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c o n c l u s i o n Ephemeral Remains In his 1751 treatise Philosophia Botanica, Carl Linnaeus introduced a radical new system for classifying botanical material that allowed him to attend to both generic and specific qualities of vegetative matter. His system involved surveying a plant’s reproductive organs and classifying them through binomial nomenclature ; the inclusion of the secondary “diagnostic” term enabled botany to unfold, in his terms, “like territories on a geographical map.”1 Mapping floral reproduction through visual systems of observation, Linnaeus organized all the world’s plants into classifiable matter. Given the emphasis on spatial mapping, it is perhaps not surprising that vision emerges as the organizing sense through which all other botanical phenomena are understood; plants are primarily identified through visual concordances between configurations of their reproductive parts.2 In such a system, smell is almost inconsequential, yet Linnaeus, like so many of his eighteenth-century scientific peers, offers a brief theorization of olfaction before dismissing its importance to scientific study. Though the scent of a plant is an important property (along with its color and its taste) and thus should be included in descriptions, Linnaeus reminds his readers that “scent never clearly distinguishes a species,” since the sense of smell is “the most obscure of the senses” and because the “scent of all things very easily varies.”3 Smell also troubles his botanical map, for he notes that “scents do not allow for fixed boundaries and cannot be [spatially] defined.”4 Linnaeus’s binomial descriptive system revolutionized European approaches to biological matter; in many ways, it reflects all that Enlightenment science, with its emphasis on quantifiable evidence, teleological progress, and objective truth, would come to represent within modern, Western approaches to intellectual history. It also sounds a historic death knell for olfaction. With the rise of Enlightenment science comes the triumph of the eye over the nose (along with all other sensory organs), or so the story goes.5 The term Enlightenment itself emphasizes such shifts: light was linked with reason and scientific discovery. Eighteenth-century philosophers, influenced by Sir Isaac Newton’s paradigm-shifting study of optics in the century before, defined theirs as an age of light.6 Seventeenth-century scientific discovery thus marks a tri- Ephemeral Remains 183 umph over the “dark” ages of the medieval period; that leads to further enlightenment , and a long, teleological progress toward modernity begins. The elevation of vision over all other senses introduced a spatial dimension to reason: a disembodied , universal perspective was valued over more material, embodied ways of knowing. Olfaction was subjective and thus subjugated. Vision was the domain of the human, smell, the domain of the animal—so much so that Denis Diderot could famously “suspect” the blind of inhumanity; for Diderot, lack of vision was linked to a dangerous lack of morality.7 Diderot is not alone in making this claim; countless groups were defined in such sensory ways. Slaves—both African and native American—were routinely used by British colonists in the eighteenth century in the American South to collect valuable botanical specimens due to their perceived olfactory acumen, which was believed to help them navigate the dangerous environmental conditions of southern swamps.8 Such sensory insight, though valued, also marked them as expendable laborers. It offered no paradox for English naturalists to trust the botanical knowledge generated by such laborers yet denigrate them for it.9 Likewise , gynecological manuals from the nineteenth century continued to recommend the application of fetid smells to revive “hysterical” women, long after such practices had been abandoned for men.10 These kinds of practices document the shifting social meanings of sagacity across the historical scope of this book. The term, from the Latin sagacitas, linked acuteness of sensory perception—especially olfaction—with cleverness and intelligence . Knowledge was embodied and spatially defined; one was as clever as one’s nose was keen.11 Ben Jonson’s New Inn (1629) stages sagacity precisely opposite to Diderot’s conception of it. Olfaction is an index of moral value, punning on the link between smell and wisdom: in the play, a character wonders aloud how the host of the titular inn, a man of such “sagacity, and clear nostril,” could work in such a sordid industry (1.3.110).12 Having a “clear” nostril was a positive quality, at times even reflecting a keen aptitude for regal...

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