In 1924, the British biologist J.B.S. Haldane acknowledged that anyone who tried to predict where science was taking us was obliged to mention H.G. Wells, since ‘[t]he very mention of the future suggests him’. Nevertheless, Haldane complained that Wells was ‘a generation behind the time’, having been raised when flying and radiotelegraphy were genuinely scientific questions, but they were now mere ‘commercial problems’, Haldane asserted, and ‘I believe that the centre of scientific interest lies in biology’. Haldane's conviction that biology was the key to the future was widely shared, and lies in the background of both these books. Helen Curry examines the early history of the dream of engineering new kinds of plants, using first X-rays, then colchicine (a chemical mutagen), and then the new sources of intense radioactivity that were created by the early nuclear reactors. By contrast, Ewa Luczak is interested in the influence of eugenics on American literature, focusing particularly on Jack London, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and George Schuyler. What unites these books (and the diverse topics they address) is new ways of imagining the future, specifically a future based in biology.

In this paper, I discuss the development and use of images employed by the Dresden Royal Museum for Zoology, Anthropology and Ethnography to resolve debates about how to use visual representation as a means of making ethnographic knowledge. Through experimentation with techniques of visual representation, the founding director, A.B. Meyer (1840–1911), proposed a historical, non-essentialist approach to understanding racial and cultural difference. Director Meyer's approach was inspired by the new knowledge he had gained through field research in Asia-Pacific as well as new forms of imaging that made highly detailed representations of objects possible. Through a combination of various techniques, he developed new visual methods that emphasized intimate familiarity with variations within any one ethnic group, from skull shape to material ornamentation, as integral to the new disciplines of physical and cultural anthropology. It is well known that photographs were a favoured form of visual documentation among the anthropological and ethnographic sciences at the fin de siècle. However, in the scholarly journals of the Dresden museum, photographs, drawings, tables and etchings were frequently displayed alongside one another. Meyer sought to train the reader's eye through organized arrangements that represented objects from multiple angles and at various levels of magnification. Focusing on chimpanzees, skulls and kettledrums from Asia-Pacific, I track the development of new modes of making and reading images, from zoology and physical anthropology to ethnography, to demonstrate how the museum visually historicized humankind.

This article traces the diachronic development of English conditionals with clause-initial subclauses (If you hurt the cat, (then) she will bite you) by means of (frequency) data from three corpora (YCOE, PPCME2 and PPCEME). It investigates the division of labour between (g)if, and (meaning ‘if, suppose/provided that, on condition that’) and verb-initial conditionals from Old to Early Modern English. It is shown that conjunctional conditionals (e.g. if conditionals) have always been most frequent. The limitations on verb-initial conditionals (as they exist in Present-day English) develop diachronically and are related to restrictions on verb movement and choice of verb, and not frequency. Genre preferences, however, seem to exist. The use of then introducing the main clause will be shown to be a reflex of an earlier paratactic structure. Its use over time is influenced by mood and length, the latter being of influence especially in later periods.