392 Livingstone
elsewhere. Even in France, where most copies were located in Jesuit librar-
ies, there is little evidence of censorship.
Darwin’s theory of evolution also experienced a different fate in differ-
ent national settings, religious spaces, and institutional arenas.^47 Because
Darwin was heard to say different things in different places, different rhe-
torical strategies were deployed in these theaters of operation to meet the
challenges he was taken to be provoking. Prominent Protestant Church
leaders in Edinburgh, Belfast, and Princeton, for example, developed mark-
edly different tactics in their reading of the Darwinian challenge. In each
case local circumstances were crucial to the stances they adopted and to
the vocabulary—whether irenic or bellicose—they chose to express their
sentiments. The reading of Darwin, indeed, often became an occasion for
engaging in culture wars seemingly far distant from scientifi c matters.^48
Elsewhere other factors shaped Darwinian hermeneutics. In the Amer-
ican South, for instance, the monogenetic implications of Darwin’s ac-
count of human origins did not sit at all comfortably with the widespread
belief that the human race was composed of entirely different species.
Here racial politics conditioned the response to Darwin precisely because
scientifi c language had long been the bearer of local ideological freight.^49
In New Zealand, by contrast, racial politics tended to favor the espousal of
Darwinism because it was seen as justifying an ethnic struggle for life and
legitimizing the settlers’ routing of the Maori.^50 In Russia, the story was
again different, and here the vast expanse of a harsh, sparsely populated
environment was crucial. The metaphor of a struggle for existence was re-
sisted by leading members of the Russian scientifi c intelligentsia. Beketov,
Bogdanov, Dokuchaev, Kessler, Kropotkin, and Poliakov were all deeply
skeptical of the Malthusian elements in the Darwinian scheme. A meager
population and extreme climatic severity did not fi t at all well with Dar-
win’s picture of teeming life- forms or Wallace’s lush tropical vegetation.
For Russian evolutionists, On the Origin of Species seemed a theory inspired
in, and by, the tropics.^51
Scientifi c ideas rarely circulate as immaterial entities. Rather, as they
move from place to place, they are routinely embodied in written texts.
At a fundamental level, it is print rather than thought or theory that is
let loose upon the world. Scientifi c forms of reasoning crystallize in texts
of all kinds, including—according to Nick Jardine—“routinely authored
works—instrument handbooks, instruction manuals, observatory and
laboratory protocols” that are crucial to the regulation of empirical prac-
tices.^52 All of this brings the book to the forefront of our considerations
and to the importance of textual space, namely those arenas of engage-
ment where moments of hermeneutic encounter are effected.^53