In the eighteenth century, algae were wretched organisms, receiving scant attention from naturalists, who largely preferred animals as their subjects of research. This predilection held true for J. F. Blumenbach, who devoted less than 5% of his influential Handbuch der Naturgeschichte to plants and even less to algae. It is surprising, then, that a species of algae, Conferva fontinalis, played a crucial role in Blumenbach’s own research program and contributed essentially to the advent of biology. I argue that C. fontinalis was so important for this development because it functioned as a proto-model organism, in that Blumenbach selected it precisely for its epistemological and practical advantages. First, he recognized that its physiological simplicity enabled him to overcome foregoing difficulties in embryology, which freed him to formulate a new theoretical foundation of biology that contributed to knowledge of living beings as such. Second, because C. fontinalis was easy to procure, maintain, and propagate, Blumenbach knew that any naturalist could replicate his experiments. This self-consciousness in selecting a subject of study predates the reasoning that stands at the beginning of Gregor Mendel’s famous work on peas by 84 years, the latter often cited as the first example of a model organism. In the history of biology, then, the model organism is not a phenomenon that occurs after the science has already begun, but one which is concomitant with its beginning. Blumenbach’s work on C. fontinalis forces us to reassess the inauguration of biology, in its history and its present.

Infusoria captured the attention and imaginations of naturalists and philosophers in the years at the turn of the nineteenth century. From Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon and Denis Diderot through Erasmus Darwin to Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus and Lorenz Oken—a diversity of figures explored, experimentally and conceptually, the presence of vital molecules or simple beings at the boundary of the living and nonliving. Experiments on spontaneous generation were repeated again and again, with each new set of trials calling into question earlier results. It remained unresolved whether infusoria were newly existent beings or vestiges of life already there. Many naturalists regarded infusoria as transitional entities complicating distinctions between the organic or inorganic. Many naturalists also regarded infusoria as the composite parts of more complex organisms, like fragments of polyps, that enabled living beings to transform and to regenerate their form. Infusoria thus became important for imagining the development and evolution of life. This paper looks at the place of infusoria in Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus’s Biology and Lorenz Oken’s Naturphilosophie in particular. It explores how their study of these active and animate material entities introduced new prospects for the history of life.

No other organism better represented the nebulous boundary between botany and zoology in the Victorian imagination than fungus. For the first half of the nineteenth century, it was not clear whether fungi should be classed with plants or animals. Although, by the end of the century, the taxonomic confusion was resolved by creating a new third kingdom, fungi were still figured as “quasi-animals.” Hunger for flesh—as well as a resemblance to flesh—continued to animate fungus in the Victorian imagination. As animacy structures hierarchical logic, the animatedness of fungus became an important testing ground for the taxonomic ranking of quasi-animals and quasi-plants in the Victorian period. Taking a long view of mycological history, this paper will consider how fungi model fugitive, cryptic, and queer forms of belonging that open the body and the body politic to modes of collectivity that trouble the equation of ecology with holistic closure. Even as mycological research helped to police biological hierarchies, fungal life also indexed the difficulty of pinning down lifeforms that flourished in the interstices of taxonomic orderings, creating a space where alternative narratives of life, intimacy, and relationality could emerge. As this paper will show, the geographies of desire and belonging created through fungal intimacies make it impossible to speak of either the self-contained individual or ecology in the singular. Open and plural, selves and worlds proliferate, contaminate, and interpenetrate through the infectious touch of fungal relations.

In the face of the current environmental crisis, i.e. climate change, the life and death of marine microbes has gained renewed scientific attention. Until recently unicellular marine microbes, such as phytoplankton, have been considered immortal unless eaten by predators. As marine ecologists recognize phytoplankton’s important role in the global carbon cycle, the assumption of their atemporal existence is currently revised. Microbiologists suggest that under specific conditions entire populations of phytoplankton actively kill themselves. Drawing on empirical research into the life and death of marine microbes, this paper explores how an affirmation of phytoplankton’s mortality may reconstruct the relationship between life and death and how deep seated metaphysical assumptions may become revised in a time of crisis. The idea that death is an evolutionary adaptation seems no longer tenable. As phytoplankton challenge the relationship between life and death and the boundary between an individual and a population, marine viruses are complicating the boundary between life and nonlife and the ontologies of substance and process. The liveliness of viruses seems to depend on their connections. Together, I argue, recent research into marine microbes suggests new histories of nature in the ocean, while also interrogating the relationship between science and philosophy.