Breeding: a partial history of the eighteenth century

Introduction: Breeding Before Biology 1 --
The language of human nature --
The concept of heredity --
Airs, waters, places --
The "Design of Lengthening and Whitening His Posterity" --
Perfectibility and Englightenment --
Looking-glass determinism --
The Ghost Structure --
Archeologies of ashes --
A nuance exercise --
Partial history --
Chapter 1 The Rules of Resemblance 14 --
The question of scale --
Theatrical adaptations as cultural indicators --
Inheriting properties --
Why Children Look Like Their Fathers --
The Winter's Tale --
Marrying scions and stock --
"Art thou my boy?" --
"The whole matter / And copy of the father" --
The Rules of Resemblance --
Aristotle's carpenter --
The maternal imagination --
Jacob and Laban's sheep --
Aristoteles Master-Piece --
The organs of Adam and Eve --
Taffeta breeches --
"Nature's Bastards" --
Perdita's gillyflowers --
"The art itself is Nature" --
Egalitarian eugenics --
Grafting as metaphor --
Literary criticism and the science of genetics --
"Her Royal Image Stampt on Thee" --
Garrick's Florizel and Perdita --
"This pretty abstract of Hermione" --
Biparental heredity --
Why girls look like their mothers --
Burney's Evelina --
Inchbald's A Simple Story --
Darwin's novel-reading --
"To the memory of the fractured leg of my dear mother" --
Chapter 2 Bent 39 --
The blank slate --
"God has stampt certain Characters upon Mens Minds" --
The two cultures --
The Blank Slate --
Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding --
The mind as white paper --
Original tempers and native propensities --
"Adam's Children" --
Sinners by Descent --
Augustine's generatione non imitatione --
The Pelagian heresy --
Genetic perfectibility --
Timothy Nourse's "Original Curse" --
"A Meer Errant Cat" --
"AEsopes Damosell" --
Blood and kind --
"Gentlemen born" --
Chapter 3 Cultures of Improvement 58 --
Habit as second nature --
Fantasies of improvement, fears of degeneration --
Deucalion's Kin --
The Georgics --
Dryden's translation --
Jethro Tull and The New Horse-Houghing Husbandry --
Prose georgics and savage nature --
"A Living Magazine" --
Defoe's Robinson Crusoe --
"An education according to nature" --
The work of Providence --
Perfect Wildness --
The Wild Boy of Hamelin --
Defoe's Mere Nature Delineated --
"A lump of soft Wax" --
The Wolf Girls of Midnapore --
Original sin --
Forbidden experiments --
"A Perfect Yahoo" --
Species thinking --
Swift's Gulliver's Travels --
Locke's parrot --
"Teachableness, Civility and Cleanliness" --
"The Females had a natural Propensity to me as one of their own Species" --
Prolific mixtures --
The Perfectibility Problem --
Gulliver redux --
Putting an end to the species --
Plato's Republic --
More's naked women --
A Modest Proposal --
The calculus of breeding --
"Properties Descend!" --
Osmer versus Wall on equine improvement --
"Ascertaining What Species Can Procreate Together" --
Bradley's "cross Couplings" --
Bonnet and Spallanzani ponder the mystery of fecundation --
Maupertuis and the Earthly Venus --
Frederick of Prussia and the beautification of the nation --
Hybrids, varieties and human polygenesis --
La Mettrie prunes man like a tree --
Vandermonde and Gregory improve the human species --
Differences of Climate --
Sheep-rearing --
"The old hairy Tegument" --
Climate theory and Hartley's alterations --
Bodily organs --
Man as a domestic animal --
"The Management of Human Creatures" --
Proto-eugenicist arguments --
Hume's "Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations" --
Multiplying the species --
Wallace on the numbers of mankind --
Diderot's Supplement au Voyage de Bougainville and global experiments in breeding --
Crabs and Brambles --
Smollett's The Expedition of Humphry Clinker --
Raymond Williams country --
Georgic fantasies and filthy realism --
The reproductive life --
"The Blackberry is the fruit of the Bramble" --
Dunghills --
"A crab of my own planting" --
Fruit of a peculiar flavor --
Chapter 4 A Natural History of Inequality 112 --
Splitting the culturalist consensus --
The Difference between One Man and Another --
Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality --
The idea of perfectibility --
The origin of difference --
The savage and the domesticated condition --
Civilization largely responsible for misery --
"We Are Born Twice Over" --
Rousseau's Emile --
"Nature's characters" --
"The present confusion between the sexes" --
"Nature's Own Pencil" --
The elocutionists --
"A natural tendency to degeneration" --
Thomas Sheridan and the language of Nature --
Condillac --
Harris's Hermes --
Herries' The Elements of Speech --
Human improvement --
Bound feet and misshapen heads --
Hippocratic habit --
"Nature framed her self to that Custome" --
The Natural Inequality of Man --
Monboddo's savages --
Acquired habits --
Custom a second nature --
Natural inequality --
"A Purity, Hwich Coarts Doo Not Always Bestow" --
Orthoepy --
Orthography --
Waistcoats and cucumbers --
"The onliest way to rise in the world" --
Vocabularies unintelligible to eye and ear --
Elphinston's Propriety Ascertained in her Picture --
Priestley on the laws of language and the laws of government --
The tacit obligations of language --
Noah Webster on the "ipse dixit of a Johnson, a Garrick, or a Sheridan" --
"I would have all the birds of the air to retain somewhat of their own notes" --
The Edgeworths' Essay on Irish Bulls --
"If an Englishman were born in Ireland" --
The logic of shibboleth --
Chapter 5 Blots on the Landscape 149 --
Promethean thinking on population --
"A monster, a blot upon the earth" --
Sidelining sexual reproduction --
"This Blot in Our Country Increases" --
Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia --
"Twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually" --
The varieties of man --
"The extermination of the one or the other race" --
Color mixture --
Subjects of natural history --
"The Incessant Improveableness of the Human Species" --
Godwin's An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness and other writings on education --
Priestley on man's unbounded improvement --
Condorcet on the progress of perfectibility --
Gulliver's Travels and original sin --
Mind's tendency to rise --
Helvetius on the importance of education --
Physical influences on man --
The perverseness of institutions --
Differences between human beings --
Hercules and his brother --
"Human creatures are born into the world with various dispositions" --
Physiognomy as fatalism --
"Encumbering the World with Useless and Wretched Beings" --
The animal function of sex (Godwin, Condorcet) --
Malthus's Essay on Population --
The restraining bonds of society --
Cabanis and others on human improvement --
Chapter 6 Shibboleths 189 --
Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones --
Handfuls of parsley --
Shibboleths --
Walker's Intermarriage --
Pinker's The Language Instinct --
Genes and culture --
The Ebonics controversy --
Race and voice --
The Blackmail of Enlightenment --
Foucault's "What Is Enlightenment?" --
Gestures of hospitality --
Accessibility and difficulty --
The problem of disciplines --
Conclusion: The Promise of Perfection 199 --
"Where is now, the progress of the human Mind?" --
Adams versus Jefferson on the natural equality of mankind --
Sandel, Zizek, and Passmore on the allure of perfectibility --
Overrating talent --
The realm of causation.