Classification and Display:
negotiating variety and
order
Mark Philp
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Ordering
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Black 3 litre Rolls Royce Silver Cloud
Blue Mini Countryman 1.2 litre
White Ford Galaxy, 1.8 litre
Red 2.5 litre Porsche 2-seater sports
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Ordering
• Add in
• Pink 100cl Lambretta Scooter
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Blue Mini Countryman 1.2 litre
Red 2.5 litre Porsche 2-seater sports
White Ford Galaxy, 1.8 litre
Black 3 litre Rolls Royce Silver Cloud
• Colour; engine size; car size; prestige, passenger capacity
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Chain of Being
Early 12th C
an R Fludd
1617
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Didacus Valades,
Rhetorica
Christiana,
1579
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Collecting and displaying without (much) order
Olias Wormius
1588-1654
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Ferrante
Imperato,
Dell’
Historia
Naturale
(1599)
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Cabinet of Curiosities
Domenico Remps, 1675
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Collecting and Science
• Francis Bacon:
• In a play performed before Queen Elizabeth I, the Gesta
Gravorumi, 1594, Bacon describes an imaginary
research facility containing “a most perfect and general
library”, “a spacious, wonderful garden” filled with wild
and cultivated plants and surrounded by a menagerie,
birdcage, freshwater lake, and saltwater lake.
• These spaces for living nature were complemented by a
house with instruments and furnaces, and a museum of
science, art, and technology – “a huge cabinet” housing
artefacts, (man-made), natural oddities, and gems,
minerals, and fossils.
• Paula Findlen, “Anatomy Theaters, Botanical Gardens,
and Natural History Collections”
“This is nature becoming reconstructed within a
“microcosm, creating an artificial world of knowledge in
which scholars prodded, dissected, and experimented with
nature in order to know it better”.
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University of Leiden Anatomy
Theatre
1610
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British Museum 1823-52; 1975-2000
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Montague House 1759:
Sir Hans Sloan 1660-1753
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Hans Soane (died 1753)
• Arranged for the Government
to buy his collection of 71,000
artefacts for £20,000
• Not to be confused with Sir
John Soane (1753-1837)
• Builder of the Bank of
England
• Collector of pictures, models,
plans, plaster casts
• 1833 Act of Parliament to
preserve house and collection
at the time of his death
• 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields
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Natural History Museum, South Kensington (1881)
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`Rules proposed to be Observed in making the Collections of
proper Use to the Publick by way of Resolutions in a General
Meeting of the Trustees‘ (1759)
In Order to prevent as much as possible persons of Mean & low degree &
rude or ill behaviour from intruding on such who were designed to have free
Access to the Repository Viz. for the Sake of Learning or Curiosity tending to the
Advancement & Improvement of Natural Philosophy & other Branches of
Speculative knowledge & in Order to render the said Repository of such Use to
the Publick as by the Act for that purpose was meant & Intended. That no
person or persons whatsoever be admitted to inspect or View the Collections
but by a proper Authority from the Trustees or one of them, or by their Order in
General Meeting made for that purpose & under & Conformable to the further
Rules hereafter mentioned.
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Catherine Talbot (1721-1770) had a preview visit on
15 August 1756:
One evening was spent at Montague House,
henceforth to be known as the British Museum. I
was delighted to see Science in this Town so
Magnificently and Elegantly lodged: perhaps You
have seen that fine House and Pleasant garden: I
never did before, but thought I liked it much better
now, inhabited by Valuable Mss, Silent Pictures
and Ancient Mummies, than I should have done
when it was filled with Miserable Fine People, a
Seat of Gayety on the inside and a place of duels
without…
Nothing is yet ranged but two of three rooms of
Mss. Three and Thirty Rooms in all are to be filled
with Curiosities of every kind. A number of Learned
and Deserving Persons are made happy by the
places bestowed on them to preserve and show
this fine Collection: These have Comfortable
Apartments in the Wings, and a Philosophic Grove
and Physick Garden, where at leisure hours they
may improve their health and Studies together.
Barthélemi Faujas de Saint-Fond 1779
Carl Philip Moritz, 1782
• The British Museum contains many
valuable collections in natural history,
but nothing is in order, everything is out
of its place; and this assemblage appears
rather as an immense magazine, in
which things have been thrown at
random, rather than a scientific
collection, destined to instruct and
honour a great nation’
• ‘The company who saw it, when and as I
did, was various and some of all sorts,
and some, as I believe,of the lowest
classes of the people of both sexes; for,
as it is the property of the Nation,
everyone has the same right to see it
that another has.’
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Margaret Bentinck, Duchess of Portland,
1715-1785 Bulstrode Park
• Richest woman in Britain at her time
• Largest natural history collection in
the country (curated by Swedish
Botanist and pupil of Linnaeus, Daniel
Solander)
• Collection included the Portland Vase
• Member of Bluestockings
• Museum , zoo, aviary and botanic
graden open to public at Bulstrode
Park
• Horace Walpole: “Few men have
rivalled Margaret Cavendish in the
mania of collecting, and perhaps no
woman. In an age of great collectors
she rivalled the greatest.”
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What Principle of Order?
• Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humane
(1966) The Order of Things (1970)
• Historians want to write histories of biology in the eighteenth century; but they do
not realize that biology did not exist then, and that the pattern of knowledge that
has been familiar to us or a hundred and fifty years is not valid for the previous
period. And that, if biology was unknown, there was a very simple reason for it: that
life itself did not exist. All that existed were living beings, which were viewed through
a grid of knowledge constituted by natural history.’ (127-8).
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Foucault/Jorge Luis Borges: Emporio celestial de
conociementos benévolos (1942)
All animals are divided into one of 14 categories:
• Those that belong to the emperor
• Embalmed ones
• Those that are trained
• Suckling pigs
• Mermaids (or Sirens)
• Fabulous ones
• Stray dogs
• Those that are included in this classification
• Those that tremble as if they were mad
• Innumerable ones
• Those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush
• Et cetera
• Those that have just broken the flower vase
• Those that, at a distance, resemble flies
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Surface description
Analytical description
• To the Renaissance, the strangeness of
animals was a spectacle: it was featured
in fairs, in tournaments, in fictitious or
real combats, in reconstitutions of
legends in which the bestiary displayed
its ageless fables. The natural history
room and the garden, as created in the
classical period, replaced the circular
progression of the ‘show’ with the
arrangement of things in a ‘table’. What
came surreptitiously into being between
the age of the theatre and that of the
catalogue was not the desire for
knowledge, but a new way of connecting
things both to the eye and to discourse.
A new way of making history. (131)
• a knowledge of empirical individuals can be
acquired only from the continuous, ordered
and universal tabulation of all possible
differences. – all designation must be
accomplished by means of a certain relation
to all other possible designations. To know
what properly appertains to one individual is
to have before one the classification – or the
possibility of classifying – all others. …an
animal or a plant … is what the others are
not. 144
• To be able to exist as a science, natural
history must, then, presuppose two
groupings. One of them is constituted by the
continuous networks of beings… (the other
is) the series of events (which is)
discontinuous (but which can be drawn as a
single line, of time).
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• Diary of John Hunter
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Carl Linnaeus (17071778)
Småland, Sweden
Systema Naturalae (1735)
11 pages in length
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Smaland, Plant collection and Uppsala
Garden
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Coyotes and gray wolves are closely related, they belong to the
same domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, and genus.
Their scientific names indicate that they belong to different
species: Canis latrans (coyote) and Canis lupus (gray wolf).
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Classification
of Plants
• A genus is, formally, a category of biological classification consisting of one or more closely
related and morphologically similar species.
• Grounds for specific names: ‘Names are, as it were, the hands of plants, of which the generic
is the right, and the specific name the left hand’
• Needs to identify the specific differences that are not subject to variation
• NOT: magnitude; comparative marks re other species of a different genus; or other species of
the same genus; nor from the first discoverer; place of growth; time of flowering; colour;
smell; taste; medical virtues; sex (since they are within species); roughness or spines;
duration – perennial vs annual; mustn’t go if can avoid it on leaves, roots, stem or trunk
• But mode of flowering; parts of fructification calyx, corolla, stamina, pistulla, seed vessel, and
seeds – distinguished into essential, natural and specific. ‘The true, constant, and faithful
marks are taken from the parts of a plant, as the root, stem, leaves, fulcra, or props, the
mode of flowering, and the different parts of fructification, according to the number, figure,
situation, connection. And proportion, as in the genera.’
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Explained by Erasmus Darwin
• The Classes are distinguished from each other in this ingenious system, by the
number, situation, adhesion, or reciprocal proportion of the males in each flower.
The Orders, in many of these Classes, are distinguished by the number, or other
circumstances of the females. The Families, or Genera, are characterized by the
analogy of all the parts of the flower or fructification. The Species are distinguished
by the foliage of the plant; and the Varieties by any accidental circumstance of
colour, taste, or odour; the seeds of these do not always produce plants similar to
the parent; as in our numerous fruit-trees and garden flowers; which are propagated
by grafts or layers.
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• Linnaeus’ claim to fame springs from his invention of a new system for naming species,
a new nomenclature.
• This nomenclature is still in use today, and is called the binary name system or binomial
nomenclature.
• a species is given two names, a first name and a second name, the first name, the
generic name indicates which broader family a species belongs to, like a surname, and
the second, the specific epithet, indicate which unique species, within this family, we are
talking about. Rhododendron a genus of over 1 000 species of woody plants, one of
which is ponticum
• This created a unified and simple system for naming plants replacing overlapping
complex diagnostic name systems or nomenclatures. If you give a plant a diagnostic
name you make its name identical to how you describe it. Such names could be very
long, if one species were very similar to another, more features needed to be described,
this made diagnostic names very hard to remember, moreover, they were unstable, as
new species were introduced to European natural history, the diagnostic names needed
to be changed.
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Daniel Solander 1733-82
• Solander came to London in 1760. And there he stayed for most of his life. He travelled
but never back to Sweden again. To London naturalists, who were some of the first to
adopt Linnaeus taxonomy and nomenclature, he was a gift.
• He explained Linnaeus principles, he became the taxonomic oracle of London. The
person everyone brought their collections to, to be examined, identified, organised.
Solander was employed by the Duchess of Portland to go over her large collection. He
soon also gained a position at the British Museum, taking charge over the natural
history collection
• Solander went over the collections organised the Museum’s herbarium according to the
Sexual System, wrote catalogues and indexes following Linnaeus systems and flexible
approach.
• This Linnaean systems for understanding and displaying nature became the corner stone
in the natural history collections of the British Museum.
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Commerce and classification
• One of Linnaeus’ main objectives for studying natural history was to create an
inventory of natural resources in Sweden and to find substitutes and replacements for
goods imported from abroad, in Sweden.
• He was launching Swedish herbs to replace tea from China. When this did not work
(caffeine, the maybe most important reason for why tea became so popular, was only
identified in the 19th century) he was scheming to grow Chinese tea in Sweden,
envisioning large tea garden stretching far beyond the Arctic circle.
• He also encouraged the growth of mulberry trees in Sweden to use for silk
production.
• Such experiments were based on an understanding that you can tame plants to new
climates.
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Sir Joseph Banks 1743-1820
• He promoted the establishment of botanical gardens in
areas around the world controlled by the British, these
garden, with Kew Garden at the centre, were used to
transfer plants from one end of globe to another.
• He was particularly keen in exploiting the Australia’s
resources, exporting seeds and husbandry to Australia.
• But he was also promoting the establishment of new
breeds of for example sheep in Britain.
• Banks had what Linnaeus did not, the support of an
expanding colonial power which helped him use nature
to promote production.
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Banks and Merino sheep
• Sir Joseph Banks procured
two rams and four ewes in
1787 by way of Portugal, and
in 1792 purchased 40
Negrettis for King George III
to found the royal flock at
Kew. In 1808, 2000 Paulas
were imported.
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Roman AD 1-25 Josiah Wedgewood
Cameo Glass ware
1789
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From variety, to principles of order
The developments from the 17th to the early 19th Century saw
• an increasing belief in underlying principles of order beneath a superficial
appearance of diversity and disorder
• the attempt to identify the principles of order on a scientific basis
• But, in the process, the development of a distinctive understanding of science as the
identification of natural order and principles of nature
• Both makes the world knowable, and assumes an order to it, where that order can
be linked to design
• The first is necessary for evolutionary theory, but it sheds the second.
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