John Debraw’s “Discoveries on the sex of bees:” A forgotten explanation for the generation of bees and its role in the eighteenth-century preformation-epigenesis debates Twyla Ruby (Fall 2012)Professor Margaret C. JacobUCLA History Department

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Table of Contents IntroductionDebraw, Schirach and the threat of active matterDebraw between Needham’s epigenesis and Bonnet’s preformationHuber reads DebrawReferences

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IntroductionA mysterious figure named John Debraw forms the subject of an often overlooked

passage in Francois Huber's famous book Nouvelles Observations sur les abeilles (1792).

Echoing the epistolary novels of the same period, Huber's Observations took the form of several

long letters. Addressed to the eminent naturalist Charles Bonnet, and written in compelling

prose, they narrated Huber's discovery that “queens were never impregnated, so long as they

remained in the interior of the hive; but that impregnation always takes place in the open air.”1

This theory is still accepted today, and Huber's Observations are often cited in contemporary

popular literature and by historians of science.2

Thus far, however, none have noted that Debraw played a central role in the process

by which Huber made this storied discovery. In Huber’s first letter to Bonnet, dated August 13,

1789, he mentioned the work of a certain “naturaliste anglois:”

Vous avez rapporté, Monsieur, dans la Contempl. de la Nat. part. XI, chap. XXVII, les observations d’un naturaliste anglois, M. de Braw [sic]. Elles paroissoient faites avec exactitude, et éclaircir enfin le mystère de la fécondation de la Reine-abeille (Voyez le LXVII Vol. des Trans. philos). Cet observateur, favorise par le hasard, appercut un jour au fond de quelques cellules ou il y avoit des oeufs, une liquere blanchatre, en apparence spermatique… Il fut tres-curieux d'en connoitre l'origine, & comme il conjectura que c'etoient des gouttes de la liqueur prolifique des males, il entreprit de veiller dans une de ses ruches tous les mouvemens des faux-bourdons, pour les surprendre au moment ou ils arroseroient les oeufs. Il assure qu'il ne tarde pas a en voir plusieurs que insiuoient la partie posterieure de leur corps dan les cellules, & qui y deposoient leur liqueur.3

1 Huber, Nouvelles Observations sur les Abeilles, Geneva: 1789.2 Caullery, 1942; Drouin, 2005. For Huber’s enduring relevance in popular literature, see two recent examples: Sara George, The Beekeeper’s Pupil, London: Headline Book Publishing, 2002; and Nick Flynn, Blind Huber: Poems, New York: Graywolf Press, 2002.3 Huber, 1792, 26 (“You have reported, Sir, in Contemplation de la Nature part XI, chap. XXVII, the observations of an English naturalist, Mr. de Braw [sic]. They seem to have been made with exactitude, and to finally clarify the mystery of the impregnation of the queen bee (see Phil. Trans. vol. LXVII). This observer, favored by chance, perceived one day in some cells containing eggs a whitish liquor, with a spermatic appearance... He was quite curious to know its origin, and as he conjectured that it was the prolific liquor of the males, he endeavored to observe in his hives all the movements of the drones, to observe them at the moment when they watered the eggs. He assures us that it did not take long to see several drones inserting the posterior part of their bodies into the cells, and deposit their liquor,” all trans. my own unless otherwise noted).

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Huber wrote that when he encountered Debraw's theory in Bonnet's famous work

Contemplation de la Nature, he at first thought it seemed logical, but ultimately concluded that

the theory "avoit quelque chose de très-spécieux.”4 But somehow Huber’s account seems itself

a bit “spécieux” -- especially given the fact that Debraw’s name never actually appeared in

Bonnet’s Contemplation.5 This strange textual discrepancy has been overlooked by historians; I

have accepted it as an invitation to investigate Debraw’s theories about the generation of bees,

and their relationship to Huber’s discovery.

How did Huber learn about Debraw’s observations, if not by reading about them in the

pages of Bonnet’s Contemplation? In this paper I trace the surprising route by which the

observations of an obscure “naturaliste” reached and influenced Huber. My research reveals

that Debraw’s “Discoveries on the sex of bees,” originally published in the Philosophical

Transactions of the Royal Society in January, 1777, was taken up around 1780 by John

Turberville Needham, an influential natural philosopher who used Debraw’s “Discoveries” to

craft an argument in favor of vitalism and epigenetic development. Through his correspondence

with Needham, Bonnet learned of Debraw’s findings, and also adopted them; but Bonnet used

Debraw’s discoveries as part of an argument in defense of the opposite doctrine of preformation!

Bonnet conveyed news of Debraw to his former student Huber by private correspondence, not

in his published book, as he urged Huber to conduct experiments that would vindicate his own

preformationist interpretation of Debraw’s experimental results. By tracing this story, and

resurrecting the forgotten figure of Debraw, I shed some new light on the familiar characters

Needham, Bonner and Huber.

Debraw is a mysterious character who illuminates some of the limitations of the existing

historiography on Enlightenment life science. His name -- a subtle anglicization of the Hebrew

word for "bee" -- is probably a nom de plume, as well as a clue to his religious and social

background. His byline in the Phil. Trans. identified him as “Mr. John Debraw, Apothecary

to Addenbrook's Hospital at Cambridge, and Member of an Oeconomical Society in The

Principality of Liege in Westphalia,” suggesting that the author had cultural links to the Low

Countries, and large ambitions for social reform.6 Describing observations carried out in the

basement of St. Addenbrookes -- a voluntary hospital for the poor where Debraw was employed

4 Huber, 1792, 27. “Had something very specious to it” (my trans).5 Huber wrote that he had encountered Debraw’s name in “part XI, chap XXVII” of that work; but assiduous cross-reference reveals the corresponding chapter in Bonnet -- “Réflexions sur les Castors” (Reflections on Beavers) -- does not cite Debraw.6 Debraw, 1777, 15.

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as Resident Apothecary from 1770-1781 -- “Discoveries on the sex of bees” was the only

scientific article Debraw would ever publish. Nevertheless, his theory on the mating of bees was

widely accepted in the 1770s and 80s, by individuals as ideologically opposed as Needham and

Bonnet; furthermore, it had an important impact on research done in the late-eighteenth century,

including that done by Huber.

Despite his wide impact, Debraw and his theory have been almost totally forgotten

today. Debraw’s erasure reflects larger historiographical trends concerning the life sciences in

eighteenth-century Europe. In the past fifty years, historians of science have established that

questions of life, generation and embryological organization were hotly debated in this period, in

a form and context that must be distinguished from that of nineteenth century biology. Jacques

Roger's field-defining 1963 monograph Les sciences de la vie dans la pensée française du XVIII

siècle discussed an emergent community of French life scientists, linked by epistolary networks

and clustered around questions of animal generation and organization, situated within the

larger context of the French Enlightenment. This model has been developed by other historians,

who have further demonstrated the ferocity of eighteenth-century debates about preformation,

epigenesis, and other controversial concepts surrounding generation and development.

However, this historiography has generally maintained the tight linguistic and geographic focus

of Roger’s pensée française, and failed to explore whether and how these issues played out

elsewhere in the European world. With the French- speaking world comfortably situated at the

epicenter of this historiography, many interesting characters in Britain and the Low Countries,

among other places, have failed to gain adequate notice; and so far no one has mapped

Enlightenment life science on a comparative, global scale.7

With these historiographical considerations in mind, I have utilized a broad range of

eighteenth-century sources to trace the outlines of Debraw’s life, and his role in within the hotly

contested intellectual field surrounding the generation of bees. Unlike the vast majority of

characters in the current historiography on Enlightenment life science, Debraw was a member

of the middling classes, an obscure apothecary with a mysterious past and only tenuous links to

the Royal Society or other institutions of elite science. Reconstructing his life therefore is a small

first step towards rounding out our picture of Enlightenment life science, in a manner according

with the aims of the social and cultural history as they have been advanced in the past several

decades.8

7 Roger, 1963; Roe, 1981; Terrall, 2002.8 Bonnell, Hunt and Biernacki, 1999.

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Debraw, Schirach and the threat of active matterDespite the fact that Huber's Observations cited Debraw by name, contemporary

historians of science have never fully considered the relationship between the two men. Some

historical accounts of Huber mention Debraw briefly, but none look at the content or context of

Debraw's long-forgotten article "Discoveries on the sex of bees." By reconstructing Debraw's

work, and reading it against Huber's better-remembered Observations, I show that Debraw's

theory led to some important developments in contemporary bee science, and also had a crucial

influence on Huber.

Debraw shared his Phil. Trans. byline with "the Rev. Nevil Maskelyne, B.D.F.R.S. and

Astronomer Royal." Maskelyne -- who had famously developed the lunar distance method for

developing longitude in the 1760s -- was a Cambridge man and a Governor of Addenbrooke’s,

who had apparently caught wind of the strange experiments Debraw was conducting on hospital

grounds. Maskelyne communicated them to the Royal Society on Nov. 21, 1776 and they

were printed in the Phil. Trans. the following January. Why was the Royal Society interested

in experiments conducted by an obscure apothecary-cum-beekeeper? It turns out that in his

experiments with bees, Debraw had unexpectedly confirmed a radical and potentially profitable

claim, and was called upon by Maskelyne to act as a witness to its credibility.

Debraw testified to the experimental results of a German pastor named Adam Schirach,

who claimed to have developed a method for artificially producing queen bees. This radical

claim, orignally put forth by Schirach in a 1769 publication in his native German, had escaped

the attention of the Royal Society, since it had been reported only in radical and nonconformist

British periodicals, which the gentleman-fellows of the Royal Society rarely read. Debraw, on the

other hand, was a regular consumer of radical literature, and in 1772 he encountered a report

on Schirach in the Monthly Review.

At the time the prevailing wisdom was that each of the three classes of honey bee -

- queens, drones and workers -- belonged to a separate gender. In his widely-read Biblia

Naturae, Swammerdam detailed how he had found ovaries in dissected queens, seminal sacs

resembling human testes in drones, and no sexual organs in the workers; he concluded that the

workers were neuter, of neither gender. But, as the Monthy Review reported, Schirach defied

this common wisdom with his sugestion that:

whatever may be the quality, destination, or functions of the drones -- [points, which do not appear to be yet settled among naturalists, or even by himself] all the working or

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common bees in the hive are females ‘in disguise,’ in which the organs that distinguish the sex, and particularly the ovaria, are obliterated, or at least, through their excessive minuteness, have not yet been observed :--that every one of these bees, in the earlier periods of its existence, was capable of becoming a queen bee, had the body of the poeple thought proper to nurse it in a particular manner, and raise it to that rank :-- in short, that the queen bee lays only two kinds of eggs; viz. those which are to produce the drones, and those from which the working bees are to proceed; and from any one or more of which, one or more queens are to be produced ;-- and that accordingly every worm of the common kind is capable, under certain circumstances, of becoming the queen, or mother of a hive.9

Schirach’s claim appealed to the nonconformist editors of the Monthly Review because it

implied radical theories of matter and generation by insisting that queens did not arise from

a structurally unique type of egg, but were rather were common females which had been

mysteriously transformed. Furthermore, Schirach had claimed that his artificial queens were

capable of laying fertilized eggs, despite having been imprisoned within a dark box and

condemned to perpetual virginity since the moment of birth; he concluded "that the queen-

bee of a hive lays eggs which produce young ones, without having any communication with

the drones.”10 These claims posed a challenge to the mechanistic universe conceived by most

eighteenth-century natural philosophers. Aware of this, the editors of the Monthly Review added

a phrase to the quoted description of Schirach’s theory that was not strictly true to the meaning

of German original, in order to make it more palatable to their deeply religious British audience.

In his original text Schirach had stated clearly that he believed that ovaries did not exist in adult

workers, thus suggesting that the queen underwent a radical transformation as she matured.

The suggestion that “through their excessive minuteness, [the sexual organs of workers] have

not yet been observed,” was a fabrication on the part of the British editors, eager to protect

themselves against charges of materialism and atheism by cloaking Schirach’s findings in the

language of preformation.

Since the late seventeenth century, in response to Cartesean materialism, many

natural philosophers had insisted on viewing nature as evidence of God’s design and the study

of nature as a foundation for religious belief and moral behavior.11 In this spirit they took up

the doctrine of preformation by the preexistence of germs. Where Descartes had suggested

that matter and motion were sufficient to explain the growth and development of organisms,

preformationists believed that “At the time of the Creation He constructed animals and plants for

9 Anonymous, Monthly Review (1772), p. 565. 10 Debraw, 1777, p. 22.11 Roe, 2010, p. 36.

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all future generations” and that organisms existed preformed from the moment of inception. This

view was taken up by many who believed in Descartes’ mechanistic universe, but were opposed

to its aetheistic implications; it became the dominant theory by 1705 and remained so for much

of the eighteenth century.12

From the mid-century, the doctrine of preformation was increasingly challenged by

naturalists who envisioned “a self-creative nature, one based on active matter, [that] would

exhibit no preordained order, only an order born out of material interactions” and would require

a new basis for morality, society and political order.13 From the 1740s, new ideas of epigenetic

development by attractive force were proposed by Newtonians such as Pierre-Louis Moreau

de Maupertuis, the Comte de Buffon and John Turberville Needham who argued that “living

and animation, instead of being a metaphysical degree of being, is a physical property of

matter.”14 The vitalistic arguments of Maupertuis, Buffon and Needham were lent credibility

by a series of mid-century biological discoveries suggesting that matter was not passive, but

driven by vitalistic forces; perhaps the most famous was Abraham Trembley’s 1740 discovery

that the freshwater polyp could regenerate completely new organisms from cut-up pieces.15 In

its 1772 report on Schirach, the Monthly Review noted that as a result of such discoveries, the

suggestion of a “self-fecundating” queen bee no longer seemed completely implausible:

A few years ago such a proposition would probably have been rejected, even by the most candid naturalists, as pregnant with absurdity, and as implying a flagrant violation of the established laws of nature. The late wonderful phenomena, however, with which we have been presented, relating to the polype, and the snail, and still more the parallel, or at least analogous case of the aphides, pucerons or vine-fretters, will perhaps be sufficient to render the prolific quality of a virgin queen bee, an idea not totally inadmissible among the present race of naturalists. In proportion as their knowledge has been extended by experience, that faithful guide has pointed out to them what a limited view we possess of nature, and how ill qualified we are to set bounds to her operations.16

12 Roger, 1961; Roe, 2010. Some believed in preexistence in the male spermatozoa, but most were ovists (cf. Pinto-Correia, 1997).13 Roe, 2010, p. 37.14 Buffon, 1749, vol. 2, p. 17. For the mid-century challenge to preformation see: Terrall, 2002, Roe, 2010.15 Varanian, 1953; Dawson, 1987. Vartanian wrote: “Trembley’s contemporaries had the startling spectacle of Nature caught, as it were, in flagrante with the creation of life out of its own substance without prior design” (Vartanian, 1953, 388).16 Monthly Review, 1772, p. 571.

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As Shirley Roe has shown, such ideas raised “the specter of atheism” and challenged the

prevalent doctrine of preformation by the preexistence of germs.17 This provoked an intensive

defense of preformation by its proponents in the final decades of the century; men like Haller

and Bonnet presented a revived preformationist theory “to combat the different systems based

on epigenesis, particularly those of MM. de Buffon and Needham” and to reinforce traditional

systems of morality, epistemology and social order.18 Debraw’s “Discoveries” became caught up

in this debate.

Schirach’s claim reeked of radical theories of matter and development, but the editors of

the Monthly Review noted with keen interest that it also had the potential to be highly profitable.

Every queen contained enough eggs to completely populate one or two hives; if it truly was

possible to rear them artificially, Debraw realized, this could "furnish the means to bring on a

numerous increase of those useful insects: an object of some importance to this kingdom, as

being the only means to prevent the annual exportation of considerable sums in the purchase

of wax" and sugar.19 The Monthly Review and Debraw both noted, with an undertone of anxiety,

that Schirach had founded an amateur "bee academy" which had already spread his practice of

rearing artificial queens had "through Upper Lusatia, the Palatinate, Bohemia, Bavaira, Silesia,

and even in Poland. In some of those countries it has excited the attention and patronage of

the government; and even the Empress of Russia has thought it of such importance, that she

has sent a person to Klein Bautzen, to be instructed in the general principles [by Schirach].”20

For the sake of Britain’s national wealth, Debraw was therefore pleased to report that he had

successfully replicated Schirach’s results: "in my own judgement, from the constant happy result

of my numerous experiments… I am enabled to pronounce on their reality.”21

This was the result of a happy accident; in 1770, two years before he read about

Schirach in the Monthly Review, Debraw had been pursuing experiments at Addenbrooke’s

concerning bees’ mode of propagating their species [which] seems to this day to have baffled

the ingenuity of the ages in their attempts to discover it.”22 Debraw noted that Pliny’s ancient

statement -- “Apium coitus vises est numquam” (the coitus of bees has never been seen) -- still

held true in his day, and was a source of wonder and frustration to Enlightenment naturalists.23

17 Roe, 2010, p. 36.18 Roe, 2010, p. 47 (citing Bonnet, 1948, p. 210).19 Debraw, 1777, p. 31. Each queen contained enough eggs to populate one or two hives. 20 Debraw, 1777, p. 32.21 Debraw, 1777, p. 32.22 Debraw, 1777, p. 15.23 Debraw, 1777, p. 16.

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Swammerdam had suggested that “a vivifying aura, exhaling from the body of the males”

might be the mode of impregnation; Reaumur had dissented and insisted that impregnation

occurred as the result of an “accouplement real.” In the early 1770s, Debraw was busily

engaged in his experiments when he was “not a little startled to find two queens” in a hive in

which had previously contained only one. This led him to conjecture that “the bees could, by

some particular means of their own, transform a common subject into a queen.”24 In order to

test this, he “got four glass-hives blown flat, which I thought preferable to the bell-shaped ones

I had used before, and I could with those better examine what was going forward.”25 In these

he placed swarms deprived of their queens, and found in each case that the bees were able to

convert a worker into a queen.26

But even as he testified to the credibility of Schirach’s findings, he carefully laid

out an alternative explanation for them. He lent his support to “the author's doctrine with regard

to the working-bees only; the quality and function of the drones being points that do not appear

to be yet fully settled by Mr. Schirach himself.”27 Schirach had insisted that queens were self-

fecundating and implied that the drones were irrelevant to generation and the production of

queens. Debraw was heartily opposed to these suggestions. For Debraw, Schirach’s claim that

female eggs could spontaneously transform into queens implied menacingly that active

regeneration and organization might be an inherent attribute of matter, suggesting that matter

was "fundamentally active, requiring only the proper circumstances for this to become

manifest.”28 If matter were truly vital, it was conceivable that, as Erasmus Darwin suggested in

1799, the first bees might have arisen from “the anthers, or stigmata of flowers; which had by

some means loosed themselves from their parent plant and, in the long process of time, been

formed from these; some acquiring fins, others wings, and others claws, from their ceaseless

efforts to procure their food, or to secure themselves from injury.”29

In his report to the Royal Society, Debraw made it clear that he was uneasy with

the radical implications of Schirach’s findings. In his report he plaintively inquired, if it were true

that queens were spontaneously generated from common worms: "For what purpose should

24 Debraw, 1777, p. 28.25 Debraw, 1777, p. 28.26 Debraw, 1777, p. 29.27 Debraw, 1777, p. 22.28 Roe, 2008, p. 416.29 Erasmus Darwin, 1791, p. 465 (If this were true, one ‘bee-master” fretted in 1806, it might “also be contended that separated portions of the human body might, by proper management, become perfect animals; because worms and polypi can be thus multiplied,” Evans, 1806, 63).

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wise nature then have furnished the drones with that large quantity of seminal liquid? To what

use so large an apparatus of fecundating organs, so well described by Réaumur and

Maraldi?”30 In his seventeenth-century dissections, Swammerdam had uncovered organs in

drones that resembled human testes, and on this basis had designated them as males;

however, he argued that the organs could not function in copulation, being disproportionaely

small in size to the reproductive organs of queens (Swammerdam’s lush illustrations of the

sexual organs of the queen and drone became iconic images of Enlightenment life science, see

Figure 1) . In the 1740s, Réaumur detailed illustrations of the drones’ reproductive organs had

been intended to demonstrate their sexual utility (Figure 2). Debraw, believing that nature

offered evidence of God’s design, believed fervently that these observed structures played a

role in bees’ reproduction. A disciple of Descartes’ mechanist philosophy, he rejected the notion

that queens were produced spontaneously, without seminal influence.

In the spring of 1770, Debraw was "anxiously endeavouring to ascertain the use

of the drones" when he developed a theory for the propagation of bees that drew heavily on the

findings of Giacomo Maraldi.31 Maraldi, the first observer to use glass observation hives in his

experiments, dissected thousands of bees and announced in 1712 that he had encountered

male reproductive organs in a great many of them, suggesting that earlier naturalists had

underestimated the number of drones in a hive.32 Maraldi also announced that he had observed

a “matière blanchatre” (whitish material) inside the hive, pooled in the cells containing eggs.

This led him to propose that insemination might occur within the hive, “à la manière de des

poissons, apres que les femelles a posé ses oeufs.”33 Beginning in the spring of 1770, Debraw

wrote, he had carried out a series of "experiments, made all in glass-hives" arguing as well that

the bees' "ova, like the spawn of fishes, most probably owe their fecundation to an impregnation

from the males [after the queen has laid them in the hive]." Noting that Maraldi and

even "Reaumur himself had noted the existence of drones 'no bigger than the common bees',"

Debraw suggested that a breed of "little drones" had escaped notice by previous observers and

was responsible for inseminating the eggs within the hive.34 Thus, according to Debraw’s

scheme, the conversion of workers into queens was not the result of chance, but of a lawlike

order which had previously remained unobserved. Thus with his "little drones," Debraw modified

30 Debraw, 1777, p. 22.31 Debraw, 1777, p. 20.32 Maraldi, 1712, p. 332. 33 Maraldi, 1712, p. 333..34 Debraw, 1777, p. 21.

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Schirach's original claim, providing an explanation for the economically tantalizing suggestion

that workers could be converted into queens, while avoiding notions of active or vital matter. He

wrote: “I am not a little flattered with the similarity of my discoveries with those of the ingenious

German naturalist, in proving the sex of the common bees; although we so widely differ in what

relates to the use of the males, whom, as we have seen before, he imagined to be quite

useless.”35

Upon its publication, Debraw's theory was widely accepted as "seem[ing] incontestibly to

establish the doctrine of the impregnation of eggs by the males,” and offering a religiously

palatable explanation for Schirach’s findings.36 The Monthly Review for 1778 placed its review

of Debraw on page one and reported that “he seems to have discovered the manner in which

queen bees are reproduced.”37 In the same year The Gentleman's Magazine, a more staid

publication, also reported approvingly on Debraw's "Discoveries:"

Chance, he says, befriended him in the discovery of the use of the Drones. It was in the spring of 1770 that he was enabled to confirm what Miraldi had only conjectured, namely, the impregnation of the eggs by the males, and that he was acquainted with the difference of size in the Drones or males… Reaumur likewise discovered Drones that were no bigger than common bees, tho they have escaped the observation of Schirach and his friend, Mr. Hattorff, Member of the Academy of Lusatia, who, in a memoir he presented in 1769, annhilates the use of Drones in a hive, and advances the singular opinion 'that the Queen-bee lays eggs, which produce young bees, without having any communication with the Drones.' If that were true, for what purpose has wise Nature furnished these Drones with all these organs so well described by Réaumur and Miraldi? Mr. Debraw, therefore, with good reason, explodes that notion.”38

Debraw's theory seemed at last to provide an explanation for Schirach's results, while averting

the atheistic threat of actively regenerative matter.

35 Debraw, 1777, p. 31.36 Medical and Philosophical Commentaries. By a Society in Edinburgh, p. 393.37 Anonymous, Monthly Review (1778), p. 1.38 Gentleman's Magazine, 1778, p. 210

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Source: Swammerdam, The Book of Nature, 1758.

Figure 1: Swammerdam’s iconic illustrations of the reproductive organs of the queen (left) and drone (right). Based on the fact that the male organs were dwarfed in size by the queen’s, Swammerdam argued that impregnation took place via an odiferous “aura seminalis.”

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Source: Réaumur, Mémoires, plate 34, "Parties propres aux mâles des abeilles." Figure 2: Réaumur’s illustration of the drone’s sexual organs. In Fig. 7 note the “vésicules séminales” (s,s), “vaisseau déférents” (d,d), "étranglements" (q,q), "vaisseaux tortueux" (x,x), “testicules” (t), “canal” (r) and lentille” (l).

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Debraw between Needham’s epigenesis and Bonnet’s preformation

In the 1770s and 80s, the preformation-epigenesis debates raged as Bonnet and others

developed a new, revived, brand of preformation in response to the success of epigenesis.39

Debraw’s “Discoveries” were caught up in this maelstrom in the 1780s, as they were taken

up by diverse individuals including John Needham (a proponent of epigenesis) and Charles

Bonnet (an advocate of preformation). Needham and Bonnet had quite different beliefs

about life, matter and generation; however, it is important to see that they were both equally

opposed to the atheistic implications of Schirach's suggestion that organic matter could be self-

generating. The two men, although ideological opponents, were also life-long correspondents

and, as Mazzolini and Roe have shown, the two men were united in promoting science against

encroaching unbelievers.40 Their competing interpretations of Debraw’s discoveries are a never-

explored instance of this.

The “Discoveries” seemed to offer a bulwark against the threat of active matter which

had been posed by Schirach’s discoveries. But to some readers, Debraw's system could still be

interpreted as an affirmation of epigenetic vitalistic theory. In a covert footnote to its 1778 review

of Debraw, the Gentleman's Magazine noted:

Our correspondent's opinion is, that the Sovereign, which Swammerdam calls the Female, Reaumur the Mother-bee, other writers the Queen-bee, and ancient authors the King, is produced from a common bee, not by copulation, but by a transformation or change very common to insects, something in the manner as a caterpillar is transformed into a butterfly; and this change he conceives to be performed thus: 'The common bee being of the proper age (about a year), and finding in itself, by instinct, an aptitude for its change, fixes itself in a cell made by the bees for producing of Sovereigns, is there supplied with the necessary aliment, is sealed up by the other bees, and there suffers a temporary death, transformation, or dissolution; and, when ready to rise again mature, eats its way thro' the covering, and emerges from its grave a new creature of a more perfect form, and in a superior state, having now changed into

39 Roe, 2010.40 Mazzolini and Roe, 1983. In 1768, Needham had written to Bonnet: “In spite of all that... we have done to bring our believers to reason, I have always hoped that somehow we will stop the contagion [atheism] by warding it off from those it has not yet touched,” p. 257

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a Sovereign, and acquired a power of propagating, is fit to head a swarm, and to continue the breed.41

Insisting that the transformation of a common worm to a queen required the application of some

“necessary aliment,” the correspondent signaled his opposition to theories of active matter.

By suggesting that the reproduction of queens involved "a temporary death, transformation, or

dissolution," the anonymous correspondent also indicated a sympathy for epigenetic theories

of development.The Gentleman’s Magazine never revealed the name of their anonymous

correspondent, but evidence suggests that it might well have been John Turberville Needham.

In the late 1770s, Needham adapted Debraw’s “Discoveries” into a complex argument in

favor of his theory of epigenesis by “vegetative force.” His lecture on Debraw, delivered

to the Academie Imperiale et Royale des Sciences et Belles-Lettres de Bruxelles in 1780,

was strikingly similar in tone and content to the argument expressed by the anonymous

correspondent.

He had been appointed lead director of the Academie in 1768, after making a name for

himself as a proponent of theories of vitalism and epigenesis in the mid-eighteenth century.

Voltaire’s famously quipped that “the microscope of Needham came to be seen as the

laboratory of atheists,”42 and he is frequently associated with materialism, atheism and the

doctrine of spontaneous generation; but as Shirley Roe has shown, these are generalizations

and misperceptions. Needham defended himself against charges of materialism and “never

challenged the dualism of matter and soul; he retained a central role for God in his system; and

he confined the vital powers that matter possesses within clearly marked boundaries, based on

regular, divine laws.”43 Furthermore, his support of epigenesis arose from a desire to “reform

biology and metaphysics and to provide an alternative epistemological and metaphysical

foundation for religion and morality.”44 The deep religiosity of Needham’s epigenesis is evident

in his reading of Debraw.

Like Debraw, Needham was ardently opposed to Schirach’s claim that males were

irrelevant to reproduction and argued against “les naturalists qui... imaginant que les oeufs

pouvoient etre feconds sans l’intervention d’aucun male, a la facon de pucerons.” A Catholic

priest, ordained in England in 1738, he feared the threat of atheism implied by doctrines of

active matter and insisted that “l’impregnation de chaque ouef, pour le rendre prolifique, est

41 Gentleman's Magazine, 1778, p. 210.42 43 Roe, 1983, p. 177.44 Roe, 1983, p. 183.

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essentielle.”45 However, he was skeptical about the prevelent doctrine of preformation by

preexisting germs.

In his 1780 address to the Academie, Needham used Debraw’s findings to craft

an elaborate argument in favor of this epigenetic doctrine. Against Schirach’s claim that workers

were really “females in disguise,” he maintained that “il y a trois sortes d’oeufs, desquels

naissent trois sortes d’abeilles, la femelle, les males, & l’espece neutre.”46 Sexual identities

were the result of a complex process of vegetative decomposition and growth within the hive,

dictated by local conditions and temperatures. Debraw’s “little drones” -- which exactly

resembled workers on the surface, but were revealed by dissection to contain the seminal sacs

of the male -- were further evidence of epigenesis as the result of universal vegetation.

Needham explained the little drones were formed according to “un moulé, que n’affece que la

surface des corps, [mais] peut changer la configuration des parties intérieurs.”47 In 1750,

Needham had modified Buffon’s theory, proposing his own epigenesis based on infusion

experiments which “seemed to indicate that plant-like filaments produced animal-like moving

bodies, which in turn vegetated anew into filaments.”48 He believed the vegetative microscopic

beings he viewed in his infusoria “furnish[ed] a Key to lead to the Generation of all others,”

showing the importance of vegetation (“an operation of Nature that proceeds by the

decomposition of old forms to a composition and a structure of new forms”) to understanding all

processes of generation. He believed that higher organisms, including bees, also reproduced by

means of vegetative forces.49

Needham also discussed his interpretation of Debraw’s “Discoveries” in his private

correspondence with Charles Bonnet; but when Bonnet, a staunch advocate of preformation,

heard of Debraw’s findings, he interpreted them quite differently than Needham had. He

agreed with Needham that Schirach’s experiments raised the specter of atheism, and was

relieved that Debraw offered an explanation of the utility of “that large fecundating organ so

45 Needham, 1780, p. 362.46 Need, 1780, p. 360.47Needham, 1780, 357. With the word “moulé,” Needham consciously echoed his former experimental partner, the Comte de Buffon. In the 1740s, they had performed infusion experiments together in an attempt to prove Buffon’s theory of epigenetic development, which he explained as a process of organic molecules combining according to the forces of “internal molds.”48 Roe, 2010, p. 163.49 Roe, 1983, p. 165.

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well described by Reaumur and Maraldi.” But Bonnet disagreed with Needham’s assertion that

bees’ development was shaped by an internal mold or driven by a universal vegetative force,

and interpreted Debraw’s “little drones” as evidence of preformation.50 As discussed above, the

mid-century had brought much experimental and theoretical evidence against preformation and

its affiliated schools of thought. In the late eighteenth century, Bonnet developed a “speculative

version of preformation theory” to defend against vitalist epigenesis like Needham’s.51 Bonnet’s

speculative preformation theorizing came into play around the question of Debraw’s little

drones.

Debraw’s little drones posed a certain epistemological threat; they had passed unnoticed

as workers for millennia, bearing no outward marks of dronehood. Needham conceived of

the little drones as “of the same mold,” and merely smaller than, the large drones; Bonnet

interpreted them as inferior and incompletely developed, in accordance with the doctrines of

preformation and emboitement. Needham had proposed that little queens might also exist,

as a result of the same process that gave rise to little drones; this suggestion was particularly

fascinating to Bonnet. In the 1780s, he drafted a small army of observers in a quest to

locate “little queens” -- that is, common workers displaying some vestige of ovaries or other

reproductive organs.

In the late 1780s, Huber was one of the many naturalists recruited by Bonnet in this

effort. In 1789, Bonnet wrote to his former student Huber about "the small queens mentioned

by the Abbe Needham… It will be of great importance to dissect them for the purpose of finding

their ovaries... As small drones exist, it is not surprising if small queens are produced also, and

undoubtedly by the same external causes." Years later, Huber wrote that workers:

have received from nature the germs of an ovary, but they either by accident or a particular instinct, the principle of which is unknown to me, drop some particles of royal jelly into cells contiguous to those containing the worms destined for queens. The larvae of workers that have accidentally received portions of so active an aliment, must be more or less affected by it and their ovaries should acquire a degree of expansion. But this expansion will be imperfect; why? because the royal food has been administered only in small portions, and, besides, the larvae having lived in cells of the smallest dimensions, their parts cannot extend beyond the ordinary proportions. Thus, the bees produced by them will resemble common workers in size and all the external characteristics. Added to that, they will have the faculty of laying some eggs, solely from the effect of the trifling portion of royal jelly mixed with their aliment."

50 Duncan, 88-9.51 wg: “we must not believe that the germ possesses in miniature all the features that characterize the mother as an individual. It is, in miniature, a man, a horse, a bull, etc... but not a certain man, a certain horse, a certain bull (Terrall, Speculation and Experiment).”ritin

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This was a large-scale speculative undertaking involving hundreds of Bonnet’s correspondents.

Huber reads DebrawFrancois Huber is a cultural icon, famous as the “prince of apiarians” for his discovery

that bees mate on the wing, which he made despite the fact that he was completely blind.

Huber’s insight has proven correct, and Debraw’s involvement in the story has now been

forgotten. From Huber’s own words, in his Nouvelles Observation sur les Abeilles, it is clear that

he borrowed critical instrumental and theoretical tools from Debraw; and yet no historians have

yet noted this.

Huber learned about Debraw in his private correspondence with Bonnet (and not in

Bonnet’s published Contemplation, as he erroneously stated). Having learned of Debraw’s

“Discoveries” from Needham, Bonnet relayed them to Huber, his former student. Huber, as he

reported, found them so “specieux” that he was driven to repeat them for himself; Huber’s

imitation of Debraw eventually lead him to the historic discovery that bees mate high overhead.

Notably, Debraw’s influence can be detected in Huber’s much-celebrated invention,

the “leaf-hive.” These was a thin transparent hive, "where the panes should be so near each

other, that only a single row of combs could be erected between them," and joined together by

hinges "so that they could be opened and shut like the leaves of a book" (Figure 3). With this

device, Huber said: "there was not a single cell where we could not distinctly see what passed

at all times, nor a single bee, I may almost say, with which we were not particularly acquainted."

Though historians frequently present this invention as the singular doing of Huber, it is actually

the case that Huber seems to have been inspired by Debraw, in the early 1770s had "got four

glass-hives blown flat” (see above).52 Considering that Huber had set about to assiduously

replicate all of Debraw’s experiments, it seems unlikely he would have missed this detail, and

strange that he neglected to credit the British apothecary for the invention of the flat hive, which

he attributed to himself (a possible reason might be that, by the time Huber had encountered

the “Discoveries,” Debraw’s whereabouts were somewhat mysterious. Having been recruited by

Jeremy Bentham to participate as an "experimental chemist" in a colonial project in Catherine

the Great's New Russia, Debraw staged his own death and absconded to modern-day Belarus

in 1786). According to Jeremy Bentham's correspondence, Debraw "had just been made

Phyician-General to the army when he died in 1787, possibly a mercy for the Russian soldiers"

(although his brother Samuel Bentham suggested that Debraw's demise may have resulted

52 Debraw, 1777, 28.

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from an "intemperate lifestyle").53 However, it may be that Debraw had staged another elaborate

disappearance; in 1796, Debraw was again listed in A list of the livery of London, this time as

a "needle-maker" living in the Minories, a largely Jewish section of London).

Debraw’s “little drones” and “whitish substance” equipped Huber and with theoretical

tools to combat the atheism and materialism implicit in Schirach’s findings, and to advance pet

theories of matter and development throughout the late eighteenth century. Huber and Bonnet,

who took the preformation position, and Needham, the epigenesist, are not really as far apart

as the existing historiography suggests. All three wanted to use life science to argue against

encroaching atheism and immorality.

53 Monteliore, “Bentham Brothers in Russia,” online.

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