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Chapter 2 Sons ofSrence Natural History and Collecting According to John Aubrey's account of the death of Sir Francis Bacon, the former Lord Chancellor, after having been sent into political exile byJames I for accepting bribes, perished in the pursuit of scientific knowledge: As he was taking the air in a coachwith Dr.Witherborne (a Scotchman,physician to the King) towards Highgate, snowlay on the ground, and it came into my lord's thoughts, why flesh might not be preserved in snow, as in salt. Theywere resolved they would try the experiment at once. They alighted out of the coach, and went into a poor woman's house at the bottom of Highgate Hill, and bought a hen, and made the woman gut it, and then stuffedthe bodywith snow, and my lord did help to do it himself.The snow so chilled him, that he immediatelyfell so extremelyill, that he could not return to his lodgings (I suppose at Gray's Inn),but went to the earl of Arundel's house at Highgate, where they put him into a good bed warmed with a pan, but it was a damp bed that had not been laid-in about a year before, which gave him such a cold that in two or three days, as I remember Hobbes told me, he died of suffocation.' This story, although probably fictitious, helped to establish the image of Bacon as a keen man of science which persists to this day. In the biographical narrative related by Aubrey we encounter an intrepid experimentalist; Bacon is portrayed as a man whose determination to discover the principles of nature, long frustrated by the demands of his political career, leads him as a frail senior citizen to risk his well-being for the sake of natural history2 In light of the texts he authored, however, what is striking about the tale of Bacon and the lethal chicken is how far it diverges from Bacon's own vision of his proper role in scientific research. Bacon's writings, I shall argue, represent scientific research as a process of collecting which necessitates the prior creation of a collection of men. For Bacon, the gathering of materials fundamental to a reformed natural philosophy becomes the rationale for assembling and organizing a new bureaucracy, a body of men whom Bacon envisions himself administering. In Bacon's writings, we see how the activity of collecting could be conceived as a technology of social 9 C H A P T E R 2 innovation in early modern England, a means by which new groups and new forms and positions of status could be created. Bacon never imagined himself as actuallyhaving to handle mundane objects like poultry carcasses, but instead envisioned that he would supervise a group of underlings who would gather data for him to assess. During the last five years of his life, however, Bacon bitterly realized that rather than overseeing a group of subaltern "factors," he could pursue his plans to compile a natural history only if he were to get his own hands dirty by gathering material himself. Bacon's chaplain and amanuensis,William Rawley,reported, "I have heard his lordship speak complainingly, that his lordship (who thinketh he deserveth to be an architect in this building) should be forced to be a workman and a labourer, and to dig the clay and burn the brick; and more than that (accordingto the hard condition of the Israelites at the latter end) to gather the straw and stubble over all the fields to burn the bricks withaLn3Aubrey's narrative of Bacon's death portrays the one-time Lord Chancellor as being forced to collect the facts of nature for himself, with only an ad hoc assistant like the impoverished woman of Highgate Hill to help him. In the absence of a collection of men for him to administer, the pursuit of natural history proved fatal to Bacon. From this perspective, one could argue that Sir Francis Bacon died because he failed to realize his aspirations as a collector. In the decades after Bacon's death in 1626, however, other men modeled their own natural history projects on Bacon's schema, and more successfully created new social groupings which they organized around the activity of collecting. The Study ofNature Before Bacon During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,the conceptualframeworks which structured European approaches to the study of nature changed significantly. Although bestiaries, herbals, and lapidaries were popular in the Middle Ages, "natural...

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