Abstract
The tedium and torture that Vinogradskii associated with his apprenticeship in St. Petersburg did not long dissuade him from a scientific career. He spent the summer of 1885 recuperating and dabbling in scientific farming on his Kiev estate, still considering the same career alternatives that he had during his gymnasium days. The local botanical excursions he enjoyed with his mother and the experiments he conducted in his home laboratory attest to his enduring interest in botany, an interest that finally won out over a life as a gentleman farmer. That fall he departed for Strassburg and one of the foremost botanical teaching laboratories in Europe, where he would commit himself to a field of study that was itself just emerging from disciplinary chaos. During Vinogradskii’s “Strassburg period”—the years from 1885 to 1888—he intensively investigated the physiology of several “peculiar” microscopic organisms.
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- 1.
See below and Part III for a discussion of the rise of ecology as a discipline and a way of thinking.
- 2.
Although a self-conscious discipline of ecology would not form until the early-twentieth century, the conceptual frameworks and methodologies that defined that discipline were already prevalent in late-nineteenth century botany and plant physiology.
- 3.
He recalled that he could not pursue this option because “he was not able to set himself up.” Though, if he had, he thought, he “would have probably remained in Gorodok [his] entire life, devoting [himself] completely to a country life and farm work, which had always attracted [him] ….” This would have precluded any serious scientific career on his part.” Vinogradskii, Itogi, 22.
- 4.
Ibid., 16.
- 5.
He does not specify what he investigated in this small laboratory, however, when he departed from the university in 1884 he took he microscope and glassware with him. At this time cell morphology was an expanding area of study that encompassed nearly every theoretical perspective and a wide range of techniques that could be preformed in a small home laboratory. Cell morphology would play a central role in his subsequent investigations at Strassburg and Zurich.
- 6.
Ibid., 16.
- 7.
Ibid., 14, 22.
- 8.
Ibid., 13. The difficulties of his recent experiences in St. Petersburg, the freedom offered by his personal wealth, and a dislike for St. Petersburg’s cold and damp climate certainly influenced him in making this decision, but it was also common for students (Russian, American, or other) at his stage of development to spend a couple of years training in Western Europe. There was a widespread perception within Russia’s scientific society that any serious science investigator should study for a year or two in a Western university.
- 9.
Other options included working in with Simon Schwendener at the University of Berlin, Gottlieb Haberlandt in Tubingen, and Eduard Strasburger in Bonn, to name only a few. See Eugene Cittadino, Nature as the Laboratory: Darwinian Plant Ecology in the German Empire, 1880–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) for a discussion of these schools.
- 10.
Famintsyn and De Bary shared an interest in investigating symbiotic relationships in fungi and lichens. De Bary had coined the term “symbiosis” in his Die Erscheinung der Symbiose (Strassburg, 1879). They showed each other a mutual respect, which would have enhanced De Bary’s positive reception of Vinogradskii in 1885. Both Famintsyn and his close friend and colleague M. I. Voronin had, following the advice of their advisor Lev Semenovich Tsenkovskii, spent 1858 expanding their scientific horizons under De Bary’s guiding charms. See B. P. Strogonov, Andre Sergeevich Famintsyn, 1835–1918 (Moscow, Nauka, 1996), 22.
- 11.
Direct observations and the study of life cycles were central to De Bary’s study of Peronospora infestans the parasite responsible for the 1861 potato blight. This research brought him wide recognition and involved him in the question of spontaneous generation. See Gloria Robinson, “Heinrich Anton De Bary,” Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Vol. 1, 612–613; Vinogradskii, Itogi, 14.
- 12.
Vinogradskii, Itogi, 14.
- 13.
Ibid.
- 14.
Ibid.
- 15.
It is most probable that Fischer also directed Vinogradskii to Konrad Meyer-Ahrens, Die Heilquellen und Kurorte der Schweiz: und einiger der Schweiz zunächst angrenzenden Gegenden der Nachbarstaaten (Zurich: Drell, Füssli, and Co., 1867), 2nd edition. In this extensive classification of mineral springs and health resorts in Switzerland Meyer-Ahrens described all of the springs that Vinogradskii visited: Adelboden, Rinderwald, and unnamed spring near Leissigen. It is quite clear that Vinogradskii referenced Meyer-Ahrens book; the description of the Leissigen source follows Meyer-Ahrens verbatim. Vinogradskii cites him in another place in “Ueber Schwefelbacterien.” Meyer-Ahrens lists Bad Langenbrück in the Canton Basel, Switzerland; see his Die Heilquellen und Kurorte der Schweiz, 659–660. This cite was popular with the chemists, including Robert Bunsen and his student Lothar Meyer; The physician Charles Müller, who Vinogradskii cites, also tested these waters; see Meyer-Ahrens, see Die Heilquellen und Kurorte der Schweiz, 226.
- 16.
Winogradsky, “Ueber Schwefelbakterien,” 530–531.
- 17.
Ibid., 531. He does not mention for what purposes the other two were used.
- 18.
Ibid. Vinogradskii knew that these sulphur springs belonged to the larger sulphur spring group, which arose from the gypsum rich Jurassic limestone of the Stockhorn and Nieson network of mountain ranges; see Ibid., 531.
- 19.
Today Beggiatoa are one of the primary organisms used in microbial ecology for determining the health of ecosystems. Because it is difficult to raise this organism in artificial cultures laboratory investigators must still find natural sources.
- 20.
Ibid., 557.
- 21.
Ibid., 557–558.
- 22.
Ibid., 531.
- 23.
Winogradsky, “Ueber Schwefelbacterien,” 557–558.
- 24.
The best source he had located was an analysis of the water at the Weilbach spring in Fresenius, Jahrbucher des vereins fur Naturkunde in Herzogthum Nassau, Heft. XI, 1854.
- 25.
It was common practice in this community to share samples, even across disciplinary lines and with challengers to one’s claims.
- 26.
There is evidence that the Vinogradskii family enjoyed the spas. Vinogradskii often took his family to the Evian-aux-Bains and the Aix-aux-Bains when he lived in Brie-Comte-Robert near Paris in the 1920s–1940s.
- 27.
On spa culture see: Helena Wadley Lepovitz, “Pilgrims, Patients, and Painters: The Formation of a Tourist Culture in Bavaria” Historical Reflections, Vol. 18, No. 1, 121–145, esp. 123, 126, 144–145; The “pilgrims and patients” that Lepovitz describes as journeying “to natural curative locations set amidst the ethnic vistas celebrated by Bavarian artists” shared their sites with botanists such as Cohn and Vinogradskii who also conducted repeated pilgrimages. Where Lepovitz’s pilgrims and patients were helping to shape Bavaria’s tourist culture, the nineteenth century naturalists were shaping European scientific culture by engaging certain networks, investigatory methodologies and over arching theoretical systems. Douglas Peter Mackaman, “The Landscape of a Ville d’Eau: Public Space and Social Practice at the Spas of France, 1850–1890,” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History, Vol. 20, 1993, 281–291; Mackaman writes that “Hesitant and uninitiated travelers consulted one of the countless spa guide books written by prolific publicists like Louis Berthet. These books beyond their vast amount of technical information, attempted to give their readers something of the traveler’s sensibility and experience. One learned much about otherwise foreign “topographies” by reading spa guides, as most books lavished a great deal of prose on carefully crafted descriptions of terrain, geology, meteorology, flora, and fauna. In discussing natural science and local history, authors typically conferred a combination of monumentality and romanticism on their subject.” Mackaman, “The Landscape of a Ville d’Eau: Public Space and Social Practice at the Spas of France, 1850–1890,” 283.
- 28.
Cittadino, Nature as the Laboratory, 1–2.
- 29.
Ibid., 4.
- 30.
Ibid., 5–6.
- 31.
Although other scientists had visited these same or similar sulphur springs, and had also noted their peculiarity, Vinogradskii interpreted these sites very differently. Below we will see that Ferdinand Cohn, for example, who, like Vinogradskii also viewed the role of bacteria in nature’s economy from a “biological” perspective, had not conducted his collecting in the same way as had Vinogradskii.
- 32.
Ibid., 4. I agree with Cittadino’s portrayal, but am reluctant to accept his stress on ‘younger men’ and ‘new generation,’ for the worst of its inherent Kuhnian implications. This history is complicated also by the fact that German transformism itself has a much longer history that predates Darwin’s work. See Pauline M. H. Mazumdar, Species and Specificity: An Interpretation of the History of Immunology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 34. She cites Philip R Sloan, “Darwin, Vital Matter, and the Transformation of Species,” Journal of the History of Biology, Vol. 19, 1986, 369–445.
- 33.
I have not found a single reference to Darwin’s work in any of Vinogradskii’s writing. In his sulphur bacteria research he does refer to competition between species for resources, but the idea of competition for resources has a long history that predates Darwin’s evolution by natural selection.
- 34.
On the introduction of Darwinian evolution into German botany see Cittadino, Nature as the Laboratory, 2, 4; and on the reception of Darwinism in Russia see Daniel P. Todes, Darwin Without Malthus: The Struggle for Existence in Russian Evolutionary Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 23.
- 35.
With few exceptions, previous portrayals of Vinogradskii’s discovery of new physiological types and later chemosynthesis have relied too heavily on his own portrayal of the events, especially as related in his autobiographical remarks. Most historians have drawn primarily on Microbiologiia Pochvy (the Russian translation of the French compendium of his life’s work), or his own account of this period in other autobiographical writings. Few, it seems have spent time with the original German and French published reports which contain a wealth of information, relative both to his scientific efforts and personal history. It is difficult to tease out the multiple influences on his research during this period. On the monomorphism-pleiomorphism debate see Penn and Dworkin (1976), Amsterdamska (1988), and Vinogradskii (1937); James Strick, Sparks of Life: Darwinism and the Victorian Debates over Spontaneous Generation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), esp. 123–128; and Mazumdar, Species and Specificity: An Interpretation of the History of Immunology, 46–59.
- 36.
Famintsyn conducted novel researches into the nature of photosynthesis, and viewed the interaction between organisms and their environment as a dynamic, not static process. His ideas were very influential on Vinogradskii’s research.
- 37.
Vinogradskii did not claim that a pleiomorphic species could not exist; however, he would accept such a finding if it some future work could demonstrate it, if it used his prescribed method of prolonged direct observation of life cycles. In his own experiments, however, he had found no evidence in support of any such ‘natural law’ for bacteria. Although this debate did play a part in Vinogradskii’s research at Strassburg (and sporadically throughout his career), and though it spread throughout the scientific community, especially when it involved mycology (the study of fungi), this is not the place for an extensive discussion of its details. He was aware of the debate and even engaged it quite openly. Explaining the sulphur bacteria research that Vinogradskii conducted in Strassburg solely in terms of the species constancy question restricts the significance of his broader theoretical commitments to plant physiology. Although he did believe that by focusing on physiological traits he had solved the riddle of some bacterial genetic relationships—that is, he had proven pleiomorphic taxonomies incorrect—he was more concerned with trying to understand their roles in the economy of nature.
- 38.
There may also have been some distant relation between Vinogradskii’s interest here and Nägeli’s proposed iconoplasm. Nägeli described iconoplasm as “a filament of “micelles,” which crystallized out of “the primitive albuminoid matter in the ooze where life begins.” See Charles Coulston Gillespie, The Edge of Objectivity: An Essay in the History of Scientific Ideas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), 323.
- 39.
De Bary, Lectures on Bacteria, 25–26. The perspective espoused by Zavarzin and others that Vinogradskii pursued his research in Strasbourg and Zurich as a conscious plan to prove the fallacy of the pleiomorphic view of microbial systematics, and that this research program stemmed logically from his training in St. Petersburg, is not supported by the available evidence. Zavarzin writes that “A botanist by education, Winogradsky had strong objections to the theory of pleiomorphism in bacteriology and the realization of the rigidity of bacterial form and function came to be one of the leading ideas spanning all his research work.” (G. A. Zavarzin, “Sergei N. Winogradsky and the Discovery of Chemosynthesis” in Hans G. Schlegel and Botho Bowein, eds., Autotrophic Bacteria (Madison: Science Tech Publishers, 1989); This book is a collection of reviews based on the symposium “Lithoautotrophy, a centenary meeting in memory of S.N. Winogradsky” held in Gottingen, August 23–28, 1987). There is, however, an interesting coincidence in this debate. Zopf (also a botanist) published his Zur Morphologie des Saltpilze in 1882 (the same year that Tsenkovskii published Microorganismy) in which he described his theory of ‘the changeability of forms in response to various substrates.” Here Zopf recognized his Russian supporters, Tsenkovskii, Gobi and Kostychev (the latter two had published a Russian translation of Zopf’s monograph. Russia’s founding microbiologists (primarily botanists at this time, excluding Metchnikov) were divided on this question of microbial species constancy. Pleiomorphists included among their numbers Tsenkovskii, Gobi, Kostychev, Ivanov, Metchnikov, and Kholodnyi. The monomorphists were Famintsyn and Voronin.
- 40.
Ferdinand Cohn, “Untersuchungen über Bacterien,” Beiträge zur Biologie der Pflanzen (Breslau: J.U. Kern’s Verlag, Max Muller, 1875), Vol. 1, No. 2, 1872, 127–222; Ibid., “Untersuchungen über Bacterien II,” Idem., Vol. 1, No. III, 1875, 141–204.
- 41.
Cohn, “Untersuchungen über Bacterien,” 128.
- 42.
Ibid., 130.
- 43.
Ibid., 129–130.
- 44.
Ibid., 133.
- 45.
Ibid., 134.
- 46.
Ibid.
- 47.
Ibid., 134–135.
- 48.
Ibid., 135. When Cohn discussed bacterial nutrition, a topic that could hardly be avoided after Pasteur’s work, he made no explicit references to taxonomic issues. Instead he treated it as a separate issue, just as he had other topics, such as the ability of bacteria to resist heat. Ibid., 191–192.
- 49.
Ferdinand Cohn, “Untersuchungen über Bacterien II,” Beiträge zur Biologie der Pflanzen (Breslau: J.U. Kern’s Verlag, Max Muller, 1875), Vol. III, 141–204.
- 50.
It is likely that these “familial associations” are related to the “associations” studied by ecologists such as Warming and Tansley. See Eugenius Warming, “Plantamsfund: grundtrak of den ökologiska plantegeographi (Copenhagen: Philipsens Forlag, 1895); idem, Lehrbuch der Ökologischen Planzengeographie. Eine Einführung in die Kenntniss der Pflanyenvereine (Berlin: Borntraeger, 1896), trans. E. Knoblauch.
- 51.
Cohn, “Untersuchungen über Bacterien II,” 142.
- 52.
Ibid.
- 53.
Ibid. Here he mentioned the specific ferment-effects of microorganisms described by Pasteur.
- 54.
Ibid.
- 55.
These are section titles in Cohn’s “Untersuchungen über Bacterien II”; “Stark Lichtbrechende Körnchen in Bacterien und Beggiatoen” is section 13, 172–173; and “Schwefelwasserstoffentwicklung durch Beggiatoen” is in section 14, 173–174.
- 56.
Ibid., 172–173.
- 57.
Cohn’s research included trips to thermal hot springs throughout the Pyrenees, Alps, and the Euganeen river basin in Italy.
- 58.
Ibid., 173.
- 59.
Winogradsky, “Ueber schwefelbacterian,” 492–493.
- 60.
Today’s readers will be familiar with Lothar Meyer (1833–1895) for his formulation of a periodic law of the elements independent of D. I. Mendeleev’s work. Meyer trained originally as a physician at the University of Zurich and at Würzburg, receiving his MD in 1853. Encouraged by Justus Liebig, his physiology professor at Zurich he turned to the study of physiological chemistry and studied with Robert Bunsen at Heidelberg. It is interesting that his earliest research concerned the physiological study of the uptake of gases by the blood (1856), work similar to Hoppe-Seyler’s (who would later discover hemoglobin in1864). On Meyer, see Otto Theodor Benfey, “Julius Lothar Meyer” Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Vol. 9, 347–353.
- 61.
Lothar Meyer, “Chemische Untersuchungen der Thermen zu Landeck in der Grafschaft Glatz” Journal fur Praktische Chemie, Band 91, Heft 1, 1864, 1–14, esp. 5–6. Meyer had recently been assigned the directorship of the chemistry laboratory in the physiological institute in Breslau, not far from Cohn’s own laboratory.
- 62.
Meyer, following the language of his mentor Robert Bunsen viewed changes in the content of hydrogen sulfide, “proved, as was to be expected, somewhat variable according to the time and circumstances” that samples were taken. Cohn, and Vinogradskii later, may have found the biological significance of this observation enticing. Bunsen when investigation the occurrence of sulphur in coal deposits noted the connection between the great quantity of marsh gas that escaped from the swamp mud was caused by the reduction of the salts of sulfuric acid (sulfates) and the decomposition of humus-like vegetable remains. See Robert Bunsen, “Ueber das Vorkommen von Gyps und Schwefel in Braunkohlenablagerungen,” Studien des Göttingischen Vereins Bergmännischer Freunde, Bd. IV, 359 (Notizenblatt, Nr. 6) republished in Wilhelm Ostwald, ed., Gesammlte Handlungen von Robert Bunsen (Leipsig: Verlag von Wilhelm Engelmann, 1904), Vol. 1, 461–462; See 462. Following Cohn’s lead Vinogradskii also read Meyers work. See Sergius Winogradsky, “Ueber Schwefelbacterien,” Botanische Zeitung, No. 31, 5 August 1887, 489–507, see 491.
- 63.
Warming (1841–1927) published his own bacterial taxonomy in which he described the Beggiatoa Cohn refers to here. See Eugenius Warming, “Om Nogle ved Danmarks Kyster levende Bakterier,” (Kjöbenhavn: Bianco Lunos Bogtrykkeri, 1876), Aftryk af Videnskabelige Meddelelser fra den naturhistoriske Forenin i Kjobenhavn, 1875, No. 20–28; See esp. 50–59. On Warming see D. Müller, “Johannes Eugenius Bülow Warming” Dictionary of Scientific Biogrpahy, Vol. XIV, 181–182. In this work, Warming proposed a new class of Bacterium sulphuratum which included all organisms containing sulphur crystals in their cells. He adopted and recommended a taxonic system similar to Ray Lankester’s pleiomorphic classification system. In 1895, Warming would also write the first monograph on plant ecology.
- 64.
Cohn, “Untersuchungen über Bacterien II,” 179–180. Vinogradskii would also address the issue of the crystalline nature of the sulphur granules. If the crystals were hard crystalline sulphur they were less likely to be part of the organism’s nutritional processes, and were more likely to only an effect of the mechanical, chemical processes occurring around them. This issue was, of course, central to Vinogradskii’s physiological approach.
- 65.
For example, there would have to be large amounts of sulfates in the water and an insufficiency of iron (which would combine with the pure sulphur to form other compounds) thus interfering with hydrogen sulfide production.
- 66.
Cohn, “Untersuchungen über Bacterien II,” 1875, 176–177.
- 67.
Ibid., 176.
- 68.
Ibid., 177.
- 69.
The problem of classifying microorganisms relied on demarcating the regular cycles of development that these botanists and mycologists assumed they were observing in nature. This task was especially complicated for the bacteria, which were so small that even under the most powerful of microscopes they appeared as tiny dots. These various views on species constancy clashed most clearly in the taxonomies established by each author.
- 70.
S.N. Vinogradskii, Mikrobiologiia Pochvy: Problemy i Metody, Piat’desiat let issledovanii A. A. Imshenetskii, ed., (Moskva: Akademiia Nauk, 1951), 74; originally published as Idem., Microbiologie du Sol: Problèmes et Méthodes, Cinquante ans de Recherches (Paris: Masson, 1949). To best understand the significance of Vinogradskii’s prioritization of physiology one needs to assess the extent to which each of the early bacteriologists relied on morphological versus physiological characteristics in constructing their taxonomies, and to consider how the notion of a ‘physiological characteristic’ is changing for these scientists.
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Ackert, L. (2012). The Laboratory is Nature: Investigating the Cycle of Life Under the Microscope. In: Sergei Vinogradskii and the Cycle of Life. Archimedes, vol 34. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5198-9_3
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