1. Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1851; New York: Norton, 2002), 45.
2. Herman Melville, Mardi (1849; Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 505. Subsequent references in the text.
3. The most comprehensive discussion of this, and Melville’s other scientific interests is Richard Dean Smith’s Melville’s Science: “Devilish Tantalization of the Gods!” (New York: Garland, 1993).
4. Marshall Hall, Memoirs on the Nervous System (London: Sherwood, Gilbert and Piper, 1837), 4; emphasis in original. The extent to which Hall can be credited with this discovery is controversial; for discussion, see Franklin Fearing, Reflex Action: A Study in the History of Physiological Psychology (1930; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970); Roger Smith, “The Background of Physiological Psychology in Natural Philosophy,” History of Science, 11 (1973), 75–123; John D. Spillane, The Doctrine of the Nerves: Chapters in the History of Neurology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), ch. 5; Edwin Clarke and L. S. Jacyna, Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 114–24; Ruth Leys, From Sympathy to Reflex: Marshall Hall and His Opponents (New York: Garland, 1990); George Canguilhem, “The Concept of Reflex,” A Vital Rationalist: Selected Writings from George Canguilhem, ed. François Delaporte, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Zone Books, 2000), 179–202.
5. For an extended account of this analogy, see Laura Otis, Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001).