Our aim is to analyze this forgotten corpus and rescue it from the dustbin of history. Our guiding question is: What did theoretical biology look like in the early 20th century? More specifically, we ask: (i) What were the central debates and topics? (ii) Who were the central authors and how international was the scientific community at the beginning? (iii) Can distinct language-(of-origin-)specific camps be identified in terms of the kinds of topics they addressed? (iv) What, where, and when did transitions occur in networks of authors and topics? (v) When, how, and why did the discipline develop its emphasis on formal modeling? At this early exploratory stage of the project, we operationalize these central questions mainly as a topic-modelling problem: (1) Which central topics can be identified and how does their ‘share’ of the documents develop? Which topic clusters can be identified? (2-3) Are certain topics dominated by particular authors, languages (of origin), and nationalities? (4) Can certain ‘turning points’ be identified? Additionally: (5) How steadily does the proportion of publications that use mathematical formulas increase over time? Is it gradual or rather discontinuous?