This history of a statement attributed to the developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert exemplifies the making and uses of quotations in recent science. Wolpert's dictum, ‘It is not birth, marriage or death, but gastrulation which is truly the most important time in your life’, was produced in a series of international shifts of medium and scale. It originated in his vivid declaration in conversation with a non-specialist at a workshop dinner, gained its canonical form in a colleague's monograph, and was amplified as a quotation on a poster derived from an undergraduate project. Although it drew on Wolpert's authority and he accepted his authorship, it thus represents a collective sifting of earlier claims for the significance of prenatal existence through the values of 1980s developmental biology. Juxtaposing a technical term with major life events has let teachers engage students, and researchers entice journalists, while sharing an in-joke that came to mark community identity. Serious applications include arguing for an extension of the fourteen-day limit on human-embryo research. On this evidence, quotations have been kept busy addressing every audience of specialized knowledge.

In this article, I explore how the twin forces of imperial and entomological power allowed Britain to shape locust research and control across Africa, the Middle East and South Asia from the 1920s to the early 1950s. Imperial power came from the size of the formal and informal empire, and alliances with other colonial powers to tackle a common threat to agriculture and trade. Entomological authority came primarily from the work of Boris Uvarov and his small team of museum and fieldworkers based at the Imperial Bureau of Entomology (IBE), later the Imperial Institute of Entomology (IIE). I begin by discussing how Uvarov's phase theory of the origin of swarming changed the prospects for the control of locust plagues. The imperial gaze and networks of the IBE and IIE were suited to a problem that was transnational and transcontinental. In the 1930s, Britain was drawn into plans for international cooperation on locust organizations that met the needs of science, to give better sharing of knowledge, and the needs for science, to secure the resources for research and control. However, such organizations were only created during the Second World War, when new plagues threatened military operations, as I show in relation to the measures taken to control the red locust and desert locust. In the final section, I follow the fate of the wartime cooperation in initiatives to establish permanent control organizations. It is a story of the decline of British political power in locust affairs as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and regional agencies took over. My account of British locust research and control reveals a neglected aspect of histories of entomology and imperial/colonial science, especially their international relations and the continuing importance of metropolitan research centres.

This paper examines cave environments as unique spaces of knowledge production and shows how visualizations of natural cavities in maps came to be powerful tools in scientific reasoning. Faced with the challenge of limited vision, mapmakers combined empiricism and imagination in an experimental setting and developed specific translation strategies to deal with the uncertain origin of underground objects and the shifting boundaries between the known and the unknown. By deconstructing this type of cartographic representation, which has barely been studied, this paper furnishes surprising insights into the scholarly practices and tools used to deal with this considerable epistemic uncertainty and to signal credibility and trust to potential users. The array of maps used for this study includes both archival and published sources, depicting caves in Europe, America and Siberia.

In recent decades, historians have become increasingly interested in the logistical challenges and difficulties encountered by those responsible for the collection, preservation and safe transport of specimens from the field to the museum or laboratory. This article builds on this trend by looking beyond apparent successes to consider the practices and practicalities of shipboard travel and maritime and coastal collecting activities. The discussion focuses on the example of William Henry Harvey, who travelled to Australia in pursuit of cryptogams – non-flowering plants like mosses, lichens and algae – in 1853. In his private correspondence to family and friends, Harvey offered insights into the challenges and obstacles faced by all collectors in the period. His experiences were fundamentally shaped by the material culture, embodied knowledge and physical constraints he encountered on the way. On one level, shipboard and onshore collecting activities were facilitated by the connections forged by new technologies and Britain's global empire. But they also depended on specific contexts and relied on local agents and actors, as well as on the physical and technical facilities (and limitations) of those doing the collecting. The examples of Harvey and others shed light on the real, ‘lived’ experiences of individual collectors, the difficulties and challenges they encountered in amassing their collections, and the networks of people on which they relied.

Fermentation is a cornerstone phenomenon in Cartesian physiology, accounting for processes such as digestion or blood formation. I argue that the previously unrecognized conceptual tension between the terms ‘fermentation’ and ‘concoction’ reflects Descartes's efforts towards a novel, more thoroughly mechanistic theory of physiology, set up against both Galenism and chymistry. Similarities with chymistry as regards fermentation turn out either epistemologically superficial, or based on shared earlier sources. Descartes tentatively employs ‘fermentation’ as a less teleological alternative to ‘concoction’, later renouncing the explicit use of the term, possibly to avoid chymical overtones. However, his continued use of analogies with fermentative processes in the natural world and in winemaking, coupled with a strong ontological commitment (the stance that the physiological processes are actual fermentations), leads to a reintroduction of natural teleology in his medical system, which I argue may be understood in an Aristotelian sense of ‘simple necessity’. The paper reveals a more nuanced account of Cartesian fermentative medicine, delineating some of its tensions with regard to chymistry as they play out in the dynamics of fermentation and concoction, and linking the analogies to fermentation processes to the difficulties in erasing teleology altogether.