Ideology and Representation in Eighteenth-Century Natural History

Abstract

Traditionally, the historiography of natural history excites little interest. By and large, eighteenthcentury natural history is held to be one of those representational discourses which lose out by around the turn of the nineteenth century. It engaged in denomination, taxonomy, the description of a static, hierarchic nature. It appears to remain within a conceptual framework still inbuilt with Classical and Renaissance teleologies and essences, rather than with properties, mechanisms and processes. There is an overweening sense, provided as much by Foucault as by professional historians of science, that geologists such as James Hutton and Charles Lyell wait in the wings, ready to wield a radically temporalized view of nature. And how, further, do the' great natural history texts survive in common cultural memory? The three best known are those of Linnaeus, Buffon and Gilbert White of Selborne, and two of those three, Buffon's Histoire naturelle and White's Natural History of Selborne, survive as specifically literary monuments. George Bernard Shaw remembered Buffon still being used as an exemplar of style in his youth. Yet as Foucault also reminds us, the era of natural history was coeval with that of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment.1 Ray and Tournefort were contemporaries of Newton and Leibniz, Linnaeus of Montesquieu, Buffon of Hume. Historians of science, ever entranced with those ascending, linear master-narratives of the mathematical and experimental sciences in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and of the emergence of nineteenth-century evolutionism, actually lack any coherent framework which can mark that contemporaneity of natural history and enable us to understand it, and thereby understand the ways in which natural history engrossed so much effort and devotion during the Enlightenment. For there is no doubt that it did. It was sheerly the most popular of eighteenth-century sciences. Experimental science had its popular dimension, but that popularity was largely one of consumption: attendance at lectures, demonstrations, or the reading of books. Beyond this, natural history was participant or producer-orientated. Socially considered, it was a form, or rather a series of forms of interacting with the natural world which could incorporate a wide range of interests and practitioners: men and women both, doctors and clergy, aristocrats and gardeners' boys, apothecaries and printers, lawyers, military and naval men. The work of such overwhelmed, in quantitative terms those nameable as having a professional career interest, institutionally based in university, museum or garden, in natural history. It did so because of the relative accessibility of its practices, which ranged from humble imitative collecting and preserving, through major endeavours of survey and discovery, the writing of essays, pamphlets and books, to the increasingly technical and controversial exercises of naming, classifying and describing the natural world. It mobilized, that is, very different kinds and levels of productive skills: investigative skills of minute observation and experimentation, where what is seen, or even counts as meaningfully seeable, is in contention; philosophical skills of individuation and analogy, for what is similar and what is different was the crucial business of natural history, structuring the whole taxonomic enterprise from the macrolevel distinctions of animal-vegetable-mineral to the micro-level of species and variety. Natural history also required practical collectors' skills of hunting, finding, drying, stuffing, arranging and displaying; horticultural skills of fertilizing, growing, cutting and grafting. It demanded writerly skills, deploying the formidably complex vocabulary of technical description, or else, at quite another level, of turning nature into an item of prurient consumption. This one finds, for example, in the enormously popular Spectacle de la nature of the Abbe de la Pluche, 'the fluttering Monsieur' as William Smellie called him,2 or in the poetry of Erasmus Darwin.3 There is a critical point implicit in realising the existence of such skills. Both professional historiography of science and Michel Foucault tend to be united in their focus upon major, canonical texts. Historiography of science reads for conceptual formation, Foucault for discursive formation. With this textual focus, both exclude an analytical sense of text itself as product, dependent not so much on ideas or discursive rules, but upon work and its various skills. Ideas and discourses are not autarchs, self-creative. They are products of specialized and skilful labour, whose material dimensions are not automatically readable in canonical texts. Some of what follows will emphasize this material dimension of natural history production, to counter the notion that this, or any, historical practice is intelligible simply through an analysis of the content, form and