The History of Natural History

620 DOUGLAS CHAMBERS dont elle fait 1a demonstration en ayant recours aquelques exemples puises parmi les comptines, les anagrammes ou les devinettes. En conclusion, Hesbois generalise la portee de sa theorie, qui repose sur l'analyse d'une cinquantaine de jeux c1assiques repartis en sept categories. S'appuyant sur un substrat linguistique bien maitrise, son analyse introduit une dimension ludique au C(Eur meme de l'argumentation , ce qui cl6t Ie recueil sur une note amusante tout en evacuant du coup 1a dimension pathologjque et tragique des rapports entre Ie langage et la folie. The History of Natural History DOUGLAS CHAMBERS N. Jardine, J.A. Secord, and E.C Spary, editors. Cultures ofNatural History Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996. xxii, 502. us $.29.95 paper David Philip Miller and Peter Hanns Reill, editors. Visions ofEmpire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations ofNature Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996. xx, 370. us $59.95 cloth Ann B. Shteir. Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora's Daughters and Botany in England 1760 to 1860 Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1996. xii, 302. us $29.95 cloth At the end of the eighteenth century, looking back over the momentous changes in natural history that had taken place since the late seventeenth century, Oliver Goldsmith used the traditional rhetorical topics of definition and description to distinguish what had been put in place between the work of John Ray and Bernard Jussieu. Natura} History, considered in its utmostextent, comprehends two objects. First, that of discovering, ascertaining, and naming all the various productions of Nature. Secondly, that of describing the properties, manners, and relations, which they bear to us, and to each other. The first, which is the most difficult part of the science, is systematicat dry, mechanicat and incomplete. The second is more amusing, exhibits new pictures to the imagination, and improves our relish for existence, by widening the prospect of nature around us. Plainly Goldsmith was on the side of the common reader when he privileged the descriptive over the systematic. He speaks with the same voice as another great eighteenth-century botanical amateur, Peter Collinson, when he reproves the botanical work of Linnaeus and his followers who, 'by multiplying divisions, instead of impressing the mind with distinct ideas, ... only serve to confound it, making the language of the science more difficult than even the science itself: THE HISTORY OF NATURAL HISTORY 621 It is the epistemology of description that has inspired the most interesting work in Cultures ofNatural History and Visions ofEmpire, and both collections represent a further stage in the history ofnatural history: the advent of its historiography. Two centuries after Goldsmith, the subject is once again returned to wider audiences than the sort of mere specialist that began to hold sway within Goldsmith's lifetime . Barbara Stafford's 'Images of Ambiguity: Eighteenth-Century Microscopy and the NeitherINor' (in Visions ofEmpire) takes as its starting point eighteenth-century perturbation about tiny biological systems 'that startled the spectator into paying attention to aspects of reality that had formerly been taken for granted or ignored: This subject leads here into a favourite field - 'a past, and otherwise inaccessible, mentality' - one in which we can also observe 'the beginnings of what would become a continual struggle with nomenclature' not least when the line between animals and plants seemed to erode. The 'liminality' ofthe naturalworld and 'the incoherent uniqueness ofgrotesque and ambivalent entities' were not long in finding critics in the later eighteenth century. The traditionalists who thought the links in the great chain of being were distinct were foremost in the attack. Indeed, although Stafford does not say so, it is difficult not to see what might be called an 'anti-Jacobin' agenda in the reactionary claims that the experimental sciences dealt only with 'purely mental, or transcendental abstraction.' Some of Stafford's style of wide-ranging ideological speculation is also present in Cultures ofNatural History, a collection of articles that might well be used as an anthology in a course that addressed the history of natural history. Dividing Western natural history into three stages - curiosity, the age of the virtuoso, and more rigorous scientific discipline - its twenty-six essays range from Renaissance natural history to the new biology...