Abstract
Abstract The middle of the seventeenth century saw the emergence of a new kind of botanical observation: Microscopical observations of seeds. Previously, naturalists had made observations of seeds to complete their description of plants published in herbals, but for the first generation of Royal Society microscopists—Henry Power, Robert Hooke, and Nehemiah Grew—seeds became the centre of attention. This essay details this transition in plant knowledge by zooming in on just one kind of seeds: The poppy seed. Poppy seeds were abundant in early modern England as they were found in fields, gardens, kitchens and pharmacies. They were also excellent specimens to look at through microscopes, but for different reasons. Focusing on pictorial representation, especially, I analyse the diverse ambitions behind Power, Hooke, and Grew’s observations of poppy seeds, and how they used pictures to further these. The comparison of these three observations of the same specimen highlights the diversity of strategies for scientific representation in the early Royal Society while showing that intense, instrument-enhanced observation did not produce a stable epistemic object, but a multiplicity of epistemic images.
Highlights
From the Herbal to the Microscopical AtlasIn the 74th chapter of his much-expanded 1633 version of John Gerard’s Herball, or General Historie of Plants, the English botanist Thomas Johnson concluded his description of the species of poppy known as prickly poppy, papaver spinosum, with a concise description of their seeds
Poppy seeds were abundant in early modern England as they were found in fields, gardens, kitchens and pharmacies
In the Renaissance herbals, botanical knowledge of poppies and poppy seeds had a strong connection to medicine mainly because of the medical properties of opium
Summary
In the 74th chapter of his much-expanded 1633 version of John Gerard’s Herball, or General Historie of Plants, the English botanist Thomas Johnson concluded his description of the species of poppy known as prickly poppy, papaver spinosum, with a concise description of their seeds. In the version of René Descartes’s (1596–1650) Principia Philosophia (1644) that Power is most likely to have had, for instance, the images are positioned and presented in a similar way on the page.[35] Here, as well, the image’s function is to present clearly and distinctly to the reader’s eyes what the text says in words.[36] This resemblance in form and function reinforces the interpretation that Power’s choice to use woodcuts as his medium for the microscopical observations, and not the technique of the copper engraving, was a conscious decision This view is reinforced if we take a look at the handwritten manuscript of the first book of the Experimental Philosophy, which is preserved among Power’s papers. As the readers of the Micrographia were unfamiliar with this appearance of thyme seeds—it takes a good microscope to see these structures of the seeds—Hooke used the well-known visual vocabulary of the Stillleben genre to make them recognizable and trustworthy
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