Naturalia : the history of natural history and medicine in the seventeenth century

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You have accessMoreSectionsView PDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail Cite this article Roos Anna Marie 2012Naturalia: the history of natural history and medicine in the seventeenth centuryNotes Rec. R. Soc.66313–321http://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2012.0058SectionYou have accessGuest editorialNaturalia: the history of natural history and medicine in the seventeenth century Anna Marie Roos Anna Marie Roos [email protected] Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for more papers by this author Anna Marie Roos Anna Marie Roos [email protected] Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for more papers by this author Published:17 October 2012https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2012.0058Other version(s) of this articleYou are viewing the most recent version of this article. Previous versions: January 1, 2012: Previous Version 1 In 1712 the poet Elkanah Settle (1648–1724) published a funeral poem, Threnodia Apollinaris, dedicated to the memory of Dr Martin Lister.1 Settle had a good deal of material to draw upon, because Lister had been Vice-President of the Royal Society, a physician to Queen Anne, and the first arachnologist and conchologist. Marriage and funeral poems were one of Settle's specialties, a lucrative business because the family of the happy couple or the deceased member would purchase a large number of copies in presentation bindings for distribution among friends.2 Never averse to cutting corners, Settle later wrote several other poems recycling the same title, one to the memory of the physician and naturalist Dr Edward Tyson (1708), another to the essayist Joseph Addison (1719), and another to the poet William Cowper (1723).3 At least Lister was in rather distinguished company. Despite the rather dubious literary value of Settle's verse (after his death he was described in The Briton as ‘a man who lived in the city and had a numerous poetical issue, but shared the misfortune of several gentlemen, to survive them all'4), Settle identified the importance of Lister's twin contributions to medicine and natural history. After praising Lister's skills as a physician, hyperbolically hailing him as the ‘Sacred Anna's Esculapian Choice', Settle continued:when, lo, his Pen ev'n Neptunes; Depths t'explore,Pourtraid the very shells that spangle on the Shore.See next the Tour he made through Earth and Air,In quest of Nature's works, a chase so fair,down to her poorest Reptile Wanderer.Ev'n those minutest Heads he did survey,Their humble Nests and their uncommon Births display5In praising Lister's study of invertebrates with ‘humble nests’ and ‘uncommon births’ (a reference to his work with parasitic wasps), Settle was making an important point. Lister in his lifetime had been satirized by Shadwell in his play The Virtuoso (1676) for dedicating his life to the study of such creatures; and in the preface to his Exercitatio Anatomica in qua de Cochleis (1696), a comprehensive anatomical guide to land shells and slugs, he remarked that he was also aware that his work might ‘provoke the laughter of spectators’.6 He also wrote to his friend Edward Lhwyd, stating that there were ‘censorious mouthes who think and say a man that writes on Insects can be but a trifler in Phisic’, and that he hoped he would be left ‘alone to pursue Philosophie amongst the inferiour sort of beings’.7 Though we must take into consideration that Settle was charged with writing a eulogy, he managed, unlike many of his contemporaries, to recognize Lister's unique achievements. Through his detailed fieldwork, illustrations, and achievements in taxonomic classification, Lister helped elevate ‘inferiour sort of beings’ into important specimens of natural history.On this 300th anniversary year of Lister's death, we also celebrated his contributions to natural philosophy and medicine not with heroic rhyme (thankfully), but with an international conference on 27 April 2012 at the Royal Society entitled ‘History comes to life: seventeenth-century natural history, medicine and the “New Science”’. This edition of Notes and Records includes a selection of the papers presented.As Lorraine Daston commented, the seventeenth century saw an exponential growth of natural history, in fact ‘a proliferation of natural histories, all with different philosophical pedigrees’.8 Recent work has considered the natural histories of zoology or botany not as supplementary to the physics and astronomy of the ‘scientific revolution’ but at its very core. Analysing epistemological assumptions of these natural histories reveals connections between natural phenomena and the origins of ideas that seventeenth-century natural philosophers took for granted but that we may overlook. This is particularly true when elucidating the conceptual relationships between natural history and medicine.Several common queries and themes emerged during the conference.Conference participants assessed to what extent the practice and technologies of the study of natural history changed between the Renaissance and the seventeenth century. The shifting of classification boundaries and systems from an Aristotelian chain of being to a proto-Linnaean taxonomy in the seventeenth century has been a focus for past scholarship.9 Francis Bacon planned to assemble vast amounts of data about the natural world, creating what he called natural histories. Bacon advised that once all the facts about a particular phenomenon had been collected, they would be organized into tables to facilitate theoretical speculation and the creation of hypotheses. Once all the facts about, for example, the nature of air, or the hoverfly, had been gathered, the natural philosopher would be in a position to develop theories about them.10 This method was developed by the early Royal Society and spread across Europe in the second half of the seventeenth century. Furthermore, in the second half of the seventeenth century, the first purpose-built public museums and scientific repositories were created, their organization reflecting the need to order and classify.11 Classification schemes were thus paramount in the minds of natural philosophers in the seventeenth century.With the decline of Latin as the lingua franca in the seventeenth century, a movement also developed to bring about a universal language that could be understood by all. Bishop John Wilkins (1614–72) attempted to base language on a logical system of classification, forming a committee in the Royal Society for his language project. Wilkins's language scheme departed from Aristotle because it was based not on the Stagyrite's universals but on abstract and artificial constructs and organization. Wilkins assembled words representing concepts, grouping them into tables according to his own idiosyncratic hierarchy. As Sara Scharf has explained, there were four levels in the hierarchy, ‘genus, difference, species, and numerical position’, and ‘within each species, items were largely grouped into nines’, with each species having a place in the table.12 Each species could also be identified and located by both a numerical rotation and a word. As Japp Maat indicated,‘elephant’ occurs under the genus ‘beast,’ and under the first difference, that is ‘whole footed,’ as the fourth species. To locate elephant on the tables, one would write 18.1.4 since ‘beast’ is the 18th genus on the list of genera, ‘whole-footed’ the 1st difference, and elephant the fourth species under that difference.13The genus was also represented by a two-letter word, and ‘each difference was indicated by adding a different consonant, and species were distinguished by the use of different vowels at the end. Using this notation, “18.1.4”, equivalent to “elephant”, could also be spelled “zibi”.’14 To be effective, Wilkins's classification system not only ‘demanded a perfect and universal body of knowledge from which to work’, but its categories had to cover in Lister's words all ‘single natures without the company of any other’; in other words, species.15 Once complete, as Rhodri Lewis has noted, Wilkins's scheme also ‘would not be useful in the further study of nature’, and would make the study of natural history redundant if it was successful.16The English botanist John Ray (1627–1705) had been recruited by Wilkins to work on the tables of plants with the use of this schema. However, Royal Society programmes that were emblematic of the ‘new science’ were not always effective when applied to the complex diversity of flora and fauna. When Ray tried to apply Wilkins's method to his work in botany, the sheer variety of plants he encountered overwhelmed the limited number of categories. As Ray wrote to Lister on 7 May 1669, not only was he ‘compelled to not to follow nature's lead but to fit the Plants to the author's prescribed Method’.17 In a following letter, he complained:This next Week we expect the B[isho]p of Chester [John Wilkins] at Middleton, who desires our Assistance in altering and amending his Tables of naturall history. To make exact Philosophical Tables, you know, is a Matter very difficult, not to say impossible: to make such as are tolerable, requires much diligence and experience, and is work enough for one mans whole life; and therefore we had need call in all the assistance we can from our friends, especially not being free to follow Nature, but forced to bow and strain things to serve a design … . To what Purpose you'll say is all this?18Ultimately when Wilkins's project failed, Ray ended up following his own schema for botanical classification in his Historia Plantarum; for instance, although he followed the traditional groupings of herbs, shrubs and trees, he moved away from tradition in his examination of leaf and floral characteristics to classify the plants into monocotyledons and dicotyledons. So, although there has been much analysis of Wilkins's linguistic contributions to taxonomic classification, Ray's experience shows us that we must explore other linguistic techniques that he, or naturalists like him, used to distinguish species.Alexander Wragge-Morley's paper does just that. Lister and John Ray used rhetorical techniques to impress vivid images of the unique characteristics of specimens of natural history and anatomy into the imaginations of their readers. Their efforts were important not only for the purposes of taxonomic classification but also for the purpose of imbuing virtue into their readers and contributing to the cultivation of the mind. Vivid rhetoric was literally thought capable of ‘changing the fabric of the brain and nerves’. Just as Descartes, Pascal and Leibniz thought the practice of mathematics was a means of cultivating the mind in the service of more enlightened moral judgments, the sense impressions of natural history were thought capable of curing the brain of ‘bodily distempers that clouded its capacity to know things well and to make good judgements about them’.19 In a unique confluence of natural history and medicine, descriptions of flora and fauna physiologically and philosophically aided our pursuit of the summum bonum.Charlotte Sleigh's work is also about the use of rhetoric in natural history, not for taxonomic classification but for the purposes of natural theology. Her interdisciplinary analysis is of the rhetorical use of frogs within Swammerdam's final work, the Bybel der Natuure (1737). As she argues, frogs were the ‘“missing link” in his theology of nature. … the Archimedean point that enabled Swammerdam to subsume both the lowest animals and man himself within one glorious, God-ordained natural history and philosophy.’ Frogs were thought to reproduce by spontaneous generation, and they had negative theological connotations as symbols of imperfection or corruption. One of the reasons that Swammerdam investigated the reproductive system of frogs and sought to disprove their spontaneous generation is because he thought God would create all creatures by one mechanism. And, ‘Thanks to his extraordinarily patient dissections of frogspawn and tadpoles, Swammerdam was now able to show in detail that the development of frogs was, like that of all insects, epigenetic.’In Swammerdam's investigations about frogs, Sleigh demonstrates that he also considered Cartesian debates about the philosophy of mind and constructed significant models of neurophysiology. Her analysis evokes another common theme at the conference, namely to what extent acquisition of natural history knowledge and new schemes of taxonomy affected the perception and treatment of animals for medical and experimental use. The seventeenth century saw increasing debate about the nature of animals. Descartes characterized animals as ‘beast-machines’, an opinion criticized by several intellectuals with growing awareness of the ethics of exploiting animals for scientific purposes (vivisection). In the Royal Society, for example, Robert Hooke and Richard Lower (1631–91) did a series of surgical vivisections in the 1660s to elucidate the mechanism of respiration, although Hooke and John Evelyn disliked the open-thorax experiments because of their cruelty.20There were other objections to animal studies and experimentation. As Sleigh demonstrates, Swammerdam, like Lister, faced the prejudice that there was something inherently undignified about studying animals in the lower orders. Swammerdam also knew that there was also a belief that ‘animal anatomy was not applicable to humans’. As he disproved the ungodly generation of insects and frogs by spontaneous generation, Swammerdam promoted the frog model as necessary to an understanding of muscular activity in higher animals. Practically, Swammerdam noted advantages of using frogs in neuromuscular demonstrations: the nerves and muscles are easy to separate and lay bare with forceps and probes. And so began the long tradition of the ‘frog dissection’ in zoological studies, which is almost a rite of passage in biology classes in secondary schools. Increasing costs of specimens mean that preparatory interactive video (IVD) simulations of frogs either as a supplement or as a substitution for dissection are becoming increasingly common.21 Swammerdam's efforts are thus taking an interesting turn as virtual frogs leap into the picture.Swammerdam's work on metamorphosis was also greatly influential to John Ray's publications about insects done in collaboration with Francis Willughby. In a detailed analysis of the relative contributions of Ray and Willughby to Ray's Methodus insectorum (1705) and Historia insectorum (1710), Brian Ogilvie has carefully and cleverly delineated the working relationship between the two, teasing out the day-to-day experimentation, close observations in the wild and captivity, and exchange of ideas between the two natural philosophers. Following examples in Swammerdam's Historia generalis insectorum (1669), Willughby carefully observed the life cycles of dragonflies and damselflies to classify them, dividing them into the two broad categories and ‘noting the characteristic T shape of the opening in the nymphal exuviae where the imago emerges’.22 Ray also paid close attention to insect metamorphosis, but built upon the work of his colleague. Whereas Willughby, for instance, had considered ‘grasshoppers to be non-metamorphosing, on the ground that the larval instars were not that different from the winged adults’, Ray, following Swammerdam, ‘placed them in the group of those who metamorphosed without a quiescent pupal stage’. Although Ray's later work classifying insects would focus on the diversity of species rather than insect metamorphosis for the simple reason that he had to rely more on specimens in collections, there is no doubt that he was greatly influenced by Willughby's early observations. The Historia insectorum that Ray ultimately published was imperfect, but his and Willughby's observations proved seminal to the history of entomology.Despite the importance of classification schemes to seventeenth-century natural history, taxonomy was not all. As Ogilvie has stated, past histories of Renaissance natural history haveoveremphasized the theoretical and philosophical elements in natural history, particularly taxonomy and classification, while neglecting or treating as self-evidently worthwhile the specific achievements of Renaissance natural history: the recognition of the vast diversity of the animal and vegetable world, the establishment of a community of scholars engaged in a common enterprise, and the elaboration within that community of methods for discovering new natural kinds and describing them precisely.23Natural historians in the Renaissance were primarily interested in collecting a wide variety of specimens, describing and comparing their external particulars, to grasp the wondrous diversity and beauty of nature. Certainly early modern Europe faced its first bioinformation crisis with the onslaught of specimens from the New World, which did lead to the necessity for new systems of classification and taxonomy. But before classification could occur, there was simply the need to describe.Past analyses of seventeenth-century natural history have also concentrated on taxonomy, in this case in an attempt to detect proto-Linnaean elements of a formal system of classification, which emphasized hierarchy and the organisms' form of reproduction. In addition, seventeenth-century naturalists certainly shaped their conceptions of a natural order by inventing novel taxonomic methods and linguistic conventions from the ‘new science’. However, our authors' works demonstrate that in the fields of botany, ichthyology and zoology, it is also important to consider continuity from previous ideas. Early modern natural history clearly did not represent a clear chronological development from ‘bookish to empirical knowledge, from traditional to objective description, from symbolic to realistic illustration’ but instead had a richer and more complex intellectual context.24Gillian Lewis, in her richly detailed study of the natural history activities of John Ray and Martin Lister in Montpellier (1663–66), notes that their work would not ‘have been conceivable without the deep familiarity that they developed with the learned work of the past, especially with the printed herbals and zoological books of the sixteenth century.’ In particular, Lewis demonstrates that Ray was especially reliant in his ichthyological work on the past observations of Guillaume Rondelet (1507–66). Many of Rondelet's observations were also done in his native Montpellier, identifications the result of hands-on experience of objects, depiction for the record, and only after these, ‘words to describe, to analyse and to set in context’. Ray's own adoption of names for fish for his edition of the Historia Piscium (1686), based partly on the posthumous work of Willughby, could only have come about because of Rondelet's discriminating selection and precise description. Rondelet's classification system was largely based on Aristotle's, in which morphology prevailed, and in which form was explained in terms of function. Like Rondelet, Ray similarly needed the clarity of Aristotle's inclusions and exclusions in selecting differentiae, to identify ‘characteristic marks’ (which, logically, made him put cetaceans back among fish).25 The current revisionist view of Aristotle's Historia Animalium demonstrates that the work served not so much as a proto-Linnaean taxonomy but more as a ‘moriology’, a science of animal parts and their relations. As R. J. Hankinson has noted, ‘Aristotle's purpose in dividing animals into classes was to exhibit what type of structures (and associated functions and activities) typically go together’, and to isolate the causes of the variousness of animal structures.26Ray's reliance on past authors also extended beyond Rondelet. As Lewis indicates, Ray used Rondelet's material in much the same way as he used the work of those sixteenth-century botanists who met with his approval, precisely because (in botany as in ichthyology) their careful empiricism and absence of intrusive attempts at system furnished him with reliable data that he could himself then build on. We also see evidence of more intellectual continuities than departures in works of natural history when we compare the seventeenth century with the eighteenth century. Anita Guerrini analyses the relationship between Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire naturelle des animaux (1676), edited by Charles Perrault and reprinted by the Paris Academy of Sciences in 1733, and Buffon's Historie naturelle (1749). Perrault's work, which began as an account of the dissections of exotic animals from the royal menageries at Vincennes and Versailles, incorporated both the encyclopaedic natural histories characteristic of the Renaissance and a new comparative anatomy inspired by Joseph Guichard Duverney's skills in dissection. Duverney was Professor of Anatomy at the Jardin du Roi from 1682 to 1725, and as many as 140 foreigners attended his lectures each year.27 He dissected a range of animals, including an elephant, a hedgehog, a panther and a viper.In 1698 Lister visited Duverney in Paris, and although he admired his skill he did not comprehend why such a gentleman would choose to work with cadavers; Lister wrote:And indeed, a private Anatomy Room is to one not accustomed to this kind of Manufacture, very irksome if not frightful. … Here a Trey full of Bits of Flesh … and every where discouraging Objects. So, as if Reason and the Good of Mankind, did not put Men upon this Study, it could not be endured.28Perrault, however, was not as squeamish as Lister. As Guerrini notes, Perrault praised Duverney particularly for his ‘skill in finding the “particularitez” of each animal’. As did his colleagues in the Academy, Perrault disdained the system building of Descartes in favour of a ‘more modest epistemology grounded in observation’ and did not think he could classify beyond the most basic types. Although ‘historians have characterized Buffon's diatribe against arbitrary systems of naming as his response to Linnaeus’, it may be more accurate to state that ‘Buffon's early ideas on species, in particular, resemble the emphasis on particulars of Histoire des animaux’ by Perrault. Just as the Renaissance naturalists did, Perrault and Buffon valued precise description, trusting it more than an overweening system of hypothetical classification.As all the essays in this issue show, interdisciplinary treatments of differing ‘natural histories’, their relationship to medical study, and the recognition that there were continuities as well as changes of thought and practice between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries permitted a considered analysis of the discipline's rich history. Natural history in the seventeenth century was not a stepchild to the physical sciences, a monolithic emblem of the ‘scientific revolution’ or a Whiggish stepping-stone to Linnaeus. Rather, natural historians such as Ray, Willughby and Perrault shaped their own conceptions of a natural order with novel taxonomic methods and information retrieval, as well as the exercise of perceptual skill and collective empiricism. In this way, these naturalists truly made ‘history come to life’.AcknowledgementsI thank the British Society for the History of Science, which provided student bursaries for the conference. Cultures of Knowledge at the University of Oxford, funded by the Mellon Foundation, the John Fell Fund of the University of Oxford, and the Wellcome Trust also provided invaluable financial support. In addition to the essay authors, I thank all the conference participants, especially Professor Tim Birkhead FRS (University of Sheffield), Dr Pratik Chakrabarti (University of Kent), Dr David Cram (Jesus College, Oxford), Dr Isabelle Charmantier (University of Exeter), Dr Sachiko Kusukawa (Trinity College, Cambridge), Dr Dániel Margócsy (Hunter College, City University of New York) and Dr Richard Serjeantson (Trinity College, Cambridge).Most of the papers and the resulting discussions were made available as podcasts and can be downloaded from http://royalsociety.org/events/2012/natural-history/. Accompanying the conference was an exhibit at the Royal Society featuring works of natural history and medicine discussed in the conference presentations that were selected from their collections and those of the Jagiellonian Library in Kraków. I am most grateful to Ms Izabela Korczyńska of the Department of Prints and Maps at the Jagiellonian Library and to Ms Katie Holyoak of the Royal Collection Trust of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II for providing exhibit materials. I wish to thank Dr Felicity Henderson and Mr Keith Moore of the Royal Society, and Professor Howard Hotson, Dr James Brown and Ms Miranda Lewis of Cultures of Knowledge for their generous assistance with the exhibition and the conference. I am also indebted to the collegiality of the anonymous reviewers who offered invaluable advice through their referee reports on the various essays. Finally, I wish to thank Professor Robert Fox (Emeritus, Oxford) for the opportunity to guest-edit Notes and Records, and Miss Jennifer Kren and Dr Bruce Goatly of the Royal Society for their administrative assistance with the journal issue.FootnotesNotes1 Elkanah Settle, Threnodia Apollinaris: A Funeral Poem, to the Memory of Dr. Martin Lister, Late Physician to Her Majesty (the author, London, 1712). See also Anna Marie Roos, Web of nature: Martin Lister (1639–1712), the first arachnologist (Brill, Leiden, 2011), pp. 417–418.2 Frank Clyde Brown, Elkanah Settle, his life and works (University of Chicago Press, 1910), p. 109. The author provides a list of these poems in pp. 109–121.3 Settle also used the same title for his funeral poem to the memory of Henry Hare Baron of Colerane (London, 1707).4 The Briton, 19 February 1723/4.5 Settle, op. cit. (note 1), p. 10.6 Martin Lister, ‘Preface’, in Exercitatio anatomica altera de buccinis fluviatilibus et marinis, p. 2 (Samuel Smith & Benjamin Walford, London, 1695); Thomas Shadwell, The Virtuoso (ed. M. H. Nicolson and D. S. Rodes) (University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1966), pp. 42–43. Shadwell wrote, ‘I think I have found out more Phoenomena's or Appearance … of Nature in Spiders, than any Man breathing: Wou'd you think it? there are in England six and thirty several sorts of Spiders; there's your Hound, Grey-hound, Lurcher, Spaniel Spider.’ This was a pointed reference to Lister's table of 36 spiders in his Historiae Animalium (J. Martyn, London, 1678).7 Bodleian MS Ashmole 1816, f. 176. He also expressed much the same sentiment in Bodleian MS Ashmole 1816, f. 116.8 Lorraine Daston, ‘Historia: explorations in the history of early modern empiricism’, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science; see http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/projects/projects/DeptII_Da_Historia.9 See Arthur Lovejoy, The great chain of being (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1936); Early modern zoology: the construction of animals in science, literature and the visual arts (ed. Karl A. E. Kenkel and Paul J. Smith) (Brill, Leiden, 2007). Also salient are special issues on animal science in early modern natural philosophy and medicine edited by Domenico Bertoloni-Meli for Annals of Science (2010) and Early Science and Medicine (2008).10 This point has been developed by Peter Anstey, ‘Two forms of natural history’, Early Modern Experimental Philosophy, University of Otago, 17 January 2011. See https://blogs.otago.ac.nz/emxphi/2011/01/two-forms-of-natural-history/.11 The literature about collecting and museums is vast, but I list here some especially pertinent examples. See for instance, Ken Arnold, Cabinets for the curious: looking back at early English museums (Ashgate, Aldershot, 2006); Paula Findlen, Possessing nature: museums, collecting, and scientific culture in early modern Italy (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1994); Arthur Macgregor, Curiosity and Enlightenment: collectors and collections from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century (Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2008).12 Sara Scharf, ‘Multiple independent inventions of a non-functional technology: combinatorial descriptive names in botany, 1640–1830’, Spontaneous Generations2, 145–184 (2008), at p. 154.13 Japp Maat, Philosophical languages in the seventeenth century: Dalgarno, Wilkins, Leibniz (New Synthese Historical Library, vol. 54) (Kluwer, Dordrecht, 2004), p. 167.14 Scharf, op. cit. (note 12), p. 154; Maat, op. cit. (note 13), p. 158.15 Rhodri Lewis, Language, mind and nature: artificial languages in England from Bacon to Locke (Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 195.16 Lewis, op. cit. (note 15), p. 199.17 Natural History Museum, London, MSS Ray, f. 10, letter 26; also printed in Robert T. Gunther, Further correspondence of John Ray (Ray Society, London, 1928), pp. 122–123.18 Natural History Museum, London, MSS Ray, f. 14, letter 34; also printed in Gunther, op. cit. (note 17), p. 125.19 See Matthew L. Jones, The good life in the Scientific Revolution: Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, and the cultivation of virtue (University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 42.20 Anita Guerrini, Experimenting with humans and animals: from Galen to animal rights (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, 2003), pp. 38–39.21 J. P. Akpan, ‘The effect of a prior dissection simulation on middle school students’ dissection performance and understanding of the anatomy and morphology of the frog', J. Sci. Educ. Technol.8, 107–121 (1999).22 A point made by Ogilvie in an earlier version of his paper.23 Brian W. Ogilvie, The science of describing natural history in Renaissance Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 8.24 Karl A. E. Kenkel and Paul J. Smith, ‘Introduction’, in Kenkel and Smith (eds), op. cit. (note 9), pp. 1–14, at p. 5.25 A point made by Lewis in an earlier version of her paper. For the influence of ‘characteristic marks’, see Sachiko Kusukawa, ‘The Historia Piscium (1686)’, Notes Rec. R. Soc. Lond.54, 179–197 (2000).26 R. J. Hankinson, ‘Philosophy of science,’ in The Cambridge companion to Aristotle (ed. Jonathan Barnes), pp. 109–140 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), at p. 123.27 Linda Payne, With words and knives: learning medical dispassion in early modern England (Ashgate, Aldershot, 2007), p. 85.28 Martin Lister, A Journey to Paris in the year 1698 (1699), pp. 63–64.This journal is © 2012 The Royal Society Previous ArticleNext Article VIEW FULL TEXT DOWNLOAD PDF FiguresRelatedReferencesDetailsCited by Kraus S (2020) Les voyages et lettres de correspondance de John Ray, ou l’émergence des sciences naturelles dans l’Europe du xviie siècle Transmission et circulation des savoirs scientifiques et techniques, 10.4000/books.cths.13608 This Issue20 December 2012Volume 66Issue 4Special issue 'History comes to life' organized and edited by Anna Marie Roos Article InformationDOI:https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2012.0058Published by:Royal SocietyPrint ISSN:0035-9149Online ISSN:1743-0178History: Published online17/10/2012Published in print20/12/2012 License:This journal is © 2012 The Royal Society Citations and impact