Throughout the late 1840s and the early 1850s, Harvard botanist Asa Gray (1810–1888) and his close friend George Engelmann (1809–1884) of St. Louis engaged themselves with recruiting men who sought to make a living by natural history collecting, sending these men into the field, searching for institutions and individuals who would subscribe to incoming collections, compiling catalogs, and collecting subscription fees. Although several botanists have noted Gray and Engelmann’s bold experiment as having introduced America to a mode by which European naturalists had devised to organize scientific expeditions, historians of science have not taken the “subscription mode” seriously. I argue that it was specifically by undertaking the labor of cataloging species and charging subscription fees for the cataloged species that Gray established himself as a metropolitan botanist. One crucial consequence of Gray’s rising profile was that he acquired sufficient “cataloging power” to secure his status as an authoritative cataloger of species, and as a kind of “mint” or “storehouse” (McOuat in Br J Hist Sci 34(1):1–28, 2001a) who produced well-pruned lists of American species to enable transactions between American and European botanists. But this essay is not focused on the Europeanization of American taxonomy. Drawing on work by scholars who place emphasis on how new forms of knowledge get produced when knowledge travels, my focus here is the evolution of the subscription mode when Gray and Engelmann adapted it to American natural history. My conclusion examines what historian of science Vanessa Heggie (Isis 105(2):318–334, 2014) identifies as the “danger of category dominance” in today’s historiography of science and shows how a kind of “assemblage thinking” may help historians cope with this danger.

中文翻译：

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订阅标本，编目订阅的标本，并在美国组装第一次植物地理调查

在整个 1840 年代末和 1850 年代初，哈佛植物学家阿萨·格雷（1810-1888 年）和他的密友乔治·恩格尔曼（1809-1884 年）在圣路易斯从事招募以收集自然历史为生的人，发送这些人进入该领域，寻找愿意订阅新馆藏的机构和个人，编制目录并收取订阅费。尽管一些植物学家注意到格雷和恩格尔曼的大胆实验将美国引入了欧洲博物学家设计的组织科学考察的模式，但科学史学家并没有认真对待“订阅模式”。我认为，正是通过承担编目物种的工作和为编目物种收取订阅费，格雷才确立了自己作为大都市植物学家的地位。格雷知名度上升的一个重要后果是，他获得了足够的“编目能力”，以确保他作为权威物种编目员的地位，以及作为一种“薄荷”或“仓库”（McOuat in Br J Hist Sci 34(1) :1–28, 2001a) 他制作了精心修剪的美国物种清单，以实现美国和欧洲植物学家之间的交易。但本文并不关注美国分类学的欧洲化。借鉴了学者们的工作，他们强调知识传播时如何产生新的知识形式，我在这里的重点是当格雷和恩格尔曼将订阅模式适应美国自然历史时订阅模式的演变。我的结论检验了科学史学家 Vanessa Heggie (Isis 105(2):318–334, 2014) 在今天的科学史学中认定的“类别支配的危险”，并展示了一种“组合思维”如何帮助历史学家应对带着这个危险。