The Work of Verbal Picturing for John Ray and Some of his Contemporaries

Abstract

By far the largest part of Nehemiah Grew’s account of a seventeenth‐century collection of rarities, his Musæum Regalis Societatis (1685) is taken up with ‘thick’, verbal descriptions of things in the Royal Society’s repository. Not only, Grew suggests, do his descriptions serve to signify the contents of his collection, but they enable us to discern among species and to think about the collection’s pieces in new ways. Verbal descriptions did not just signify things in the Royal Society’s collection, but had the capacity to alter their meanings. The essay discusses the ‘picturing’ of natural things in Early Modern Europe with little direct reference to the contemporary media of graphic representation – drawings, engravings, paintings etc. – in order to highlight the role of the then most widely used, but now least discussed of these media, verbal descriptions.

Notes

¹ N. Grew, Musæum Regalis Societatis: Or, A Catalogue and Description Of the Natural and Artificial Rarities Belonging to the Royal Society, And preserved at Gresham Colledge. Whereunto is Subjoyned the Comparative Anatomy of Stomachs and Guts (London, 1685).

² Grew, Musæum, Preface.

³ Ray's correspondence exists in printed form, though in three separate volumes, each from a different century. J. Ray, Philosophical Letters between the late Learned Mr. Ray and several of his Ingenious Correspondents, Natives and Foreigners, edited by W. Derham (London, 1718), J. Ray, The Correspondence of John Ray, edited by E. Lankester (London, 1848) and J. Ray, Further Correspondence of John Ray, edited by R. Gunther (London: Ray Society, 1928).

⁴ Two books and one edited collection have dealt with ‘description’ in Early Modern natural history, although not in an entirely satisfactory way. These are S. Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (London: Penguin, 1989) (first published London: John Murray, 1983); B. W. Ogilvie, The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006); and Regimes of Description: In the Archive of the Eighteenth Century, edited by J. Bender and M. Marrinan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).

⁵ An edited collection containing essays by each of these authors is Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe, edited by G. Pomata and N. G. Siraisi (Cambridge, MA: London: MIT Press, 2005).

⁶ Take, for example, E. Spary, ‘Scientific Symmetries’, History of Science, 42:1 (2004), 1–46.

⁷ The three rhetorical figures enargheia, hypotyposis and ekphrasis will be significant in this essay, and will be discussed fully below. Enargheia and hypotyposis are more or less synonyms. Both imply a verbal representation of an action or scene that is vivid, as if thrown before the eyes. Ekphrasis refers specifically to the idea that a verbal representation of a scene can be like a painting, or that an artwork can be rendered verbally without loss of effect.

⁸ Grew, Musæum, Preface.

⁹ Writing to Sloane in 1698 (Old Style), Ray explained that he could not work with some specimens Sloane had sent, because it would be a shame to have to destroy them. Ray to Hans Sloane, 22 March 1698/9, Ray, Correspondence (1848), 362.

¹⁰ J. Ray, F. Willughbeii […] Ornithologiæ libri tres […] Totum opus recognovit, digessit, supplevit J. Raius. (London, 1676), J. Ray, Francisci Willughbeii Armig. De Historia Piscium Libri Quatuor, Jussu & Sumptibus Societatis Regiæ Londinensis editi (Oxford, 1686). Henceforth, Ray, Historia Piscium. Ray's Historia Plantarum was a work of epic scale, consisting of three volumes, each about 1,000 pages long. J. Ray, Historia plantarum species hactenus editas aliasque insuper multas noviter inventas & descriptas complectens, 3 vols. (London, 1686–1704).

¹¹ Describing, naming and identifying species in response to queries from correspondents was one of Ray's main activities, and it fills his correspondence. Take, e.g., Ray to Martin Lister, 10 December 1669, Ray, Philosophical Letters, 52 and Ray to Edward Lhwyd, 10 June 1694, Ray, Correspondence (1928), 248–9.

¹² Tancred Robinson to John Ray, 18 April 1684, Ray, Philosophical Letters, 154.

¹³ Ray to Hans Sloane, 24 December 1698, Ray, Correspondence (1848), 348–53. The works reviewed are P. Boccone, Museo di plante rare della Sicilia, Malta, Corsica, Italia, Piemonte, e Germania (Venice, 1697) and P. Hermann, Paradisus Batavus, continens plus centum plantas (Leiden, 1698).

¹⁴ Ray, Correspondence (1848), 352.

¹⁵ Ray, Correspondence (1848), 349.

¹⁶ Ray's histories aim at species identification. However, Nehemiah Grew's Anatomy of Plants (London, 1682) seeks to explain the functions of different parts of plants.

¹⁷ Ray's descriptions of rays open, for example, with a section about rays in general, followed by a long anatomical description of thornback rays. Thereafter, very short descriptions of other ray species follow, giving their differentia. Ray, Historia Piscium, 68–78.

¹⁸ Grew, Anatomy, 2–10.

²⁰ Ray to Edward Lhwyd, 22 March 1692, Ray, Correspondence (1928), 234.

¹⁹ We can find further examples of uses of ‘knowledge’ with the sense of obviousness that Ray gives it here. In 1688 Richard Waller wrote to Ray about his project for a book that would make the identification of plants easy. He began, ‘Since one of the chief Ends of an Herbal is thereby to attain to a true Knowledge of Plants’, Richard Waller to Ray, 5 April 1688, Ray, Philosophical Letters, 211.

²¹ It is worth supplying two lengthy examples of both Hooke and Ray expressing these notions. For example ‘So that our Apprehensions of things seem to be appropriated to our Species: And that if there were another Species of Intelligent Creatures in the World, they might have quite another kind of Apprehension of the same thing, and neither perhaps such as they ought to be, and each of them adapted to the peculiar structure of that Animal Body in which the Sensation is made […] from which it seems evident, that those Imaginations we have of things, are not according to the Nature of the things themselves; but only appropriated to the peculiar Organs, by which they are made sensible to the Understanding’, R. Hooke, ‘A General Scheme, or Idea Of the Present State of Natural Philosophy, and how its Defects may be Remedied by a Methodical Proceeding in the making Experiments and collecting Observations. Whereby To Compile a Natural History, as the Solid Basis for the Superstructure of True Philosophy.’ In R. Hooke, The Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke, edited by R. Waller (London, 1705), 3–70 (8–9).

In his De Variis Plantarum Methodis Dissertatio Brevis (London, 1696), Ray also expressed the problem of non‐resemblance, to defend his classificatory system against Tournefort's criticisms (Tourenfort did not view Ray's system as a consistent system). Ray responded, ‘The essences of things are wholly unknown to us. Since all knowledge derives from sensation, we know nothing of the things which are outside us except through the power that they have to affect our senses in some particular way, and by the mediation of these impressions to cause a particular phantasm to arise in the intellect. If the essences of things are immaterial forms, it is admitted by everyone that these are not encountered in any sensible means.’ See P. Sloan, ‘John Locke, John Ray, and the Problem of the Natural System’, Journal of the History of Biology, 5:1 (1972), 1–53 (43–4). Sloan argues that Ray changed his opinions about the knowability of essences under Locke's influence, but the only evidence for this is that Ray changed his classificatory system to one that was more oriented towards this philosophical position during the 1690s. Ray's descriptive practices going back to the 1660s all manifest the ‘indiscriminate’ enumeration of whatever characteristic notes identified a species, rather than the systematist's focus on only the parts of the plant that lead one to knowledge of essences. Peter Anstey and Stephen Harris also note that Sloan's claims about Ray need to be backdated, as it were. See P. Anstey and S. Harris, ‘Locke and Botany’, Studies in the History of Biological & Biomedical Sciences, 37 (2006), 151–71.

²² Ray to Edward Lhywd, 1 June 1694, Ray, Correspondence (1928), 247.

²³ Martin Lister to Ray, 8 February 1670, Ray, Philosophical Letters, 89.

²⁴ Ray, Historia Piscium, 74. In the original Latin, Ray's words are: ‘Os dentium expers, verum maxillæ cancellatæ tuberculis rhomboidibus asperæ sunt, limæ instar.’

²⁵ I. Maclean, ‘White Crows, Graying Hair, and Eyelashes: Problems for Natural Historians in the Reception of Logic and Biology in the Reception of Aristotelian Logic and Biology from Pomponazzi to Bacon’, in Pomata and Siraisi, Historia, 147–79 (148) and, in the same collection of essays, ‘Praxis Historialis: The Uses of Historia in Early Modern Medicine’, 105–46.

²⁶ Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopædia: or, an universal dictionary of arts and sciences, 5 vols. (London, 1778–1788), vol. 2, entries for ‘description’ (unpaginated).

²⁷ D. Foster, ‘“In Every Drop of Dew”: Imagination and the Rhetoric of Assent in English Natural Religion’, Rhetorica, 12:3 (1994), 293–325 (303–7).

²⁸ C. Ginzburg, ‘Ekphrasis and Quotation’, Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 50:1 (1988), 3–19. He quotes Plutarch on page 10. Similar observations about ekphrasis may be found in M. Beaujour, ‘Some Paradoxes of Description’, Yale French Studies, 61 (1981), 27–59 (43).

²⁹ Willis's implication is that the hypotyposis generated by extended description, or a figure, is necessary before we can proceed to talk about uses. T. Willis, Cerebri Anatome: cui accessit Nervorum Descriptio et Usus (London, 1664), 119, 288, 312.

³⁰ M. Robson, The Sense of Early Modern Writing: Rhetoric, Poetics, Aesthetics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 25.

³¹ Lessing famously criticized descriptive poetry by tackling what he took to be its fundamental properties. Extended description of things, he argued, is aesthetically unsatisfying because words communicate successively what is communicated to the eyes in an instant. G. Lessing, ‘Extracts from Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766)’, in Art in Theory, 1648–1815: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, edited by Charles Harrison, Paul Wood and Jason Gaiger (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 477–86.

³² Dryden's words are, ‘a Poet in the description of a beautiful Garden, or a Meadow, will please our imagination more than the place it self can please our sight’. J. Dryden, Of Dramatick Poesie, an Essay (London, 1693) (first published, London, 1668), 22. It is worth adding here that arguments such as Dryden's were informed by classical and humanist ideas about painting, embodied in the expression ‘ut pictura poesis’. This does not translate neatly, but implies that painting could be employed to convey narratives. On this tradition, as well as Dryden's employment of it, and Lessing's criticisms of Dryden, see W. Howard, ‘Ut Pictura Poesis’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America, 24: 1 (1909), 40–123.

³³ S. Kusukawa ‘The Historia Piscium (1686)’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 54:2 (2000), 179–97 (192). See also (for example) Ray to Hans Sloane, 16 December 1706, Ray, Philosophical Letters, 319–20.

³⁴ Ray to Tancred Robinson, 22 October 1684, Ray, Philosophical Letters, 169.

³⁵ Hooke, ‘General Scheme’, 64.

³⁶ L. Plukenet, Phytographia (London, 1691), M. Lister, Historiae sive synopsis methodicae Conchyliorum quorum omnium picturae ad vivum delineatae, exhibetur liber primus. Qui est de Cochleis Terrestribus (London, 1689).

³⁷ A very small proportion of Lister's plates show comparative dissections, presumably where he found external images of the shells to be unsatisfactory. See, for example the plate in Part 1 (there is no pagination) entitled ‘Harderi Tabulæ Anatomicæ Cochleæ alicujus Terrestris Dorniportæ, earumque explicatio.’ This is the twenty‐second engraved plate of Lister, Historiæ.

³⁸ B. Stafford, Artful Science – Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 231.

³⁹ N. Grindle, ‘No other sign or note than the very order’: Francis Willughby, John Ray and the Importance of Collecting Pictures', Journal of the History of Collections, 17:1 (2005), 15–22 (20).

⁴⁰ Richard Waller to Ray, 5 April 1688, Ray, Philosophical Letters, 211.

⁴¹ On Comenius's influence, see A. Blair, ‘Mosaic Physics and the Search for a Pious Natural Philosophy in the Late Renaissance’, Isis, 91:1 (2000), 32–58 (37–9).

⁴² Comenius, Orbis Sensualium Pictus (London, 1659), Preface.

⁴³ Ray to Richard Waller, 19 May 1691, Ray, Correspondence (1928), 99.

⁴⁴ Grindle, ‘No other sign or note’, 20. In an otherwise fine article, Sachiko Kusukawa picks up on Ray's statements about the use of images in making descriptions intelligible. Although Kusukawa accurately reports these, it is still necessary to qualify them with Ray's (and indeed Hooke's) more ambivalent pronouncements. Kusukawa, ‘The Historia Piscium’, 183, 186, 192.

⁴⁵ Ray, Grew and Hooke's natural theological works are well known, especially in the case of Ray's works. Their most famous natural theological books are J. Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation (London, 1691), N. Grew, Cosmologia Sacra (London, 1701) and Hooke's Preface to his Micrographia, or some physiological descriptions of minute bodies (London, 1665).

⁴⁶ Ray to Richard Waller, 19 May 1691, Ray, Correspondence (1928), 99.

⁴⁷ Ray wrote to Lhwyd in 1694 about the difficulties in making intelligible descriptions without images. In spite of the difficulties, Ray suggests that he will be able to achieve the same outcome with words: ‘Without figures, names and Descriptions will be very fastidious & hardly intelligible to ye Reader. But I shall endeavour so to methodize them & give such certain characteristic notes, that whosoever attends to them shall not fail to understand what species I describe.’ Ray to Edward Lhwyd, 1 June 1694, Ray, Correspondence (1928), 247.

⁴⁸ Ray to Henry Oldenburg, 19 September 1674, Ray, Correspondence (1928), 66.

⁴⁹ M. Hunter, ‘Robert Hooke Fecit: Making and Knowing in Restoration London’ (unpublished Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2007), 189–90.

⁵⁰ Grew, Anatomy of Plants. It is especially interesting to run over the wide variety of graphic strategies that are employed in his engraved plates.

⁵¹ Hooke, Posthumous Works, 279.

⁵² From the point of view of thinking about aesthesis, the best account is still Alpers, Art of Describing, 26–71.

⁵³ Quoted in B. Decyk, ‘Cartesian Imagination and Perspectival Art’, in Descartes' Natural Philosophy, edited by S. Gaukroger, J. Schuster and J. Sutton (London: New York: Routledge, 2000), 447–86 (472).

⁵⁴ R. Descartes, ‘Discourse 5 of The Dioptrics’, in Descartes: Philosophical Writings, edited and translated by E. Anscombe and P. Geach (Nelson: London, 1954), 245, quoted in J. Snyder, ‘Picturing Vision’, Critical Inquiry, 6:3 (1980), 499–526 (499).