Naming the World: Knowledge and the ‘New Science’

university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 3, summer 2003 DOUGLAS CHAMBERS Naming the World: Knowledge and the >New Science= At the centre of the English scientific revolution of the late 1650s and 1660s is the establishment of modern taxonomy: a vocabulary for registering the world in a systematic order that would replace the increasingly ramshackle apparatus inherited from Dioscorides and his followers. The narrative significance of this revolution can scarcely be exaggerated, leading as it did to (among other things) the literature of more than anecdotal criticism (Dryden) and coinciding with the appearance of the first (and perhaps only) significant English epic, Paradise Lost, in which Adam is the first namer of the botanical world. This was a time, as William Clark has recently observed, when >natural science reoriented itself from contemplation to manipulation of nature, and the intelligentsia ceased believing in magic= (TLS, 5 January 2001). As a mere deference to classical antiquity dwindled and the debate between ancients and moderns sharpened, the rise of Britain as an imperial power served to establish a cartographical, economic, and (increasingly) discursive power over the known world. Within a generation (and contemporary with John Ray=s taxonomies) the Duchess of Beaufort at Badminton was collecting plants from Australia and the Far East. Her executed father=s royalism had been replaced (in her case) by a far more potent power: a correct naming of plants and their families that only Adam had possessed. In Beaufort: The Duke and His Duchess Molly McClain explores some of this botanical enterprise, but less than one might have expected. Although her book is good on the political history and confections of the Duke of Somerset, it is less satisfactory on the pioneering botanical work of his duchess, Mary Capel, and her interesting botanical connections. Less than twenty pages are devoted to placing the duchess=s extensive botanical work in the context of her contemporaries. That McClain does not mention the twelve folio volumes of >plants, most rare and some common gathered in the fields and gardens at Badminton, Chelsea, etc= and now deposited in the Natural History Museum in London is indicative of the lacuna in her work. In those papers, for example, she would have discovered that the initial design of the radiating avenues at Badminton is with the duchess=s papers, not her husband=s. Nor is the reader encouraged by finding her misspelling the name of the major collection that she cites at the British Library, the Egerton manuscripts. It is not possible to be sure that >the famous confection naming the world: the >new science= 737 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 3, summer 2003 of Alchemes= that she quotes on p 119 (a citation from a Badminton MS) is accurate, but >alchermes= (or >alkermes=), a medicinal cordial made not from berries but from Coccus Ilicis, the Scarlet Grain insect, is surely what was meant if not written. Contemporary with Mary Capel=s work at Badminton is the Royal Botanic Garden at Chelsea (founded in 1673) where Samuel Doody, the curator of the Apothecaries= Garden (later the Physic Garden), supplied her with many rarities. Indeed the duchess dispatched her gardener, William Oram, to Chelsea specifically to discover >what plants ... that I have not at Brompton Parke.= The duchess does not appear in The Apothecaries= Garden: A New History of the Chelsea Physic Garden by Sue Minter, the present director there, but Doody makes an appearance in the first chapter. Minter=s account of the more than three-hundred-year history of the Physic Garden in less than two hundred pages is inevitably breathless, especially given that half of the book deals with the twentieth century. What goes missing in her book is the botanical and horticultural context in which the Physic Garden continued to thrive. One of the early frequenters of the Physic Garden was John Evelyn, who comments in his Diary both on the tree chincona there (the source of quinine) and the development of what amounted to a new sort of greenhouse by the merchant apothecary John Watts who managed the Garden in the 1680s. The nature of Evelyn=s place in the >new knowledge= is only beginning to...