Preface to the Princeton Landmarks in Biology Edition vii Preface xi Symbols Used xiii 1. The Importance of Islands 3 2. Area and Number of Speicies 8 3. Further Explanations of the Area-Diversity Pattern 19 4. The Strategy of Colonization 68 5. Invasibility and the Variable Niche 94 6. Stepping Stones and Biotic Exchange 123 7. Evolutionary Changes Following Colonization 145 8. Prospect 181 Glossary 185 References 193 Index 201

The Theory of Island Biogeography

The fragmented forest : island biogeography theory and the preservation of biotic diversity / Larry D. Harris

The question is posed: is a coherent theory of islandness – nissology – possible? Faultlines within constructions of islands and islandness are noted. Some of these axes of contestation have remained latent but have the potential to be sharply divisive. Three of the identified faultlines are examined – the nature of the island ‘edge’, the import for questions of island memory and identity of massive inward and outward movements of people, and the appropriation of island ‘realness’ by those for whom ‘island’ best functions as metaphor. A case is made for the excision of the latter from the purview of island studies. Despite apparent irreconcilability within island studies’ emerging faultlines, it is argued that place theory does constitute a theoretical framing that can work for island studies. Following a brief overview of the faultlines that also exist within place studies, it is noted that the difference-respecting and identity focused nature of phenomenology of place is particularly apposite for island studies, and the paper concludes with a consideration of what a phenomenology of islands might look like.

A Phenomenology of Islands

Revolution in Science

What sort of activities took place in the academic laboratories developed for teaching the natural sciences in Britain between the 1860s and 1880s? What kind of social and instrumental regimes were implemented to make them meaningful and efficient venues of experimental instruction? As humanly constructed sites of experiment how were the metropolitan institutional contexts of these laboratories engineered to make them legitimate places to study ‘Nature’? Previous studies have documented chemists' effective use of regimented quantitative analysis in their laboratory teaching from the 1820s, but less is known about how Victorian academics made other sorts of laboratories unproblematic pedagogical spaces. This paper will examine the literary, disciplinary and instrumental technologies of microscopy deployed by T. H. Huxley at his South Kensington laboratory during the early 1870s to render his biology teaching legitimate, meaningful and efficient. As such it is a response to Pickstone's recent call for a broader account of microscopy teaching in late nineteenth-century academic life science, and one localized answer to Bennett's enquiries as to what the appearance of a microscope in laboratories and other domestic settings betokened to historical actors, and how such tokens changed over time.

'Nature' in the laboratory: domestication and discipline with the microscope in Victorian life science.

Hume, Stephen, and Elegy in To the Lighthouse

Since this essay was the outcome of an invitation from the Society for Literature and Science, let me begin my argument by dwelling on that copula, ‘and’. Literature and science: science and literature: what is the force of the connective? It polarises the two domains; it yokes them together in a privileged pair, separated from other cultural expressions. It also sorts them hierarchically according to which is mentioned first, so that they become prime term and concessive term: science and literature; literature and science. One is given the originating role, the other that of dependent, providing ‘context’ or ‘background’. Power struggles are masked by the deliberately evenhanded and non-directive ‘and’.

Discourses of the Island

The theme announced for this lecture, ‘the presentation of science through literature’ might suggest a one-way traffic, as though literature acted as a mediator for a topic (science) that precedes it and that remains intact after its re-presentation That is not how I understand the relations between the two. I shall emphasize interchange rather than origins and transformation rather than translation. Scientific and literary discourses overlap, but unstably. Victorian writers, scientific and literary, held to the ideal of the ‘mother-tongue’; in our own time the variety of professional and personal dialects is emphasised instead. Yet the expectation lingers that it should be possible to translate stably from one to another. This expectation may prove unrealistic. M ore is to be gained from analysing the transformations that occur when ideas change creative context and encounter fresh readers. The fleeting and discontinuous may be as significant in our reading as the secure locking of equivalent meanings. Questions can change their import when posed within different genres. Recognizing scientific reference within works of literature may not be as straightforward a business as it seems. To put it at its most direct: how do we recognize science once it is in literature? Can such reference to scientific material be drained again of its relations within the literary work and returned to autonomy?

Translation or transformation? the relations of literature and science*

Much recent narrative theory has impresseci on us the significance of gaps, fissures, absences and exclusions in the composition of a fiction and in our reading and our judgement of it. We have also been reminded of the essentially linguistic nature of the novel and attention has shifted from character to language, to the text as process rather than the text as memory. It is in memory that the discussion of character thrives. Linguistic process is the reader’s experience only while he is reading. But since the novel, as opposed to folktale, is an invariant linguistic structure composed by a single author, the order of its words is the condition of receiving its experience. Forster himself emphasised the act of reading in Aspects of the Novel.

Gillian Beer

Papers

Hume, Stephen, and Elegy in To the Lighthouse

Discourses of the Island

Translation or transformation? the relations of literature and science*

Negation in A Passage to India

The Reader's Wager: Lots, Sorts, and Futures