Nehemiah Grew (1641–1712) devoted more than 10 years of his life to developing a science of plants and vegetation, a project in which observation (often at the microscopic level) and experimentation played a prominent role. Grew started by composing a natural history of plants that was concerned with their anatomical structure and functioning, but, as I suggest, he also aimed to use observations and experiments to develop an experimental science that investigated the causes and principles of vegetation. Apart from studying (...) the structure of plants, Grew also treated them as instruments in which different chemical operations took place (such as filtration, digestion, fermentation, and the separation of particles of matter). At a methodological level, the science of plants and vegetation is a project based on experimental comparisons, variations, and extensions that, in some cases, led Grew to revise his explicative hypothesis. (shrink)

This study examines the botanical and chymical investigations Nehemiah Grew conducted for his magnum opus, The Anatomy of Plants (1682), and explores how they informed his political economic theory, as documented in the unpublished manuscript The Means of a Most Ample Increase of the Wealth and Strength of England (1707). While several scholars have argued that Grew's political economy is best described as mercantilist, this article argues for a much more multifaceted and idiosyncratic reading of Grew's political economy, which aligned (...) with or prefigured not only mercantilism, but also aspects of cameralism, physiocracy, Colbertism, and some of the utopian ideologies of Samuel Hartlib and his circle. By focusing on his knowledge of plant anatomy and plant chymistry, this paper shows that Grew developed a sophisticated understanding of local English ecologies and the natural resource management necessary to maintain a financially strong state. It also reveals an economic thinker deeply skeptical of empire, who was, instead, in favor of national economic self-sufficiency through domestic mineral extraction, agrarian improvement, and a highly regulated market. This article focuses on Grew's development of saline chymistry, his geometric approach to both plant anatomy and geography, his investigations of mineral soils, and his research into tree growth and timber management to demonstrate the deep connections between his botany and his economics. (shrink)

This essay traces the changing relationship between horticulture, agriculture, and philosophy across the seventeenth century, as the personae of the philosophical husbandman and the philosophical gardener intertwined and competed. At stake in the dynamics between them was the relationship between abstruse researches and practical applications in evolving experimental philosophy, as well as the aesthetic of experimental practices and rhetoric. Early seventeenth-century promoters of colonial projects, such as Virginian sericulture, situated the metropolitan pleasure garden, a place of whimsy and fantastical reasoning, (...) as a realm of trial that presumed eventual utility and application to large-scale husbandry. Such views informed relationships between fanciful trials, speculative proposals, and presumptions of future utility in the development of the persona of the philosophical gardener and attendant notions of experimental philosophy over the course of the century. (shrink)

In 1682, Nehemiah Grew included An Idea of a Philosophical History of Plants as the first text in his Anatomy of Plants. The former consists of a broad programme to study vegetation from a material standpoint. In addition to the mechanical and chymical investigation of plants, generally supported by microscopic observations—a core methodology of the Royal Society—in the text Grew engaged with some more philosophical and theoretical issues. Still, despite Grew's creditable attempt to produce a coherent and comprehensive science of (...) plants, the absence of a definition of vegetable life has an impact on his ability to understand plants in their own right. For instance, a few questions that emerged as Grew addressed zoophytes and other bodies blurred the line between vegetables and animals. Only in the Cosmologia sacra (1701) did Grew propound a definition of vegetable life with a more complete schema. Is the philosophy of plants a bridge between Grew's works? In this article, I contextualize his philosophical approach, explore the features of his text, and advance the possibility of answering this question positively, although the significant distance between Grew's experimental study of plants in the Anatomy and the physico-theology of the Cosmologia makes a connection between the two texts difficult. In the end, this unbridgeable gulf broadly shaped early modern botanical studies. (shrink)

The relationship between Francis Bacon's Sylva sylvarum and Giovan Battista Della Porta's Magia naturalis has previously been discussed in terms of sources and borrowings in the literature. More recently, it has been suggested that one can read these two works as belonging to a common genre: as collections of recipes or books of secrets. Taking this as a framework, in this paper I address another type of similarity between these two works, one that can be detected by looking at the (...) methods of reading, research, and enacting and recording recipes one can find in Bacon and Della Porta. I show that essential to the two approaches was the complex interplay of practices associated with enacting recipes, and that these influenced the ways in which Della Porta and Bacon recorded their experiments. Creative manipulation of the recipes transformed them into something new. In the case of Della Porta's second edition of the Magia naturalis, this new format is something I call “technologies,” that is, ways of recording the enacting of recipes with the intention to ensure repeatability and predictability of results. In the case of Bacon, the enactment aims at something different: to display and “bring to light” the hidden motions and processes of nature. (shrink)

This special issue brings to the attention of the scholarly community some of the common features and some of the subtle, but important, differences between Francis Bacon's and Giovan Battista Della Porta's ways of dealing with the reading, selecting, enacting, and recording of recipes. Focusing on questions of genre, intellectual and material context, strategies of research, and strategies of performing recipes, the four papers of this special issue address two major issues. First, they shed new light on the relationship between (...) Della Porta's Magia naturalis and Francis Bacon's Sylva sylvarum. Second, they show that in the recording of their experimental practices, Bacon and Della Porta depart from the traditional “recipe format” and discover new avenues of experimental research. (shrink)

This paper discusses the methodological relation between natural history and natural philosophy in the case of John Evelyn (1620–1706). I propose to examine Evelyn’s tree cultivation projects and to identify relevant aspects of his attempt to move from descriptive natural history to experimental natural history. My central argument is that Evelyn’s intention in this endeavour was to develop a series of experimental natural history projects that could provide general laws and axioms of nature as foundations for natural philosophy. I suggest (...) that, considering Bacon’s methodological recommendations regarding the relation between natural history and natural philosophy, Evelyn evolved from one “Baconian” role to another. While in the 1650s Evelyn acted as a “merchant of light,” as he devoted his interest to writing natural history projects based on collecting data and commonplacing different sources, in the 1660s he moved to an advanced role, that of a “compiler” or a “lamp,” in which he composed projects of experimental natural history. In Evelyn’s view, the latter kind of natural history would serve as a methodological step in building a natural philosophy. (shrink)

Nehemiah Grew is rightly lauded as one of the first and most sophisticated promoters of the discipline of plant anatomy—the observation and representation of the insides of plants. Overlooked so far, though, are his activities as a plant collector. In this paper, I reconstruct Grew's plant-collection practices from his first medical garden, through his incorporation of specimens from the Royal Society's repository, and to its expansion through his support of intercontinental plant-gathering missions. These activities gave Grew access both to fresh, (...) local plant samples, which he could observe again and again, as well as to foreign specimens that exhibited some of the more curious variations of nature. I argue that these different plant-collecting strategies reflected his overarching ambitions with his plant anatomy, which was to construct an idealised model of plant formation, generation, and growth. In order to do this, Grew pieced together his observations of individual specimens into one generalised model through the method of collation. While not offering concrete advice on how to grow plants more efficiently, I argue that Grew's idealised representation of the processes of plant life was offered as a framework for further botanical experimentation. (shrink)

The essential tension in Nehemiah Grew's working methods in his Anatomy of Plants (1682) resulted in a flowering of scientific creativity. On the one hand, he utilised his intuition about the plants he studied in order to understand them in their own right, and indeed to idealise them visually as structures of emotional sympathy and great geometric beauty. On the other hand, Grew was a secretary of the Royal Society, a physician, and a museum cataloguer, as well as a Baconian (...) empirical inductivist, and he believed his work should have practical, applied, and economic uses. Although he shared several of these impulses with other early modern English virtuosi, Grew's commitment to understanding the whole organism, from the observation of its smallest bits of matter to an emotional identification with his experimental subjects as sentient beings, shows us the power of cultivating “a feeling for the organism” in scientific work. (shrink)

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