“Nature” is one of those terms that the philosopher W. W. Gallie called “essentially contested concepts,” that is, concepts that are impossible to define because their meaning and application will always be subject to debate. Like most of these concepts, “nature” mixes descriptive and normative meanings, seamlessly connecting statements about the world as it is with claims about the world as it ought to be. (Why else should so-called “natural foods” be so expensive?) In the nineteenth century, as the capacity to describe the natural world rapidly expanded, the power of nature as a source of value became more formidable but also more contentious. This was, of course, particularly true in the study of biology, the century's most intellectually vital, philosophically relevant, and ideologically charged natural science.

Lynn Nyhart's fine new book examines a fascinating chapter in the long and complex history of “nature” as a scientific subject and a social category. Her focus is on what she calls “the biological perspective” in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany, “the challenges and the opportunities presented by modern German society … as seen through the understanding of nature” (p. 4). Modern Nature is about biology as a science and a cultural practice, about knowledge and its institutional base, and about the relationship between biological discoveries and changing images of society.

Nyhart gives her account shape and substance by following the careers of several key individuals: Philipp Leopold Martin, who began as a taxidermist and went on to design museum exhibits and zoos; Karl Möbius, one of the founders of modern ecology and also a museum innovator; Friedrich Junge, who brought Möbius's ideas about biological communities into the classroom; Friedrich Dahl, who expanded Möbius's concepts into a broader theory of biological geography; and finally Karl Kraepelin, a museum director and educational reformer. Nyhart examines her protagonists' social backgrounds, professional experiences, and institutional settings, uncovering their shared intellectual assumptions and values, as well as the personal networks that gave them a common perspective on the natural world and its social meaning.

Building on Andreas Daum's pathbreaking book, Wissenschaftspopularisierung im 19. Jahrhundert (1998), Nyhart emphasizes science's public and pedagogical dimensions. The men she studies were all committed to communicating as well as collecting scientific knowledge, not only because it was intellectually interesting and practically important but also because they believed that it had a profound moral purpose. “He who has learned to respect and love nature,” Phillipp Martin maintained, “will also respect his fellow man and the laws of society, for the one determines the other” (p. 117).

Modern Nature contains, therefore, a great deal of excellent material on the preparation and display of natural historical displays, the design of zoos, the role of biological subjects in school curricula, and especially the development of natural history museums. Nyhart's two splendid chapters on museums add significantly to the growing literature on the growth of these important nineteenth-century institutions.

The intellectual thread that weaves through these various institutions is the notion of ecology, the relationship between living organisms and their environment. The breakthrough in this project occurred in 1859, that annus mirabilis for nineteenth-century biology, when Karl Möbius began his painstaking examination of the fauna in the Kiel Fjord, which he published six years later. This was followed a decade later by Möbius's masterpiece on oysters, which clearly formulated a functional analysis of biological communities. These insights, Nyhart demonstrates, influenced the popular presentation of biology in schools and museums as well as ecological research in academic institutions.

Nyhart deftly ties the emergence of a functionally based ecology to changes in contemporary society. The success of Möbius's theory, she argues, did not only depend on his formidable study of oysters, but also on the way it matched people's perception of their social environment. In an increasingly mobile society, where conventional structures and hereditary status were ebbing, the notion of a functional relationship between individuals—humans as well as oysters—and their community seemed to be a plausible way of understanding social interdependence.

Nyhart is certainly aware of the sinister role that biology would play in twentieth-century Germany, but she does not let this awareness prevent her from seeing the biological perspective in terms of its own time and place. She recognizes that this vision of the natural world was multivalent, “accommodating diverse ways to appreciate and live with nature.” These diverse and sometimes contradictory ways, she concludes, are with us still, the lasting legacy of the ideas and attitudes that she so clearly and sympathetically analyzes.