The Dutch anatomist Petrus Camper (1722-1789) attempted to collaborate with Buffon through the intermediary of the former’s son, Adriaan Gilles Camper (1759-1820), while he was studying in France. Newly found letters, unknown to even Jacques Roger, reveal intimate details about the ups and downs of the Campers’ negotiations with Buffon. During my dissertation research on Petrus Camper, I had the pleasure of accidentally coming across a living descendant of his, who had 200 original letters on her ranch in California. In 1989 Mary Camper-Titsingh donated these letters to the University of Groningen.1 Most of this correspondence was created during two journeys taken by Camper’s son abroad.2 In 2002 Hans Bots and Rob Visser published the letters that were written during the son’s residence in Paris, from June 1785 to June 1787,3 including relevant previously known letters.4 Petrus Camper’s personal diaries were written in his native Dutch, his son’s in French, but the Campers wrote letters to each other in French.5 The newly discovered letters give us an insider’s view about naturalists’ business deals, the rivalry between anatomists, and their authentic awe for a celebrity like Buffon.
Through the years Petrus Camper’s attention shifted more away from medicine to zoology. After 1773, he concentrated only on animal comparative anatomy. His favorite research subjects became mammals that had not been or barely studied, having both the finances and the colonial connections to obtain exotic animals. Camper’s museum, like that of John Hunter (1728-1793), belonged among the richest and most important private collections of the eighteenth century.6 Along with Louis Jean Marie Daubenton (1716-1800) and John Hunter, Camper was one of the few eighteenth-century zoologists who valued the primacy of anatomy for understanding the animal organism. They believed that only from laborious dissections the “connoissances générales” would be ultimately derived.7
Buffon was among the first to benefit from Camper’s striking tendency to confide the results of his research to others before he had published them himself.8 Camper initially met Buffon in Paris during his 1749 Grand Tour. He practiced surgical operations on a plentiful supply of cadavers with the French surgeon, Antoine Louis (1723-1792), who became his life-long friend: “During three months in Paris Monsieur Camper came almost every day to spend several hours with me. It is with me that he paid a visit to Monsieur de Buffon ... of the Academy of Sciences, ... from where he left always flattered and grateful for the gracious welcome he received.”9
When Camper returned to Paris in 1777 for four months, he was in the prime of his career. He lectured on breast cancer, the illness from which his wife had died in the previous year, at the Royal Academy of Surgery, on cattle inoculations at the Royal Academy of Medicine, and on his “facial angle” theory at the Royal Academy of Sciences. Daubenton was in the audience, but not Buffon.10
By 1785 the Academy of Sciences in Paris elected Camper a foreign associate (an “associé étranger”), an honor that only one other Dutch scientist had received: the eminent physician Hermannus Boerhaave (1668-1738). Boerhaave, while no great discoverer, was an excellent teacher, known as the “Medical Instructor of Europe,”11 whose influence through his students was to dominate the progressive development of medical instruction throughout Europe.12 Boerhaave taught medical Newtonianism by trying to embody the empirical method of Isaac Newton (1642-1727) in his theoretical work and clinical practice. He systematized the chaotic body of fact and opinion embraced within eighteenth-century medical thought. Boerhaave prepared the way for the emergence of the University of Leiden as a leading center of Newtonian and experimental science on the continent.13 His student, Willem Jacob ’s-Gravesande (1688-1742), created a unique method for Newtonian physical science. This precise program may have been the model for Buffon’s determination to achieve a similar one unique for the life sciences.14 Jean Nicolas Sébastian Allamand (1713-1787), the Swiss-born professor at the University of Leiden, apparently thought so because he translated and edited ’s-Gravesande’s and Buffon’s books respectively.
Buffon often quoted Dutch naturalists’ observations of animals in the Prince of Orange’s menagerie, animals that had never been seen alive in France.15 Arnout Vosmaer (1720-1799) was the Director of the Prince’s menagerie and museum. The Prince placed the exotic animals he received as gifts in het Kleine Loo, a zoo on his estate at Voorburg, one kilometer east of The Hague. The menagerie of this Stadholder William V (1751-1795) was famous for welcoming even foreigners, as described in a 1785 guidebook to The Hague:
Facing het Huis ten Bosch is a little estate called het Kleine Loo that the Prince of Orange acquired since many years. A long lane which is the avenue of another estate, named het Oude Loo, and which also belongs to the Prince of Orange follows it. It is an ancient seigniorial land. The chateau was pulled down and almost only the doors remain; but the gardens and the groves there are still very beautiful. The most remarkable that they enclose is a very beautiful menagerie, furnished with birds, and other unknown and curious animals. Foreigners should not fail to visit it. Beyond this territory the lane continues to the Voorburg road.16
Vosmaer was the first to publish zoological illustrations made from living animals instead of stuffed specimens and he focused particularly on animals not treated or fully treated by Buffon.17 Many mammal plates in Vosmaer’s Regnum Animale, published in practically simultaneous Dutch and French editions, were copied in Buffon’s Paris edition.18
Allamand, who edited new Buffon editions respectively in French and in Dutch, both published in Amsterdam, often copied plates from Vosmaer’s book and referred to Vosmaer’s descriptions. His editions were called the Nouvelle Edition or “Edition de Hollande.” Allamand wrote 41 articles about new or hitherto imperfectly known species to Buffon. Many of Allamand’s additions were republished later in Buffon’s own supplements.19 Copies of the Dutch engravings were often reversed.20 Aware that Camper was dissecting the comparatively unknown Scandinavian reindeer, Allamand invited him to contribute to his Buffon edition.21 Five years later Buffon published Camper’s “Observations sur le renne faites à Groningue” again in his own third supplement.22
When Buffon pointed to the exceptional form of the speech organ in the tropical America’s howler monkey, but bemoaned his inadequate material, Camper sent him the complete description of this “most peculiar organ of speech, hitherto unknown except through my dissection” in November 1778.23 The following month, in reply, Buffon proposed possibly collaborating with Camper on little known ape and cetacean species.
I received, Monsieur, with great satisfaction, the letter that you gave me the honor of writing on the 15th of last November. I begin by assuring you that I regret that you were in Paris without my seeing you during your last [1777] stay. I remember your first interview in 1749 very well. And, since that time, Monsieur, you have already demonstrated the great talents that distinguish you, making you justifiably regarded as one of Europe’s most excellent anatomists.24
Camper became the first to distinguish the genuine orangutan anatomically from the chimpanzee.25 This pioneering research Camper accomplished only after Buffon had already published on the great apes in 1766.26 The “orang utan,” the generic term that served for both the chimpanzee and the orangutan and even monkeys, was one of the most discussed yet least known animals in Europe. Partly due to the long-standing assumption of two varieties, the black in Africa and the red in Asia, Europeans completely confused ape species. Camper’s pioneering treatise, Essay on the Natural History of the Orangutan and Other Simian Species; On the Double horned Rhinoceros; and On the Reindeer, that declared the Asian anthropoid ape to be a separate species from the African ape, would be published in Dutch only four years later (1782).27 Between 1770 and 1777 Camper had investigated a total of eight orangutans, five of which he had personally dissected. So much anthropoid material available to the Dutch had some call their eighteenth century “the century of the orang-utan.”28
In 1778, Buffon wrote Camper about his expertise in primatology as well as in cetology.
As I expect to publish next year a second volume of supplements to the natural history of the quadruped animals to which I have numerous additions on the subject of several simian species, I would be enchanted to mention your name and all your discoveries on these animals’ anatomy.29
Flattered, Camper informed Buffon about his significant discovery that the Asian orangutan was a different species from the African “orang-outang” dissected by Edward Tyson (1650-1708) in England. Buffon would receive a French proof of his orangutan book as soon as it was printed.30 The following year, when it was printed in Harlingen (1779), Camper made arrangements to send a copy to Paris. By 1779 Camper knew that the true orangutan came only from Borneo, was always reddish, and never had a nail on their great toes. Tyson’s “Orang” and Buffon’s “Jocko” all came from Angola, had black hair, and large nails upon the great toes. They were always represented as very strong and muscular. The East Indian orangutans were the opposite, with long, very lean arms and legs, and their heads set into their shoulders.31
Another great gap in eighteenth-century zoological knowledge was the Cetacea, the genus of whale-like animals. Except for the smaller species of the porpoise and dolphin, sufficient material presented the greatest challenge to researchers. Buffon wanted to copy drawings of the cetacean specimens in Camper’s museum.
... I have in fact some desire to give the public a history of the cetacean animals and to add one on lizards and reptiles, but this work has not yet progressed much. I plan to finish the entire history of birds and then my quadruped supplement before applying myself seriously to the cetaceans and the reptiles. Nevertheless I have already collected a rather large number of drawings, and several surveys, for this subject. You would do me a real pleasure if you would, Monsieur, let the small whales and other cetaceans, that you have in your Cabinet, be drawn at my own expense. Rest assure that I will cite you in my work with all the praise due to you. Of course, I do not ask this favor of you except in the event and assumption that you do not want to write the natural history of these animals yourself.32
Camper replied by mail that he would send Buffon drawings.33 Seven years later his son personally delivered a portfolio to Montbard, with considerably more mammals than the originally requested apes and whales.
It is only because Mr. Daubenton knew that I planned to work on this history of cetaceans that he was a little angry that you had drawn the Cachalot without having notified us. But I beg you to no longer think about that for you are well placed to give me much more than I could give you...
The Count de Buffon34
Camper had already notated the friction with Daubenton in 1777 in his private diary.
Then I went to the king’s Hortus medicini in order to see and draw the cachalot head. However, Daubenton appeared uneasy about that because Buffon wanted to describe the Cetacea, an unforgivable jealousy between these men. In order to put him at ease, since I still wanted to sketch the jaw, I told him that I would not publish my drawing during Buffon’s and his own, Daubenton’s, lifetimes.35
In late 1766 Buffon had invited Daubenton to work on a sub-series on whales to follow the series on quadrupeds.36 Buffon was trying to appease Daubenton for excluding his anatomical descriptions from the new editions, in his attempt to improve sales by making the Histoire Naturelle less technical and more “readable.”37 The fact that the Histoire des cétacés was never realized became one of the reasons Daubenton no longer collaborated with Buffon by the end of 1767.38
As Buffon’s anatomist and assistant, Daubenton exercised broad authority in the Jardin du Roi for much of the year. During long summers Buffon resided in Montbard, as in June 1785 when Adriaan Gilles moved to Paris to study mathematics and astronomy. Dutch universities were no longer leaders in science.
Daubenton’s lack of enthusiastic admiration for his father’s portfolio soon offended Adriaan Gilles.39 His father explained: “I am not surprised [that] Daubenton’s ... viewing of my drawings did not make more of an impression on him. It’s jealousy which causes this indifference.”40 Petrus Camper urged his son to visit Montbard. “The trip to Mr. de Buffon could interest you: to see a famous man, and I believe that the premises, the iron factories, etc. are worth the trouble. You have suffered, because the works that you displayed were by a father you love. They regard them with eyes of indifference and are little accustomed to such things.”41
At the end of July 1785 Adriaan Gilles journeyed to Montbard. He sent his father a star-struck description.
Imagine a man of large stature, with a very happy physiognomy, brown eyes, black eyebrows, a thick head of hair, white as snow, well done (for since 65 years he has always inserted curl-papers every day), looking at age 78 like many do at 56 or 58.42
Interestingly, Marie Jean Hérault de Séchelles (1759-1794), who visited Montbard the same year as Adriaan Gilles, published a rather similar description of Buffon.43 Numerous signs of respect shown to him at Montbard made Adriaan Gilles feel vindicated.
Scarcely had I put up at the inn and that I let him know about my arrival, that two servants invited me on behalf of the Count to come take my rooms at his home, saying that they had orders to take my luggage. I was hardly ready to change my lodgings when they escorted me into a very beautiful room, where Mr. Necker was in the habit of staying when passing through Montbard. After I was led to Mr. Buffon’s room, he told me he was pleased that I had been willing to make the trip to see him. I could stay as long as I liked. After finishing some business, he would be pleased to see me again. Meanwhile I could get settled in my room, etc.
It was barely an hour when he had me come to him. I found him with his secretary reading aloud your letter of introduction. Mr. Buffon received your praises smiling, saying that you were very kind and that it was very honorable on your part. He was most curious to see the portfolio, etc.44
The purpose of this visit was Petrus Camper’s portfolio containing a profusion of original data, so that collaboration plans with Buffon could be worked out in detail.45 Buffon admired the mammalian drawings, generously placed at his disposal, but declined to use the cetacean sketches himself. The observation of the cetaceans would be left rather to his much younger naturalist colleagues.46 For his supplement on the quadrupeds, however, the 78-year-old Buffon singled out sixteen drawings and descriptions of six mammals.47 Neither Camper nor his son let their disappointment show yet about Buffon’s indifference to the cetacean sketches. After his return to Paris on August 3, Adriaan Gilles felt “happy as a king by the most flattering reception and welcome of the greatest and most amiable genius of France” and “touched almost to tears in leaving his charming residence.”48
The “blues,” however, soon followed euphoria. By the end of August Adriaan Gilles became discouraged about the prospects of any Buffon collaboration. The latter’s draftsman had not yet contacted him in Paris.49 His father held out hope.50 Only at the beginning of 1786 did Buffon show interest in a modest cetacean participation. Buffon’s turnaround was due to, according to Adriaan Gilles, his correction of an anatomical error made by Daubenton concerning cetacean jaws. Adriaan Gilles’s detection so impressed Buffon that he was inspired to proceed with a common publication, a conversation described in detail:
Mr. Daubenton’s blunder and my decision, based on simple knowledge of a little osteology, have put new life into the Count de Buffon’s spirit, his desire to examine your drawings, and to become familiar with the structure of these animals. I did my best to explain to him the grand views with which you are busy. I succeeded in conveying to him in a few words how much the structure of these [cetacean] animals, bizarre at first sight, let a naturalist reflect: if one takes delight in contemplating Creation. The Count asked me why you have not published these things. I went on: that [you] having hoped that he would publish your discoveries at a time that he was going to tackle the description of these animals, you imagined that the public would accept them with a greater reverence from his hands, etc., etc. And, finally, there was the difficulty of getting good engravers. The little interest that men solely busy with trade [the Dutch] take in the advancement of knowledge was one of the principal reasons that delayed the publication of an immense number of discoveries available in your manuscripts.
Well then, Monsieur! Said the Count. That is so interesting, so admirable, and so little known that it should be published, and I will do it at my expense. Monsieur, your father, will have 12 or more samples. I will have the plates engraved and I will write a Preface in which I will inform the public how it is all owed to your worthy father. But it will be necessary that all this be translated into French. No one could do that better than you; start it right away. … And that is how I find myself translating.51
Adriaan Gilles acknowledged very honestly that Buffon’s popular appeal would greatly enhance his father’s reputation as a comparative anatomist to a much broader audience. He mentioned this objective numerous times in his letters to his father.52 Despite his father’s proficiency in English, French and Latin, most of Camper’s publications appeared in Dutch.53
Since the sixteenth century, some fifty whales had stranded in the Republic of the United Provinces. Such events were almost always immortalized by artists in these maritime provinces. Formerly seen as bad omens, eighteenth-century strandings were regarded as windfalls from nature by both naturalists and merchants. The cadaver provided oil used in the manufacture of cosmetics and as an emollient in ointments. In January 1762, when two or three sperm whales (cachalots) were washed ashore on the little island of Griend in the Waddenzee, the Harlingen physician Simon Stinstra (ca. 1734-1782) placed some of the bones at Camper’s disposal. Camper published about the auditory organ from this specimen twice. The first article made Camper the first scientist to write a treatise specifically on the hearing of whales, and of sperm whales in particular.54 The second article added a baleen whale, a porpoise, and a dolphin.55 The Franeker artist Pieter Idserdts (1698-1781) drew one of these whales; Camper copied his sketch in outline.56 In 1772 Camper delivered three public lectures on the Cetacea in the Groningen Theatrum Anatomicum. Displaying one of the specimen’s 48 teeth, along with several anatomical preparations and bones, he received a great deal of applause.57
After 1764, there were no more whale strandings until 17 May 1781 when a 64-foot male sperm whale grounded upon a sandbar, north of Zandvoort. But now no one made the usual illustrations of this curiosity. The outbreak of the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War in 1780 became a disaster for the Dutch. British navy and privateers captured Dutch vessels at home and overseas. Soldiers placed in the fishing villages, and the coast on watch, probably kept everyone off the beaches. Petrus Camper referred to this 1781 stranding as having been a “Trumpo,” a word equivalent to sperm whale used in his day.58
Cetacean source material limited Camper to eight species.59 Of the larger ones he had to be mostly satisfied with fragments, mainly of the skeleton, which were spread all over Europe. Camper visited the church of Scheveningen in Holland, where a 56-foot cachalot skeleton had been kept as a curiosity since 1617. The only complete skeleton of a rorqual hung from the ceiling of the Bremen city hall in Germany.60 Camper found other specimens in the Paris and London museums, where he had to respectively ask for Daubenton’s and John Hunter’s permission first.
The range of forms among the cetaceans had given the impression that the whale skull had no similarity with the mammal skull. Since the sutures were still visible in most of Camper’s preparations, he could use the openings for the sense organs and the occipital hole as fixed points of reference. Camper was able to establish accurately the form and the position of the skull bones in seven of the cetacean species. Through comparative anatomy he unraveled the complicated structure of the cetacean cranium to prove that it contained the same parts as the crania of other mammals.61 This was a proud moment of Camper achieving a “grand view” à la Buffon, i.e. finding order in chaos.
Private communication revealed how highly Petrus Camper valued Buffon’s philosophical genius. “Count Buffon has nevertheless earned more money than me. His style is vaster, his mind more brilliant. Despite his mistakes, he taught me by his example to envision things in the abstract, to make connections between them, etc.”62 Adriaan Gilles vigorously protested his father’s self-deprecation.
You expressed in the previous [letter] of the 12th that Buffon’s mind is more brilliant than yours. I do not agree. His French style should be compared with your Dutch style in the compositions admitting flowery eloquence. Mr. De Buffon derived his system from Whiston, Burnet, etc., furthermore [from] the great immortal Newton who gave his daring views in his famous Questions, where he demonstrated the possibility of comets falling into the sun’s body when they enter its atmosphere. This idea Buffon embellished. He has constructed a beautiful edifice upon it, but which leaks through all sides. But who has demonstrated Creation’s analogy like you? Who has conceived like you the simplicity of the Eternal Geometrician’s works? Furthermore, I ask, for I ask if of posterity, of all the centuries to come: Who between you can have your building ever turned upside down, founded principally of what is the most secure? Each century will answer: You are right and every step towards the perfection of knowledge will expose your insights in all their brilliance, this brilliance that only atheists, the ridiculous defenders of fortuitously-amassed molecules, could call into question.63
In truth, Adriaan Gilles was unable to judge the historic extent to which Buffon, who was no physico-theologist like Camper, had actually influenced his father’s life work. If Buffon had started as a Newton disciple, he had gone beyond Newton.64
Buffon’s new methodology was a naturalistic explanation for organized bodies that could present laws similar to — but otherwise different from — those evolved to account for the movement of inert bodies. Buffon’s new science would go beyond that which was immediately observable. The naturalist had to penetrate beneath the veil of surface phenomena to the core of reality. He did not need to choose between concentrating upon the concrete singularity and cultivating generalizations because both should be done at the same time. The methods for this program were analogical reasoning and comparative analysis. The interaction between observation and imagination would generate a form of understanding superior to simple empiricism (accumulation of facts) and mathematical abstraction (formal logic). Buffon called this type of understanding divination or intuition. The life sciences would acknowledge both nature’s diversity and unity by reducing the manifold appearances of nature to simple principles.65
Buffon redefined matter as a complex conjunction of related parts. There was no such thing as an isolated entity or a simple substance. Rather, everything in living matter was related to everything else, everything was joined. Relation replaced aggregation as one of the defining principles of matter.66 An organized body was conceived by Buffon to be a set of relations (“rapports”) existing between mutually interdependent parts. The rapports between the parts constituted the whole, creating a unique organism. An organized body was no mere aggregation of simple identical particles, but a conjunction of symbiotically related parts. Each constituent part of an organized body was both cause and effect of the other parts. Living matter formed a complex combination in which one element could not be subtracted from another without radically changing the relations between the remaining parts. Immense diversity resulted from a mere augmentation or contraction of a single part causing immediate ramifications.
The challenge was to join structure and life processes into a unified field of explanation. The goal of comparison was to see similarities and differences, mediate between them, and find analogies not immediately perceived. In an August 1786 letter to Buffon, Camper would describe how:
… my great objective was to constantly study the relations that the animals have between them, and with man.67 You have been my master in these parts and the model that I try to imitate!68
Scientists became fascinated with extremes — boundaries and limits — because real reality always lay in between. Finding similar tendencies between dissimilar things led to the hidden organizer on which all reality was grounded. Locating “real” reality entailed a progressive descent into the depths of observed reality. Camper juxtaposed the extremes of organic forms in order to grasp their reality.
With his combined abilities to draw and sculpt as well as to dissect, Camper demonstrated how the correlation of racial features in the human related directly to the protrusion or retraction of the osteological jaws.
In the year 1758, I dissected publicly at the anatomical theatre at Amsterdam, the body of a negro lad, about eleven years of age. This afforded me an opportunity of demonstrating all those diversities in the cranium, which nature had effectuated. By nature, I mean the influence of country, nutrition, air, etc.69
The human head had to be visualized to be like a finite mound of clay that could be molded. Changes in noses, from long to flat, and lips, from thin to broad, modified the mutually-related parts and resulted in the characteristic national physiognomies around the world. This “facial angle” theory, that measured the jaw’s slant in profile and that accounted for the finite physiognomic variations, became Camper’s most lasting legacy posthumously — though often misunderstood.
While Buffon discussed speculative “internal molds,” Camper literally molded the exterior into a visual clarification. He implemented Buffon’s theories in a very concrete and practical manner. Camper attributed these morphological laws to wise design by the Creator (physico-theology). Buffon accounted for diversity from geo-historical “de-generation” — a word Camper never used — of the original forms. Both believed in the impact of environmental changes, which utilized development and contingency as explanatory concepts.
Collaborating with Buffon, however, taught the Campers that it was easier to introduce synthetic insights about new material than it was to make corrections to previously published descriptions.70 By March 1786 Adriaan Gilles complained to his father about Buffon’s stubbornness.
The cetaceans did not suffer any difficulty in their acceptance, because the Count had not written about them, but the quadrupeds have made me suffer greatly. You judge yourself after I have communicated to you why.71
… [2˚] The orangutan … is not the jocko or true orang …
The orang is not the orang because the jaw is not so prominent, because it does not resemble the figure, which is in the jocko’s description … All the names, which you give, are drawn from Linnaeus’s bad nomenclature. You did not follow the Count’s nomenclature! Bless my soul! If all this kind is confused, then one does not know what it concerns. This is how one speaks!72
… I hope that the Count changes his mind after reading your orang book. I do have here some of your observations concerning this animal, but as you have written about them in French yourself, it is best to take advantage of that.73
Adriaan Gilles wanted the “Plinius of France” to adopt his father’s orangutan observations because they were reliable dissections of this rare and enigmatic creature.74
In August,75 in September,76 in March,77 and again in April,78 Petrus Camper repeatedly asked his son whether the orangutan book in French that he had sent Buffon by way of the Spanish ambassador’s secretary had ever arrived safely. Each time Adriaan Gilles answered that it had never arrived.79 Please send it again.80 By Spring, however, he came to understand the reasons for Buffon’s confusion.
I finally found in the Cabinet the famous Jocko or orang-outang described in the Count’s book. I am no longer surprised that the Count does not recognize in your figures the animal that he had as such described. I begin to even lose hope that he will ever adopt your observations, if he maintains that this animal is orang, for it is no more an orang than a broomstick is one!81
… I [now] see that Buffon must have your book on the orangs, but he works and acts so little on his own that I do not believe that he knows either what he has in the library nor in the Royal Cabinet.82
When Petrus Camper had visited the French king’s cabinet on 18 July 1777, he, too, had been quite surprised by the small, ugly, stuffed chimpanzee he witnessed,83 which Buffon’s artist had drawn standing so elegantly as an adult with a walking stick.84
Adriaan Gilles suggested to Buffon’s current collaborator that it did not make sense to accept Allamand’s orangutan but not his father’s: “I told the Count de Lacépède that I was a little surprised that Mr. de Buffon had hesitated with your figures, because Allamand described the same animal with acceptance.”85 This was a reference to the Suppléments à l’Histoire Naturelle de Buffon published by Allamand the prior year (1785) in Amsterdam.86 Buffon had observed a living chimpanzee but never any orangutans. The 1740 chimp he saw in Paris later died in London and was returned to Paris and its skin mounted. For Camper, it was the reverse. He had neither seen nor dissected chimps. He had, however, observed Vosmaer’s living orangutan, in het Kleine Loo from 29 June 1776 to 22 January 1777, in addition to dissecting five orangutans.87 Daubenton had never seen any living ape. Finding the chimp remains in the royal Cabinet too meager, he had to base his anatomical publication on Edward Tyson’s authoritative chimp autopsy.88 Adriaan Gilles had his sincere doubts whether all this confusion would be resolved in Buffon’s supplements.89
Unfortunately, Buffon’s advanced age and failing health would fail to give the Campers the outcome that they had labored for so strenuously. Buffon’s revisionist requests during Adriaan Gilles’s second trip to Burgundy, at the end of September, hinted at a most unlikely completion.
Hélas, I would not know how to promise you when and how all that will be done, for the Count appears to me to be very little inclined to the work. Since his illness (which could well be the stone) does not give him any moment of relief, he is only busy with his work on the magnet, having dismissed his secretary for drunkenness.90
Adriaan Gilles had to admit to his father that the French naturalist did not want nor see the figures nor take the trouble to read the observations he had translated with so much trouble. Buffon, moreover, wanted to cut costs by reducing the number of plates.91 It was soon made clear to the Campers that Buffon had a different division of the work in mind. Not at all prepared to be concerned with content, Buffon wished to exclusively take care of the style. Finally, he insisted that it was absolutely necessary to place Camper’s discoveries into a very broad historical context, supported by excerpts from the books of a considerable number of authors from the last centuries. Overwhelmed by all these demands, Adriaan Gilles begged his father to come to his rescue.92
But now Petrus Camper himself could no longer cope with rising problems in his normal way. During the 1780s a civil war broke out in the Dutch Republic that now seems to have been the prelude to the French Revolution. The people’s movement, called “Patriots,” was opposing the Orangist oligarchy more and more violently. In 1786, when William V had to abandon The Hague, he sold his Kleine Loo estate. The royal family moved to their ancestral castle at the Oude Loo in Gueldre, in the east of the Dutch Republic, and closer to the stadholderian military stronghold in Nijmegen. In November Vosmaer moved the animals, including two Asian elephants, from het Kleine Loo to a new menagerie at het Oude Loo near Apeldoorn. Similarly Petrus Camper became so fearful of losing his property to Patriots’ riots, that he dispersed his cabinet, even burying some of it, for safekeeping.93
Nevertheless, Camper did not hesitate to give his son his opinions about the bad news from Montbard. He was against a reduction of the number of plates, preferring to pay the extra expenses from his own money. Their costs were cheaper in France than in the Netherlands. As to the excerpts drawn from a great number of books, he thought that that task would require at least a year or two of work. At this point Camper advised his son to merely string Buffon along for he suspected Buffon “to be at death’s door, at least his spirit is abating.”94
Indeed, ten days later, Buffon advanced new objections against a publication in its original form. This time, he criticized the purely anatomical descriptions that would not interest, he worried, the less educated scholars.95 Realizing that he may not even get, at the very least, a preface penned by Buffon, Petrus Camper now regretted the publishing projects set aside by his exertions in collaborating with Buffon. “I would have finished my book on the facial line which has suffered.”96
Whatever letters Adriaan Gilles wrote his father from Paris thereafter are missing; most likely destroyed. In spring 1787 Adriaan Gilles came down with a venereal disease.97 A gap appeared for two months in the Camper correspondence when Petrus Camper had to travel to Paris, despite a painful arm, to visit his seriously sick son.98 Later it was asked if Camper had a diplomatic mission on behalf of the Orangists, i.e. prevent France from meddling with their internal affairs? In 1795 the Patriotic preacher, Eelko Alta (1723-1798), suggested that Camper had bribed the French in April 1787.99 The Patriots were hoping for French support of their case, but, when the Prussians restored William V, the French did nothing.
The 1787 visit was Petrus Camper’s last trip. In the 18 days he stayed in Paris, he dined with Buffon seven times.100 He also visited Daubenton, Count de Lacépède (1756-1825), and his old friend Louis. Camper attended the meetings of the Royal Academy of Sciences and visited the cabinets of the French king, the crystallographer Jean-Baptiste Louis Romé de L’Isle (1736-1790), and others. He met the geologist Barthélémy Faujas de St. Fond (1741-1819).101 The result of the father and son reunion was the decision that Adriaan Gilles would go on a Grand Tour to the south of Europe to recuperate his health. His heavy-handed mercury treatment had sunk Adriaan Gilles into an ugly depression. His father begged his moody son not to leave Paris without taking courteous leave of their professional colleagues.
When Petrus Camper became a member of the State Council, he moved permanently to The Hague. His letters to Princess Wilhelmina in Nijmegen prove that he was well aware of the plan for a Prussian military intervention. Only recent decoding of encrypted archival material reveals that his eldest son, Jacob Camper (1757-1813), gave Laurens Pieter van de Spiegel (1736-1800), the future Great Pensionary, in Zeeland on 25 July 1787 the secret message that Britain would declare war on France if she interfered in any way with the Prussian plan.102 In September 1787, the new King of Prussia since 1786, Friedrich Wilhelm II (1744-1797), sent an army of 26,000 men into the Dutch Republic to restore his brother-in-law to full stadholderian power.
From August 1787 to July 1788 Adriaan Gilles traveled through the south of France to Italy, spending two months in Naples and four months in Rome.103 From The Hague Petrus Camper read in 1788 about his son in L’Esprit des Journaux:
Among the travelers who visited Rome at the end of 1787 was the son of the famous Camper. Like his father, he knows the principal modern languages. He draws very well, and paints stylishly. In Paris he lived at Count Buffon’s home and was received no less favorably by Count Hamilton in Naples.104
Adriaan Gilles had never lived in Buffon’s home at Paris — only at Montbard. On his return home, through Switzerland, Adriaan Gilles became the first Dutch alpinist to attempt a Mont Blanc ascent.105 But his departure from Paris had essentially ended the Buffon-Camper collaboration.
Ultimately only Camper’s letter to Buffon about the howler monkey was published in Buffon’s supplement on the quadrupeds.106 After Buffon’s April 1788 death in Paris, Lacépède took on the task — apparently against the deceased’s wishes — to publish the seventh and last volume of the supplements, which appeared in 1789.107 The supplement contained mainly additions and corrections to prior descriptions of animal exteriors. Only three of the 82 plates were anatomical, one of which was the howler monkey larynx drawn by Camper.108
Buffon’s original classification of the “orangs-outangs,” or great apes, was rectified somewhat in the seventh supplement, by references to Allamand and Vosmaer only.109 Lacépède never mentioned Camper’s name, even though both Allamand and Vosmaer cited the results of Camper’s critical acumen and authoritative autopsies.110 In his “Introduction” Lacépède pointed out that Vosmaer’s and Allamand’s orangutans were the same animal yet did not mention Camper in terms of orangutans but only in terms of howler monkeys.111
Since only two samples of the French book version of Camper’s orangutan treatise, Histoire Naturelle de l’Orang Outang et de Quelques Autres Singes (Harlingen, 1779), appear to exist, the French book version must have remained in the proof stage.112 Convinced of its importance, Adriaan Gilles published the orangutan French translation in the very first volume of the three-volumed Les Œuvres de Pierre Camper he edited in 1803.113 The world would see that his father had drawn the very first scientific figures of the genuine orangutan.
In 1804 Lacépède published his Natural History of Cetaceans, whereas Camper’s Observations of the Interior Structure and the Skeleton of Several Cetacean Species appeared only posthumously, in 1820, written by his son with the assistance of Georges Cuvier (1769-1832).114 In 1793 the old Jardin du Roi and its Cabinet were replaced by the Jardin des Plantes and the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle. The French declared war on the “tyrant” William V that same year. In Holland the Stadholder’s cabinet and menagerie were still his personal property. Therefore, after the French occupied Holland and the Stadholder sought refuge in England in 1795, the invaders considered his belongings to be war loot. His natural history cabinet had specimens from Africa and the East Indies that the French knew only from the works of Dutch naturalists. Most of it went to the Paris Museum. The Versailles menagerie had been moved to the new menagerie in the Jardin des Plantes. Cuvier, the director of both the museum and menagerie, derived even more benefit from the transfer of the Loo survivors, including the two Asian elephants, to Paris.115
Petrus Camper had completed all the cetacean illustrations, the greater part of which had been engraved by Jacques de Sève (1742-1788) at Buffon’s expense. Forty-six of the final 53 handsome plates were based on Camper’s original drawings, including three plates in color.116 But Camper did not live to write the text proper because he unexpectedly died on 7 April 1789. Apart from a number of quotations from the literature and his articles on the auditory organ, he left but a brief exposition in which he compared the skull of whales with that of man, a comparative analogy illustrated in the final engraving.
Camper’s graphical skills had certainly contributed to his international fame. He had always drawn his own illustrations for all of his publications, many of which are still preserved in manuscript form. He had been commissioned as medical illustrator. But Camper was particularly applauded for the dynamic drawings he called “re-creations” or “metamorphoses.”117 No less an admirer was Denis Diderot (1713-1784): “Camper created from a single model, from which he altered only the facial line, all the animals from man to stork.”118 Like Buffon, Camper emphasized how nature always worked in nuances and degrees.
When Buffon had made the interconnection of nature central, he modified the concept of cause and effect. Immense diversity could result from a mere change in a single constituent part of the organism. The exact same lessons Buffon articulated in literary eloquence, Camper demonstrated in the pictorial representations that he sketched, elongated or shortened, in front of live audiences. Witnesses related how impressive Camper’s transformation of an African into a European, and back again, by changing the facial line’s degree of inclination. The superimposition of the African’s facial line over a European’s readily showed that the Negroid nose was not so much squashed as embedded in a forward-jutting jaw. The nostrils had necessarily to flatten as the nose grew. These morphological demonstrations in chalk were entertaining at the very least.
Daubenton’s work failed to inspire such popularity.119 In Buffon historiography, there is a debate about whether Daubenton appeared to be the dull but accurate anatomist only in a hyperbolic contrast with the stylish Buffon.120 It is therefore rather interesting that Adriaan Gilles reported that Daubenton was a boring lecturer. Admittedly not an impartial witness, Adriaan Gilles brought this topic up independently.
The day before yesterday I was in Daubenton’s public class at the Royal College… There were 30 in Daubenton’s audience. The professor, with whose expansive mind you are acquainted, was in the Vegetable Kingdom. He almost put me to sleep while galloping across the history of lilacs, leaf and flower buds, etc. Today he had as subject hazel nuts, box-tree, and that of leaves. In my life I have never seen or heard a more stupid nor childish thing. He narrates all that without raising or lowering his voice, without allocution or exordium. He starts like that, and then, in a voice hardly loud enough to be heard. The hazel-tree is a tree, etc., etc. I need a lot of patience!121
Petrus Camper answered his son that Daubenton’s manner of teaching did not surprise him.
Other than the dryness of technical details costing readership and sales, another historiographical explanation for Daubenton’s declining contributions to Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle was the difficulty of getting exotic specimens from overseas. Their necessity for an accurate international coverage required collaborating with foreigners and anatomists. Unlike Daubenton, Petrus Camper was both.
But, like Daubenton, Camper soon came to learn that Buffon did not consider comparative anatomy to be the cornerstone to natural history. Buffon approached the anthropoid ape only from the exterior whereas Camper was in complete solidarity with Daubenton that the scalpel had the final say.
Daubenton’s uniform descriptive method, on an unprecedented broad scale to facilitate comparison, was an innovation.122 The same anatomical observations for each dissected specimen should be recorded so that species could be usefully compared before generalizing about their relationships.123 Although Buffon had prescribed a period of fact-finding followed by comparison and generalization, he began his Histoire Naturelle with theories before turning to details. Ironically, Daubenton’s research reflected Buffon’s methodological precepts far closer than Buffon himself!124 Following Daubenton’s innovative lead, Camper gave a tabular review of his specimens’ principal dimensions in his orangutan book.125 Despite fierce rivalries for precedence in discoveries, the nascent discipline of comparative anatomy could not advance without mutual cooperation between anatomists.
The most instructive revelations in the Camper epistolary exchange were Petrus Camper’s private views about Buffon. His many public tributes to Buffon were not obligatory signs of deference but sincere compliments. The letters confirm that the author he described as the “Architect of genius” had inspired Camper’s metamorphoses. The letters also prove that Camper was a success as a father and that Adriaan Gilles was a worthy heir to his father’s museum and manuscripts. However, regardless of their respective health problems, the differences in goals and methods probably guaranteed that the envisioned co-publication between Buffon and Petrus Camper would result only in a collaboration manqué.