Echo Worlds and Mole-Thinking: Imagining the Nocturnal Sensorium in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Scientific Investigations

In this article we track the relationship between transforming ways of engaging with animal Otherness in the context of Western scientific writing from the mid-eighteenth through to the early twenty-first century. Specifically, we engage with studies of dark-adapted sensoria. There are few species which seem to have presented such a challenge to the Western, post-enlightenment capacity to imagine Otherness, than those which dwell in darkness. Indeed, naturalists became increasingly confident across the course of the period that variable combinations of technologies and experiments enabled some degree of access to the sensory depths of the animal body. Animals’ fleshy forms, and sensory systems, were conceptualised as bodies of potential knowledge. However, these investigations into animal sensing were highly contextual and reveal as much about the human animal – and its imagined place in the wider world – as they do the animals under study.