>>Dr. Kerry Magruder: Thanks for joining me
in the History of Science Collections of the
University of Oklahoma Libraries. Let's look
at a few treasures from the vault that throw
light on natural history in the 16th century.
This massive set is the natural history of
Ulisse Aldrovandi, who worked in Bologna at
the end of the 1500's. There are volumes devoted
to mammals, birds, fish, trees, and minerals.
Aldrovandi wants to tell us everything that
is known about any animal. These books are
a masterful achievement of emblematic natural
history, aiming to document not only what
we would call an animal's biology or ecology,
but also to place it in the entire web of
meaning. Does this animal live in Italy? Does
it appear in Homer? What does it mean in iconography,
if you find it in a painting or on a coin,
or in a poem? Why wouldn't you want to know
about all of these things? Aldrovandi's volume
on serpents describes those from northern
Italy with great accuracy. Yet other serpents
have been reported in literature and travelers'
tales; why should they not be included? Aldrovandi
warned the reader that he could not vouch
for everything he reported, yet he judged
it better to let the reader decide for himself
than to take a risk that a report might be
lost. This is Aldrovandi's volume on monsters.
Some of these we can recognize as quite plausible
birth defects, as well attested in our time
as they must have seemed marvelous and inexplicable
then. Natural history provided a key to one
of the most important questions of natural
philosophy: what do rare and irregular events
reveal about the natural order?
This is one of my favorite early printed herbals,
De historia stirpium, a history or description
of plants, published in Basel in 1542 by Leonhart
Fuchs. Fuchs' plants are drawn from life,
and given a German name as well as the traditional
Latin. Fuchs' cherries are quite recognizable.
At the end, Fuchs shares credit with the artist
and the woodblock carver who assisted him.
Although not shown are the women who likely
were the artists who hand-colored select copies
such as this one. The Herbal of John Gerard,
published in 1597, accomplished for England
what Fuchs' herbal did for the German speaking
parts of northern Europe. Yet Gerard, an estate
manager for Queen Elizabeth the 1st chief
executive, was in contact with naturalists
around the world who sent him both plants
and soil to grow them in. The first illustration
of the Virginia potato appears in Gerard.
Imagine how the history of the world would
be different if the potato had never been
brought to Europe from the New World. Gerard
grew and described many plants from the New
World, including squash, pumpkins, gourds,
and turkie corn, cultivated by the Mayans
and was a staple crop in the Americas. This
herbal is part of the Galileo collection,
for it was published by Galileo's friends
and associates in the Accademia dei Lincei,
the Academy of the Lynx. It is the first natural
history of the New World to be printed in
Europe, by Francisco Hernandez. In the late
16th century, Hernandez lived among the Aztecs
in central Mexico and collected their knowledge
of plants and medicine. The descriptions include
Aztec names and medicinal lore for New World
plants. The result was this monumental natural
history of the New World, incorporating approximately
800 woodcut illustrations.
Federigo Cesi and the Accademia dei Lincei
issued two preliminary copies in 1628. Widely
anticipated as a guide to the "fountain of
youth," Francesco Stelluti finally printed
a revised version in 1650. The Oklahoma copy
consists of the original sheets of the 1628
printing together with a later preliminary
gathering of five first leaves, including
the 1650 title page. The dramatic increase
in knowledge of New World plants and animals,
which we may represent by Hernandez's herbal,
meant the end of natural history in the emblematic
mode of Aldrovandi. These plants and animals
had no previous store of associations for
Europeans, no established iconography, no
literary allusions. The natural knowledge
of the peoples of the Western hemisphere shook
the foundations of early modern natural history.
Fabio Colonna, a member of the Lincei and
a major contributor to the Hernandez natural
history, published the first book containing
copper plate engravings of plants. These engravings
show much more detail than was possible with
woodcuts, as you can see by comparing the
woodcut borders with the engravings of the
plants themselves. Colonna attempted to standardize
botanical terms in this book. For example,
he coined the term "petal." With Colonna,
natural history is being transformed into
botany. In this little treatise Giovanni Anfossi,
an 18th-century Venetian physician, discussed
the origin, composition, and medicinal use
of chocolate. He surveyed arguments both pro
and con for drinking chocolate. Ultimately,
Anfossi praised the use of chocolate for its
high nutritional value, its aphrodisiac qualities,
and as a cure for all sorts of physical maladies.
But what about kids? Chocolate might make
them high-strung, Anfossi concluded. So he
recommended that chocolate, like coffee, was
harmful to children and should be reserved
for adults!
The Oklahoma copy is bound in contemporary
hand-painted Venetian wrappers illustrating
the cocoa bean plant. I myself consider chocolate
a vegetable, since it comes from beans. In
this book, Edward Tyson studied the "Orang-outang",
which was actually a chimpanzee. It's a foundational
work of comparative anatomy, first published
in 1699. This second edition includes an appendix
on the American rattlesnake. Aldrovandi's
emblematic natural history was not the only
casualty of increasing knowledge in a new
global natural history. What did this unexpected
diversity of life from the New World, from
Indonesia, from outside Europe, mean for human
history? In Sacred Origins, Bishop Edward
Stillingfleet argued that the distribution
of life on Earth required a disassociation
between human history and natural history.
It was no longer plausible to think that New
World plants and animals could all have fit
inside Noah's Ark, or that they could have
dispersed to their far-away continents in
the patterns of distribution we now observe.
Therefore, the bishop argued, Noah's Flood
must have been only a regional event instead
of a global one. Stillingfleet provoked a
response from Thomas Burnet, a Cambridge Platonist
who valued the consilience of ancient testimony,
both sacred text and pagan mythology, for
a global deluge. In his Theory of the Earth,
Burnet therefore sought to save a global extent
of Noah's Deluge by arguing that Adam and
Eve first populated the western hemisphere
in a Garden of Eden with New World plants
and animals before being miraculously translated
to a second Garden of Eden in the Old World.
The two gardens are indicated on this map
of the primeval world by the two sets of trees.
Ironically, Burnet lost his job as Physician
to the King because his insistence on the
global deluge led him to dismiss the pre-human
origin of mountains on the 3rd day of the
creation week. Science is a story. What stories
do you want to hear and tell about 16th-century
natural history?
