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chapter 2 Botanical Matters differentiae Je bornerai là ces exemples. Ils montrent que tous nos efforts sont impuissants, en présence des relations multiples qu’affectent de toutes parts les êtres qui nous entourent. C’est la lutte, dont parle le grand botaniste Goethe, de l’homme contre la nature infinie. On est assuré toujours de trouver l’homme surpassé. (I will conclude these examples here. They show that all of our efforts are powerless in the presence of multiple relations that affect all parts of the beings that surround us. It is the struggle, as the great botanist Goethe says, against infinite nature. We are always certain to find humankind surpassed.)1 Published after three centuries of European exploration and taxonomic activity around the globe, Henri Baillon’s exhaustive classification of the Euphorbia, a large plant family with many exotic species and genera, offers the extraordinary admission , quoted above, that “it is the struggle . . . against infinite nature.” Precisely because such monographs describe all known species and genera of a given plant family and analyze relevant taxonomical debates, they tend to offer confident hypotheses and learned conclusions. Baillon breaks with this convention only in the sentences quoted above. The rest of the monograph runs true to type, as it were. Three hundred or even one hundred years earlier, a monograph of several hundred pages and numerous engraved plates devoted to a single plant family would have been inconceivable. Yet Baillon appears to be nearly as uncertain about nature ’s things as his predecessors had been—among them Andrea Cesalpino in 1583 and James Wallace in 1700. Some botanists practiced what Sir J. E. Smith characterized as “philosophical” or speculative botany rather than the analysis of plant groups that Baillon offers. However, the two practices were typically distinct. The theoretical and philosophical implications of taxonomic evidence might be extraordinary, but taxonomical papers were and still are characteristically circumspect in presenting those implications . Robert Brown, the most brilliant taxonomist and botanist of the first half of the nineteenth century in England, is a notorious case in point, reticent nearly to a fault about the larger implications of his botanical investigations.2 His practice 18 c l a n d e s t i n e m a r r i a g e mirrors a widespread scientific and cultural disposition that supposes minute, particular observation and analysis constitute the work at hand. Baillon’s departure from this protocol is almost certainly not unique, but it is sufficiently unusual to warrant asking what it means. That it occurs not at the end of the work but at the end of its penultimate section suggests that its author recognized its anomalous relation to the conventions of the taxonomic monograph. He concludes the work without further reflection about who or what might win or lose in the struggle between infinite nature and taxonomic man. I argue in this chapter that the special interest of botany in and for romanticism derives from its complex engagement with the internal conflicts that Baillon’s 1858 monograph reprises: tenacious investigation of plants coupled with closely reasoned taxonomical debate, on the one hand, and, on the other, doubts about the possibility of mapping nature ’s kinds. Committed to a level of particularity about nature that nonnaturalists and nontaxonomists would find numbing, botanists from the time of Linnaeus forward have experimented with successive protocols for mapping plant relationships : reproduction, natural affinities, evolutionary histories, and finally genetic mapping, called cladistics, which maps complex interrelations among plants and taxa. The history of this taxonomic effort witnesses what romantic era botanists began to recognize: that botanical nature persistently defied their best efforts. Aristotle introduced the term differentiae to specify key differences between things. Centuries later Cesalpino used the same term to refer to features that distinguish one plant from others in a species or species within a genus. As this long continuum suggests, differentiae became the unending order of business in botanical thought. As Cesalpino presented it, the Latin term refers to the specific traits or “characters” of plants and animals, not in and of themselves but as markers of contrastive distinction.3 In the modern translation of Linnaeus’s Philosophia Botanica, the differentiae are called Definitions, in order to signal that species and genus definition is what differentiating characters make possible.4 Historians of botany have mostly agreed that for Aristotle and his student Theophrastus, the notion of differentiating characters invokes Plato’s theory of eidos, or universal ideas, insofar as the natural...

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