In the nineteenth century paleontologists claimed that, from just a single bone, they could identify and sometimes even reconstruct previously unknown prehistoric creatures. Such extraordinary displays of predictive reasoning were accomplished through the law of correlation, which proposed that each element of an animal corresponds mutually with all the others. Although this law, which was pivotal in the development of the new science of paleontology, was formulated by Georges Cuvier amidst the tumult of post-revolutionary Paris, it was in Britain and America that it took particular hold. Pale ... More

In the nineteenth century paleontologists claimed that, from just a single bone, they could identify and sometimes even reconstruct previously unknown prehistoric creatures. Such extraordinary displays of predictive reasoning were accomplished through the law of correlation, which proposed that each element of an animal corresponds mutually with all the others. Although this law, which was pivotal in the development of the new science of paleontology, was formulated by Georges Cuvier amidst the tumult of post-revolutionary Paris, it was in Britain and America that it took particular hold. Paleontologists such as Richard Owen were heralded as scientific wizards who could resurrect the extinct denizens of the ancient past from merely a glance at a fragmentary bone. Show Me the Bone examines the distinctive anglophone engagement with Cuvier’s renowned method of reconstruction across the whole of the long nineteenth century. It considers how the law of correlation was successively repackaged by different audiences, including those across the Atlantic and in the furthest outposts of the British Empire, and was used for diverse and often contradictory purposes. Even after the law of correlation had been decisively refuted by Thomas Henry Huxley and other expert practitioners in the 1850s, claims about Cuvier’s unerring and almost prophetic powers continued to circulate in works of science popularization as well as in fiction and poetry. The remarkable afterlife of Cuvier’s famous law had important consequences both for the cultural authority of scientific naturalism and the development of paleontology in the late nineteenth century.