck’s travel report, which was done not by himself, but by the
German scholar Johann Gottlieb Georgi (1729-1802), by arguing that
the German translation was superior to the excellent Swedish original
because it contained more information.
47
In fact, in addition to Osbeck’s
72 Bettina Dietz
April 1757; see facsimile of the original and an English summary at http://linnaeus.c18.net/
Letter/L2186 (last accessed 14 January 2015); see also letter Linnaeus to Osbeck, 25
January 1754, in which he advises Osbeck to make the publication of his travel report a
priority; see facsimile of the original and an English summary at http://linnaeus.c18.net/
Letter/L1696 (consulted 14 January 2015).
44. The translation of a report about his travels through North America (1747-1751) by Pehr
Kalm, another student of Linnaeus, followed a similar pattern. First published in Swedish, it
was then translated into German, and then from the German into English. On translations
of Carl Peter Thunberg’s journey to Japan see Marie-Christine Skuncke, Carl Peter Thunberg,
botanist and physician: career-building across the oceans in the eighteenth century (Uppsala, 2014),
p.252-70; on translations of Linnaeus’s works see Bettina Dietz, ‘Linnaeus’s restless system’.
45. Pehr Osbeck, Herrn Peter Osbeck, Pastors zu Haßlo
¨f und Woxtorp, der Ko
¨nigl. Schwedischen Akademie
zu Stockholm und der Ko
¨n. Gesellschaft zu Upsala Mitgliedes, Reise nach Ostindien und China, nebst O.
Toreens Reise nach Suratte und C. G. Ekebergs Nachricht von der Landwirthschaft der Chineser,
translated from the Swedish by J. G. Georgi (Rostock, Johann Christian Koppe, 1765).
46. Schreber translated Des Herrn Archiaters und Ritters von Linne
´Reisen durch einige schwedische
Provinzen, 2 vols (Halle, Johann Jakob Curts, 1764-1765), vol.1, Reisen durch Oeland und
Gothland, vol.2, Reisen durch Westgothland. He supervised the publication of, among others,
extended editions of Caroli A. Linne´Genera Plantarum [...], editio octava post Reichardianam
secunda [...] auctior atque emendatior, curante D. Jo. Christiano Dan. Schreber (Frankfurt am Main,
Varrentrapp and Wenner, 1789-1791); Caroli Linnæi Materia Medica; editio secunda auctior,
curante Jo. Chr. Dan. Schrebero (Leipzig and Erlangen, Wolfgang Walther, 1772).
47. Georgi had run a pharmacy in Stendal (Saxony-Anhalt), before he moved to St Petersburg
in 1769, from where he accompanied Peter Simon Pallas’s expeditions through Russia in
the 1770s. His later publications were based on these travels. In his Foreword to Osbeck’s
travel report, it also contained the following texts: a description of Olof
Tore´n’s (1718-1753) journey to Surat (in northern India) and China, also
translated from the Swedish, which had been included in the Swedish
version of Osbeck’s report;
48
the inaugural lecture that Osbeck had
delivered when he became a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of
Sciences in 1758;
49
and a report about agriculture in China by Carl
Gustav Ekeberg (1716-1784), a captain with the Swedish East India
Company.
50
The most interesting additions from the point of view of
publication strategy, however, were made by Osbeck and Schreber, and
these will be discussed in greater detail below.
Osbeck was actively involved in the translation process. He sent
Schreber new, as yet unpublished material, which Schreber then inserted
at the appropriate place and, where necessary, supplemented further and
annotated.
51
Osbeck seems to have welcomed if not expected the oppor-
tunity to publish additional material, or to correct observations that had
already been published. Schreber put any observations by Osbeck that
arrived after the printing process had begun into his Foreword, where he
supplemented and commented on them further. There, for example,
Schreber pointed to the considerable differences that he had noticed
between the generic character of Cassytha, a genus of semi-parasitic
climbing plant, as described by Osbeck on the one hand and by Nikolaus
Joseph von Jacquin on the other.
52
As both authors had proved them-
selves to be knowledgeable and reliable observers through their journeys
and the publications based on them, it was not to be assumed, Schreber
wrote, that one or the other had made a blunder in this matter. He
732. Pehr Osbeck’s travelogue and the culture of collaborative publishing
travel report, Schreber mentions that Georgi had studied in Uppsala for a number of
years, and had already demonstrated his knowledge of Swedish acquired there in other
translations. See Osbeck, Reise nach Ostindien und China, preface, p.xvi.
48. The Swedish original of Tore´n’s text was appended to the Swedish version of Osbeck’s
travel report as an appendix under the title En Ostindisk Resa Til Suratte, China &c. Fra
˚n
1750 April 1. til 1752. Jun. 26 Fo
¨rra
¨ttad af Olof Tore
´
n; in the German translation, the title is
Eine Ostindische Reise nach Suratte, China etc., von 1750. den 1 April bis 1752. den 26 Jun. Verrichtet
von Olof Toreen, Schiffsprediger der ostindischen Compagnie.
49. Anleitungen zu einer nu
¨tzlichen Aufmerksamkeit bey chinesischen Reisen, in einer Rede bey der
Aufnahme in die Ko
¨nigl. Schwed. Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Stockholm, den 25 Hornung 1758.
ertheilet von Peter Osbeck.
50. Kurzer Bericht von der chinesischen Landwirtschaft, von dem Herrn Schiffscapitain Carl Gustav
Eckeberg.
51. Unfortunately this process is not documented in Schreber’s correspondence. His papers,
held by the University Library Erlangen, contain only a single letter from Osbeck, dating
from the 1770s.
52. See Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin, Selectarum stirpium Americanarum historia, in qua ad
Linnaeanum systema determinatae descriptaeque sistuntur plantae illae, quas in insulis Martinica,
Jamaica, Domingo, aliisque, et in vicinae continentis parte, observavit rariores (Vienna, Kraus, 1763),
p.115; Osbeck, Reise nach Ostindien und China, preface, p.xiii.
therefore invited the informed reader to decide: ‘whether [...] the plant
that he [Jacquin] saw, the Cuscuta baccifera barbadensium Pluk. Alm. 126. t.
172. f. 2., was of a different genus from the Chinese Cassutha Rumph. Herb.
Amb. 5. p. 491. t. 184 f. 4 observed by Pastor Osbeck [...] especially as there
seems to be a marked difference in the structure of the two.’
53
Schreber’s achievement, therefore, was to have identified a classi-
ficatory problem, which he then asked others to solve. Noting inconsis-
tencies in the main text or footnotes of publications, and asking questions
to which the author himself was unable to provide definitive answers, was
part of the arsenal of strategies used by Linnaeus and others to generate
knowledge in a collaborative publication culture.
54
Osbeck had already
inserted footnotes that served this purpose into the Swedish original
version of his travel report. For example, with reference to the descrip-
tion of a Chinese fruit called by its local name of Lang-ann in the text, a
footnote asks whether this might be the same plant that Georg Eberhard
Rumpf had called Cussambium in his Herbarium amboinense (Amsterdam,
1741-1750)?
55
Elsewhere Osbeck expresses his belief that a plant he
described was Linnaeus’s Convolvulus batatas, which corresponded to
Hans Sloane’s Convolvulus radice tuberosa esculenta minore purpurea.
56
The frequency of such questions and conjectures in botanical publi-
cations shows that authors and their readers saw these works, especially
those with an ambitious scope, as provisional. It was crucial for the
accumulative process of knowledge acquisition in botany to make new
information public as quickly as possible, so that those who needed it for
their own work could use it. The iterative model of publication described
above took account of this need. Few large botanical publications could
claim long-term relevance unless they were to some degree based on this
principle of constantly collecting and incorporating information. In this
sense, to publish not only knowledge that was reliably established, or
considered to be secure, but also questions and conjectures to be
answered, confirmed, or refuted in later editions on the basis of readers’
reactions, made a constructive contribution to the long-term complete-
ness of a work.
74 Bettina Dietz
53. ‘ob nicht [...] diejenige Pflanze, welche er [Jacquin] gesehen hat, die Cuscuta baccifera
barbadensium Pluk. Alm. 126. t. 172. f. 2., von der chinesischen vom Herrn Pastor Osbeck
beobachteten Cassutha Rumph. Herb. Amb. 5. p. 491. t. 184 f. 4 [...] dem Geschlecht nach
unterschieden sey, zumal da sich in der Structur von beyden eine merkliche Differenz zu
finden scheint.’ Osbeck, Reise nach Ostindien und China, preface, p.xv (author’s own
translation).
54. See Dietz, ‘Contribution and co-production’, p.565.
55. See Osbeck, Dagbok, p.193 (‘An Cussambium? Rumpf. libr. 1. p.154. t. 56’). Schreber
retained the footnote unchanged, in Latin, in the German translation. See Osbeck, Reise,
p.251.
56. See Osbeck, Dagbok, p.253.
Schreber continued this process initiated by Osbeck. He retained
Osbeck’s questions which were still unresolved, and added notes that
gave the readers of his translation more material for solving a problem,
signing his additions with his initials ‘D. S.’ (Daniel Schreber). To
Osbeck’s detailed description of a tree named Dracaena ferrea, for
example, he added a footnote in which he identified this tree as a plant
that had already been described in Linnaeus’s Species plantarum and
Rumpf’s Herbarium amboinense: ‘The tree in question here is called As-
paragus terminalis LINN. Spec. pl. p. 450. n. 13. Terminalis alba RUMPH.
amb. t. 4. p. 79. t. 34. D.S.’
57
Given Linnaean botany’s enormous need for
information and the constant need to modify and correct already
published observations, names, classifications and so on, a translation
offered a vital opportunity to update the original.
Layers of information: multiple authors
Six years after the publication of the German translation, Osbeck’s travel
report went through another cycle of updating, in the form of a second
translation. In 1771 the German natural historian Johann Reinhold
Forster (1729-1798) published an English version, which continued the
project begun by Osbeck and Schreber, and further decentralised it.
58
It
was not that English natural historians could not benefit from the
Swedish-Latin original or the German translation but, as the English
merchant and amateur botanist Peter Collinson explained, travel reports
in English were generally bestsellers on the English book market.
59
752. Pehr Osbeck’s travelogue and the culture of collaborative publishing
57. ‘Der Baum von welchem hier die Rede ist, heißt Asparagus terminalis LINN. Spec. pl. p. 450.
n. 13. Terminalis alba RUMPH. amb. t. 4. p. 79. t. 34. D.S.’ See Osbeck, Reise, p.328
(translation by the author); on the translation of botanical texts as a process of textual
engineering, and on the growing complexity of information layering see Dietz,
‘Linnaeus’s restless system’.
58. On Johann Reinhold Forster as a translator of travel literature see Vladimir Kapor,
‘Translating the great maritime explorations: on Johann Reinhold Forster’s translation of
Bougainville’s Voyage autour du monde’, in Travel narratives in translation, 1750-1830: national-
ism, ideology, gender, ed. Alison Martin and Susan Pickford (Abingdon, 2012), p.93-109; on
Georg Forster’s translations of travel literature see Alison Martin, ‘U
¨bersetzung und die
Entdeckung der Welt: Georg Forster und die Reiseliteratur’, in U
¨bersetzung / Translation /
Traduction: ein internationales Handbuch zur U
¨bersetzungsforschung / an international encyclopedia
of translation studies / une encyclope
´
die internationale de la recherche sur la traduction, ed. Harald
Kittel, Armin Paul Frank et al., 3 vols (Berlin, 2008-2011), vol.2 (2008), p.1634-41; Christine
Haug, ‘‘‘Diese Arbeit unterha
¨lt mich, ohne mich zu ermu
¨den’’: Georg Forsters
U
¨bersetzungsmanufaktur in Mainz in den 1790er Jahren’, Georg-Forster-Studien 13 (2008),
p.99-128.
59. See letter of Peter Collinson to Linnaeus, 20 April 1754, in Carl Linnaeus, A Selection of the
correspondence of Linnaeus and other naturalists, from the original manuscripts, ed. James Edward
Smith, 2 vols (London, 1821), vol.1, p.31-32 (32). In this letter Collinson commented on the
publication in Swedish of Pehr Kalm’s En Resa til Norra America, pa
˚Kongl. Swenska Wetenskaps
Academiens befattning, och publici kostnad, 3 vols (Stockholm, Lars Salvius, 1753-1761): ‘I hope
Forster translated the German version of Osbeck’s travel report, that
is, one that had already been expanded, and now enriched it by adding
more information. Readers could reconstruct the provenance of the
observations inserted into the original by stages because Forster also
worked with footnotes which he signed with the initial ‘F’ (for ‘Forster’).
In this way, the text went through two cycles of revision by three authors
– Osbeck himself, Schreber and Forster – during which it was updated or
revised where relevant new information had come to light.
Thus Forster, for example, commented on the description of Dracaena
ferrea quoted above, which had already been expanded by Schreber, by
adding another footnote on botanical nomenclature. Forster referred to
the entry on Dracaena in the most recent version of Linnaeus’s Systema
naturae available at the time when his translation was published, that is,
the twelfth, and the classificatory changes that Linnaeus had made there,
repeating the synonyms that Schreber had used in his German trans-
lation: ‘(Dracaena ferrea, Linn. Syst. Nat., ed. 12. p. 246). D.S. remarks that it is
called Asparagus terminalis in Species Plantar and Terminalis alba by Rumph.
Am. vol. IV. p. 79. tab. 34, but Linnaeus, in his new system, on the
aforementioned page, calls that species of Asparagus,Dracaena terminalis.
F.’
60
Or to take another example, in a long footnote on the tea shrub,
Schreber had reported a claim by the English botanist John Hill that,
contrary to general assumption, black tea and green tea were not just the
result of different methods of picking and preparation, but were made
from the leaves of different tea plants. Forster retained the footnote, but
added a final sentence, in which he cast doubt on the validity of this
claim:
It has been universally believed that all teas came from the same shrub, and
are only distinguished by different age, gathering, and preparation. But Dr.
Hill has lately discovered that the brown tea comes from the tea shrub with
six petals, or flower leaves, which Kaempfer has described, and represented:
but that the green tea is taken from the tea shrub with nine leaved flowers.
The former in Linnaeus’s Spec. Plantarum, Ed. ii. p. 734 is Thea bohea, and the
latter Thea viridis. Linnaeus distinguishes it, besides the flowers, by the longer
and narrower leaves. Dr. Schreber. It is, notwithstanding, very doubtful
whether the plant of the green tea is really different from that of the bohea
tea. F.
61
76 Bettina Dietz
some ingenious man will translate it into either Latin, English, or French. All books of
voyages and travels, printed in English, sell the most of any books in England.’
60. Osbeck, Voyage to China, vol.2, p.14. References to Linnaeus’s nomenclature also play a
central part in Forster’s translation of Bougainville’s Voyage autour du monde. See Kapor,
‘Translating’, p.99.
61. Osbeck, Voyage to China, vol.1, p. 246.
In addition to these footnotes with comments and corrections, Forster
offered the readers of his translation of Osbeck a further addition.
Under the title Faunula sinensis and Flora sinensis, he put together an
overview, organised by Linnaean principles of classification, of all the
Chinese animals and plants known so far, compiled from Linnaeus’s
Species plantarum, Osbeck’s travel report, and other botanical publi-
cations. His aim was to record the status quo of European knowledge
of Chinese flora and fauna at the time, to draw attention to classificatory
discrepancies or difficulties, to identify cases where different authors had
given the same plant different botanical names, and to refer to the best
descriptions in botanical literature.
Under the generic name of Panicum, for example, Forster’s Flora sinensis
presents a list of known Chinese species of millet as follows: ‘1.
Alopecurodeum, 2. Glaucum, 3. Crus galli, 4. Brevifolium, 5. Arborestens, 6.
Patens, 7. dissectum. Osbeck. Perhaps the P. dimidiatum Linn.’
62
Forster here
pointed out that the seventh species might have been listed both by
Osbeck and Linnaeus but under different names. He could not settle this
question himself, but left it to be cleared up by others. Yet the reference
to this potential duplication alone was of great benefit, as it localised a
problem that others now merely had to solve, without first having to find
or identify it.
Compiling a Chinese Flora was, like Linnaean botany in general, a
long-term project that depended on countless contributions, obser-
vations and corrections. Osbeck’s expedition and his travel report pro-
vided the core that others built on. This sort of collaboration required a
central authority, someone to record newly identified and named species
in a central register and to update and correct these entries when
necessary. After Linnaeus had served as this centre of global botany
for several decades, publishing expanded editions of his systematic
writings at intervals – the twelfth and last edition of the Systema naturae
that he edited himself was published between 1766 and 1768 – the
publication of Osbeck’s travel report pointed to a structural change.
Immediately after Osbeck’s return from China, it was still taken for
granted that newly discovered species would be incorporated as fully as
possible into the global list of species, Linnaeus’s Species plantarum. But
Forster’s Faunula and Flora sinensis were symptoms of a process of
differentiation, from a central, global register to several regional regis-
ters that were no longer maintained by a single scientist but by several, in
order to keep up with the explosive growth in botanical and zoological
information.
772. Pehr Osbeck’s travelogue and the culture of collaborative publishing
62. Osbeck, Voyage to China, vol.2, p.343.
What was a botanical author in the eighteenth century?
There is, as yet, no comprehensive answer to this question, but it will be
closely connected to the answer to a second question, namely, what is a
botanical publication, or how did it come about? What has been shown
here is that far-reaching forms of collective authorship were not a
product just of the twentieth century, but had already emerged much
earlier, at a time when the knowledge claim of a scientific project or
discipline so far exceeded the capacity of an individual scientist that
collaboration, and thus the aggregation of contributions by many scien-
tists, became a necessity. The global project of Linnaean botany and the
modular and participatory architecture of Linnaeus’s systematic works
as well as of the publications of other botanists – and thus of a Systema
naturae in a wider sense – is probably the most spectacular pre-modern
example of this sort of dynamic. The process of layering information,
however, driven to extremes by Linnaeus but also practised by other
botanists, fragmented the botanical author, who still appeared to be an
individual because, as a rule, only one name was printed on the title page
of publications. Yet the input by all the contributors involved, in the case
of Osbeck’s travel report, the two translators in particular, was minutely
documented. This demonstrated to every reader that this text had not
been produced by one individual, but had grown out of a culture of
collaborative publication.
As the result of collaborations of various dimensions, which had to
reflect this fact, botanical publications of the eighteenth century faced
challenges not entirely different from those of present-day laboratory
research. The long-term accumulation of a Systema naturae (in the wider
sense described above) created a publication culture that anticipated
what, in the biomedical community of the 1990s, was proposed as a
radical solution to the increasingly complex problem of authorship:
replacing the concept of ‘author’ by that of ‘contributor’ in order to take
account of the fundamentally collaborative nature of the knowledge-
production process. A proposal published in the Journal of the American
Medical Association in 1997 suggests that ‘[whoever] has added usefully to
the work’ should be listed as a ‘contributor’, and should briefly describe
his or her own contribution in a list of contributors. This would give
readers a clearer view of the variety and diversity of the contributions
than conventional selective author by-lines permits.
63
This step towards
78 Bettina Dietz
63. See Mario Biagioli, ‘Rights or rewards? Changing frameworks of scientific authorship’, in
Scientific authorship: credit and intellectual property in science, ed. Mario Biagioli and Peter
Galison (New York and London, 2003), p.253-79 (264-66); Drummond Rennie, Veronica
Yank and Linda Emmanuel, ‘When authorship fails: a proposal to make contributors
accountable’, Journal of the American Medical Association 278:7 (1997), p.579-85. The three
a concept of modularised authorship that adequately reflects that a
publication is an aggregate had already been taken, in its way, by
Linnaean botany.
792. Pehr Osbeck’s travelogue and the culture of collaborative publishing
authors’ response to the question of who, in the context of modularised scientific
authorship, is responsible for the content of a publication is to suggest that ‘special
contributors’ should be designated.
