Science and Place 383PLACES OF PRACTICE
Initially, then, we direct our attention to sites where scientifi c inquiry is
activated and scientifi c claims are generated, that is, to the production
sector of the knowledge circuit. Science, of course, has been practiced in
a remarkably wide range of places. Venues like the laboratory, the obser-
vatory, the museum, the fi eld, the botanical garden, and the hospital,
spring readily to mind. But such standard locations do not exhaust the
range of possibilities. The ship, for example, has not only been a space in
which scientifi c gadgetry was transported; it itself has been—as in the case
of James Cook’s vessel, the Endeavour—a scientifi c instrument delivering
to surveyors, through the plotting of its own geodetic position, a sort
of cartographic shadow of the coastline.^19 During the middle decades of
the nineteenth century, the English village inn became a key site in the
pursuit of artisan botany. In the public house, as Ann Secord has tellingly
shown, amateur horticulturalists would congregate on Sunday mornings
to share plant information, swap specimens, and pore over the botanical
textbooks that the club kept in the local hostlery. Indeed gentlemen sci-
entists, like J.D. Hooker of Kew Gardens, would resort to these gatherings
for samples and skills alike. Here the chasm between philosopher and
craftsman, head and hand, began to be bridged as working- class prac-
titioners, long denied access to the elite sites of scientifi c investigation,
pursued botanical inquiries in a congenial atmosphere.^20 And then there
is the library. As Adrian Johns has reminded us, “far from emerging from a
rejection of words, in fact science originated partly from a need to master
as many of them as possible.”^21 The research library, only spatially differ-
entiated from museum and laboratory space during the European Enlight-
enment, installed various bureaucratic practices that effectively regulated
access to crucial scientifi c texts. The remarkable library at the University
of Göttingen for example, itself “oriented on a pragmatic, rationalising
view of knowledge” from its opening in 1737, stamped an Enlightenment
philosophy of utility on its collections by becoming as renowned for what
William Clark calls “its reader- friendly atmosphere,” as for its effective
cataloguing system. Such arrangements, expressed in the spatial layout
of stock, went hand in hand with the systematization of knowledge.^22 To
these we might also add such locations as cathedrals, coffee houses, tents,
breeding clubs, royal courts, stock farms, exhibition stages and, no doubt,
many more.^23
There are indeed important things to be said about each of these spaces
as sites of scientifi c practice and the production of scientifi c knowledge,
just as there are about individual cases of each. The stories of, say, the