This panel brings together material, global and bibliographical approaches to natural history during the long eighteenth century (c. 1680–1820), seeking parallels between the processes involved in transferring three dimensional objects into a publication. Concentrating on a selection of different historical actors and situating knowledge production in a variety of geographical and social settings, each paper in this session endeavours to unfold the dynamic connections between objects, publications and a range of different, and sometimes obscure, actors who contributed to the production and dissemination of natural-historical knowledge. While the first paper is concerned with approaches to collecting information in the field, concentrating on the information networks of Georg Everhard Rumphius in the East Indies, through which he gathered material for his publications, the second paper examines the work of the Berlin based Jewish Physician Marcus Élieser Bloch, and how he converted fish specimens gathered from across the oceans into his Allgemeine Naturgeschichte der Fische (1782–1794). The next paper brings into account the late-eighteenth century publishing practices of Joseph Banks, who produced a number of botanical books which he then distributed on a global scale. Paper four examines the cases of Thomas Molyneux and Hans Sloane and their use of fossil elephant’s teeth to dismiss the popular belief that they originated from giants, following accounts they published in the Philosophical Transactions. The final paper examines the connections between scientific oceanic exploration, examining the use of images by Count Luigi Ferdinando Marsili in his Historoire Physique de la Mer (1725).
