Can fish hear? Studying fish ears in eighteenth-century natural history

Abstract This article investigates the dispute about auditory perception in fish that took place in the mid-eighteenth century, when the question of whether fish could hear was heavily debated in academic societies in France, England, Germany, and the Low Countries. Arguing that this dispute contains key insights into the understanding of animal hearing in eighteenth-century natural history, this article charts the different ways in which how and why early modern naturalists tried to create knowledge about this difficult subject. I discuss the efforts at the Royal Society of London and by individual scholars such as Jean-Antoine Nollet, Jacob Theodor Klein, and Petrus Camper to study underwater hearing by means of anatomy, animal physiology, and acoustic experiments. Although the role of non-human animals in historical notions of hearing has received little attention, this article argues that animals were central to the question of what it means to hear and to the establishment of an eighteenth-century science of hearing.