It is not easy to find the Department of Lepidoptera at the London Natural History Museum. Corridors meander their way through the entire history of the museum; past dignified and all but abandoned mahogany cabinets in the old wing to immense metal storage systems in the new containing tray after tray after tray of moths and butterflies of all sizes, colours, origins, all levels of rarity and beauty. An estimated 68 million specimens are kept there, some 20 million of them butterflies. The collection has become a vast reference base for the taxonomy of new or unknown species, and every day new parcels arrive from all over the world, smelling faintly chemical and containing creatures dried or pinned on to cardboard or suspended in alcohol.
I am shown some truly spectacular examples, delicate things of miraculously rich and varied colour, iridescent apparitions with wings as large as hands, death moths that seem to have skulls etched on their massive backs, and others so small that their intricacy is almost impossible to believe. The specimens I have come for, however, are all in one small cabinet in a large room smelling unbearably of mothballs. Here, opened only with a special key, are a few trays containing butterflies in individual glass frames, all labelled by hand and sealed with parchment around the edges. Some of these specimens carry a red dot indicating that they are the reference sample used in the past to describe a species; others have suffered greatly and have all but disintegrated. One in particular, large, with red wings shot through with brown and black, hardly survives at all and is little more than the ghost of a butterfly, skeletized like an autumn leaf, mere hues of colour between the two glass panes holding together what remains.
These fragile remnants once formed part of one of the greatest collections Europe has seen, central not only to the holdings of the Natural History Museum but also to those of the British Museum: the life’s work of Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753).
‘I had from my Youth been very much pleas’d with the Study of Plants, and other Parts of Nature, and had seen most of those Kinds of Curiosities, which were to be found either in the Fields, or in the Gardens or Cabinets of the Curious in these Parts,’1 Sloane remembered about his Irish childhood. Born in 1660 as son of a land agent in Killyleagh, Co. Down, he attended the local Latin school. At sixteen, he developed haemoptysis, a painful condition that caused him to spit blood and was to last for three years, though other sources relate that it plagued him intermittently for his entire life. It is possible that it was this medical condition that forced the young man to turn his hand to more academic pursuits instead of following the countrified life of his family. At the age of nineteen he studied at the Apothecary’s Hall in London, and soon came to the attention of Robert Boyle, a distinguished chemist and physicist. The young man cultivated Boyle’s friendship by ‘communicating to him whatever occur’d to himself, which seem’d curious & important, & which Mr Boyle always receive’d with his usual Candour & return’d with every Mark of Civility and Esteem’.2
After four years at the Apothecary’s Hall, Sloane went abroad to study in Paris, dividing his time between the Jardin Royal des Plantes and the Hôpital de la Charité. He was a voracious student, as a friend testified:
He enter’d at six in the morning the Royal Garden of Plants with Monsr Tournefourt, who demonstrated the Plants after the Order of Caspar Bahuin … til eight, when Monsr Duforty explain’d their Virtues till ten; & at two in the afternoon Mons du Verney read upon Anatomy till four, & was succeeded by Monsr Sanlyon, the Chemical Professor, who discours’d in French on the Operations to be perform’d that day by Monr Faveur.3
From there the young Sloane went to the most famous school of medicine of that time, to Montpellier. As a Protestant he was debarred from taking a degree in both Paris and Montpellier and so he had to finish his studies in Orange. He received the degree of Doctor of Medicine with distinction. Already a respected man of science, the young doctor returned to England with a letter of introduction to Dr Thomas Sydenham, one of the most notable medical men of the day. On his return he was made a Fellow of the Society of Physicians. The world, at least the small world of respectable London society, was open to him.
In 1687, Sloane accepted a position as physician to the 2nd Duke of Albermarle, recently appointed Governor of Jamaica, probably in order to get him as far away as possible from London. The duke had caused considerable scandal with his dissolute lifestyle, which threatened to ruin not only himself, but also the reputation of his father, General Monck, one of Cromwell’s most loyal supporters who had switched allegiance and had been created a duke in recognition of his pivotal role in the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. In the later political climate of the 1680s, however, under James II, whose Catholic sympathies were plain for all to see, the wayward son of an eminent man who had once supported the opposition was a liability, and best removed from the hub.
The prospect of foreign travel excited the young doctor, especially since it would give him the opportunity of studying foreign plants and drugs. Having sailed to Jamaica on the Assistance, a frigate of forty-four guns, Sloane soon settled into a routine of perfunctory duties, which left him plenty of time for exploration. He hired artists to record nature and wildlife, kept detailed notes and also wrote about his adventures to London friends:
[A]fter I had gather’d and describ’d the Plants, I dried as fair Samples of them as I could, to bring over with me. When I met with Fruits that could not be dried or kept, I employ’d the Reverend Mr. Moore, one of the best Designers I could meet with there, to take the Figures of them, as also of the Fishes, Birds, Insects &c in Crayons, and carried him with me into several places of the Country that he might take them on the place.4
Sloane’s West Indian days set a pattern for the rest of his life. While his position as the duke’s physician was not demanding and much of his time was taken up with explorations and with cataloguing and preserving his finds, he soon operated a flourishing medical practice open to the governor’s circle and the less privileged citizens of Port Royal alike. (One of his patients was Sir Henry Morgan, a retired buccaneer, whose medical trouble turned out to be that he drank so much that he found it impossible to sleep, an unusual consequence of excessive consumption of alcohol.)
While not allowing anything to detain him from pursuing his passion, Sloane was aware of the dangers lurking everywhere. ‘In that distant Climate the Heats and Rains are excessive,’ he wrote. ‘The Parts not inhabited … are often full of Serpents and other venomous Creatures … The same Places remote from Settlements are often full of run away Negros, who lyie in Ambush to kill the Whites who come within their reach.’ It was not just rebellious former slaves that endangered his growing collection; the tropical climate presented added difficulties. ‘I attempted to preserve the Skins and Feathers of Humming Birds, and was oblig’d, to keep them from Ants, by hanging them at the End of a String from a Pully fasten’d in the Cielling and yet they would find the Way by the Ceiling to come at and destroy them.’
Sloane’s time as a colonial doctor and collector of rare species was rudely interrupted when on 16 March 1688 his employer, who had himself enthusiastically sampled local produce, Jamaica rum, suddenly died. The duchess, no doubt relieved at finding her exile cut short, decided to return home. Sloane discovered that his skill at preserving organisms proved a useful asset as the duke’s body had to be embalmed in order to be taken back to England. The political uncertainty surrounding the increasingly embattled James II prevented the party from sailing for another five months. The dowager duchess wisely decided that the England of an ever more intransigent Catholic king was no place to be. They eventually set sail in August, when it seemed certain that James II would not last. On arriving in England, the duke, pickled twice over, was interred in Westminster Abbey.
Back in London, Sloane was quick to exploit his connections and expertise. He set up practice in Bloomsbury Square and soon had among his patients some of the most influential members of society. His reputation, and wealth, rose with the publication of his observations made on his journey to the West Indies. In 1693 he succeeded Isaac Newton as Secretary of the Royal Society and in 1719 he became President of the College of Physicians. The personal physician to Queen Anne, he also received an honorary degree from Oxford University. Despite his position as consultant to the rich and famous, Sloane obviously retained a strong sense of obligation to his profession: he returned his annual salary of £30 as Physician in Charge at Christ’s Hospital for the treatment of its patients. By now one honour chased the next. He attended upon Prince George of Denmark, the Consort of Queen Anne in 1708, was created a baronet in 1716, and was made Physician General to the Army in 1722. In 1727, by now sixty-seven, he was appointed King’s Physician in Ordinary to George I.
While obviously enormously active and successful as a doctor and a man of science, Sloane was first and foremost a collector of immense curiosity and considerable means. His great wealth did not rest on his success as a physician alone; in 1695 he married a widow he had known in Jamaica, Elizabeth Langley, an heiress to a substantial fortune, who enabled him to pursue his passion and to pay fabulous sums for objects he thought valuable and genuine. As there was nothing that did not excite his interest, nothing so small or insignificant that he would not have attempted to acquire it, Elizabeth found that her famous husband came at a price. When John Evelyn visited Sloane in 1691, only three years after his return from Jamaica, he wrote:
I went to see Dr. Sloane’s Curiosities, being an universal Collection of the natural productions of Jamaica consisting of Plants, Corralls, Minerals, Earth, shells, animals, Insects &c: collected by him with greate Judgement, several folios of Dried plants & one which had about 80: severall sorts of Fernes, & another of Grasses: &c: The Jamaica pepper in branch, leaves, flowers, fruits &c: with his Journal, & other Philosophical & naturall discourses & observations is indeed very extraordinary and Copious, sufficient to furnish an excellent History of that Island, to which I encouraged him, & exceedingly approved his Industry.5
Sloane did not rely on his own judgement alone. Agents and seamen would bring him rarities, and he would buy entire collections in order to incorporate the best pieces into his own. His rooms in Bloomsbury must have been a remarkable sight: wealthy private patients come to see the great man when he was unable to visit them; other, less distinguished but equally sick, people hoping to be attended to; sailors with plants, animals, alive and dead, antiquities, tribal art and boxes arrived from all the harbour towns of Britain, all vying for space in his increasingly cramped quarters.
The collection took a new direction when Sloane’s friend from Montpellier University days, the rich botanist William Courten of the East India Company, bequeathed his specimens to Sloane in 1702, a legacy that was estimated at a staggering value of £50,000.6 After this, there was seemingly no stopping him. Sloane acquired several entire collections, among them ‘a good collection of Roman coins, and a most surprising one of shells, a thousand of several sorts from all parts of the world, curious for their form, size, colour &c’.7 Not content with objects of science, he became increasingly fond of curiosities, such as parts of the salvage from a Spanish galleon. By now, a constant team of curatorial assistants helped him in the task of cataloguing and preserving the exploding number of specimens in his house.
There are conflicting reports as to the appearance of the collection, encouraged perhaps by the fact that it was in a constant state of flux. Initially it was contained in eleven large rooms in which cabinets for various specimens lined the lower areas of the walls, with three or four tiers of bookshelves above. The cabinets were ordered according to the kind of object they contained: mineral or animal, insects or vertebrae, shells, birds’ eggs, and one containing ‘7,000 different fruits’. There were also cabinets containing shoes and clothing, Egyptian antiquities, fossils, medals and coins, and various objects defying classification altogether. Always generous with access to his treasures, Sloane still expected his guests to take great care. When Händel visited the great man in 1740, he disgraced himself and incensed his host by placing a buttered bun on a rare medieval manuscript.
Eventually the ever-increasing number of items in the house forced Sloane to search for new lodgings. In 1742, he chose to move to Chelsea, where he hoped to accommodate his pieces more adequately. Edmund Howard, who worked as one of Sloane’s assistants, had the task of making an inventory. The catalogue runs to forty volumes in folio, including records of a library of 42,000 volumes. The collection kept growing. Already in April 1743 a visitor recorded about Sloane’s new residence: ‘His great house at Chelsea is full throughout; every closet & chimney with books, rarity’s &c.’
An inventory from 1753 gives a more accurate picture of the extent of the collection. It itemized, among many other categories:
Earths and Salts 1035
Bithumens, Sulphurs, Ambers, Ambergreese 399
Metals and Minerals 2725
Talcs, Micae, etc 388
Corals, or such as are kin to them, as Sponges and other Submarine Plants 1421
Vegetables, and Vegetable Substances, as Roots, Woods, Ruits, Seeds, Gums, Resines, and inspissated Juices 12506
Besides 200 large Volumes of dried Samples of Plants, amongst which are such Speciments as were collected by myself In Europe, The Madera Island, and America, as also those gathered by Dr Merret, Dr Plukenet, Mr Petiver, and other curious Persons all over the known world 344
Insects 5439
Echini, or Sea Urchins, and Parts of them, both natural and fossil, found at Sea and Land 659
Fishes, and their parts 1555
Birds, and their Parts, Eggs 1172
Vipers, Serpents &c 521
Humana, viz. Stones of the Kidneys and Bladder, Anatomical preparations, and the like 756
Miscellaneous Things not comprehended with the foregoing, both Natural and Artificial 2098
Things relating to the Customs of ancient Times, or Antiquities, Urns, Insturments, &c. 1125
Large Seals 268
Large Vessels, Handles, and other Things made of Agats, Jaspers, Cornelians, Chistals, besides many Camei and Seals, excisa, incisa 700
Medals, antient, as Samaritan, Phaenician, Greek, Consular, Roman, &c, and Modern, and coins in all Medals 23,000
Books in Miniature of Colours, with fine Drawings of Plants, Insects, Birds, Fishes, Quadrupeds, and all sorts of natural and artificial Curiosities, Books of Prints &c, Volumes of Manuscripts, the greatest Part of them relating to Physick, and Natural History, &c. ca 50,0008
Sauveur Morand, a French man of science, visited Sloane’s collection in 1729 and was obviously still under the impression of this vast and strange artifice when he wrote down his description of it:
Mr Sloane’s cabinet comprises eleven large rooms, including his library, which is the most complete in Europe for books on medicine; he has 3,000 manuscripts on this subject. In this cabinet are to be seen
Extremely rare anatomical pieces, amongst others many preparations by Ruysch; the foetus which Ciprien removed by caesarian operation on 1694 without causing the death of the mother; various injections of the principal vessels of a body of which the tunics are full of knots caused by a tophaceous matter, produced by the gout; various skeletons, including that of a syphillitic, full of growths; several pieces exhibiting maladies of the bones; stones removed from different parts of the body – there are 400 of them; from the bladder, and several from the intestines
A collection of medals; there are as many ancient as modern, 23,000
Skeletons of leaves of various trees, produced by insects, various birds, amongst others humming birds and ‘oiseaux du mogol’
Skins of all sorts of animals
Teeth of all sorts of animals, amongst others elephants’ teeth, swollen and distended, having been penetrated by foreign bodies which remain inside; in one is an iron ball.
A great number of Egyptian antiquities
4,000 different insects; the Surinam toad
A complete history of butterflies in glazed boxes. Also there are curious leaves resembling flying insects, which are called folia amulantia
A collection of beetles
A collection of all species of spiders
A large collection of snakes in spirits
The wings of several sorts of flying fish
A series of all sorts of shoes of different nations
Indian clothes9
Sloane did not leave all the work in detail to his assistants. He himself labelled the pieces in his possession, recording their history, peculiarities, former owners and appearance. Among the rarer items were ‘a breast after being buried [blank] years taken up given to me by Mr. Walpole’, ‘A piece of the breast of Queen Katherine out of the chest at Westminster abby 7ber [September] 1667 had out of Mr Giffords collections’, ‘The head of an Egyptian mummy dried in the sands brought from Egypt by Mr Sandys’ and ‘Part of the hide of a Bashaw that was strangled in Turkey given to me by Dr. Varin.’ Not all descriptions were so brief. Some labels contained entire stories:
A ball of bezoar taken out of the gutts of a Schoolmaster in Lancashire who suffered seven years of the colic by it notwithstanding the attempts of Physicians. The center is a plumbstone stuck there with gathered [f]omentum about it wich was found in opening his body by his own direction after death to find out the cause of so great a distemper; A small tumor of fatt voided by a person excessively troubled wh the colic who had swallowed a nail being nailing some laths upon a ceiling. He endeavour’d to gett it up by a whalebone and had a pain in his side about a year when by bleeding & the help of an electuary of conf. Ref. Bals. Locatell & fl. Shlph. Wh pectorall drink he brought it up wh a small couth. The nail wh coagulated blood round it.10
As a doctor, Sloane had unrivalled access to the kind of monstrosity so beloved by collectors a century before. His own collection had a good deal of specimens of the kind. ‘A monstrous child with 4 arms and 4 legs,’ was followed by ‘A human monster being two bodies of children joined together in one head it hath 4 arms & 4 legs From Staffordshire.’ Other items of anatomy testified to Sloane’s more eccentric tastes and habits:
Two cataracts taken out of the eyes of a blind small fox from Greenland. He lived many years wt me in my garden was brown in summer & turned white in winter. In April generally the fox shed the white hair unliss the last year of his life when being sick the white fur continued till its death not changing as usually.
Natural curiosities took up a great deal of space. There were pieces of considerable size, such as: ‘The skeleton of an Orang Utang or wild man frm Sumatra in the East Indies by Capt. Sprice. The hands and feet were thrown overboard in coming from the East Indies when this creature died. It was given me by Mr. Maidstone’; ‘A stuffed Camel’; and ‘The trunk, eyes etc. of the Elephant that died of a Consumtion in the year 1741 at Mile end in Middlesex’; as well as more modestly proportioned exhibits, such as ‘A white mouse catch’d in a trap in Hannover square.’11
It was not just his zoological collection that was thus described. He wrote about fossils as if they were living, roaming sea and land: ‘Palat or mandible of an orbis muricatus dugg up in England. This fish eats shell fish & grinds them between the upper & under manibles w are like millstones.’ The descriptions of archaeological remains showed their owner to be a man interested more in medicine than history: ‘An incrusted Skull and Sword, they were both found in the Tiber at Roma, on the right side of the Skull is the bone or head of the humerus, and the first rib adhering.’12
The Chelsea manor, complete with large and exotic stuffed animals, entire boats and a collection numbering around 200,000 pieces, became a great attraction to visitors. Sloane himself, though, had to consider what would happen to it after his death. His collection, though unrivalled in the world, was attacked by some as old-fashioned. John Woodward, himself an ardent collector, wrote about it: ‘Censure would be his due, who should be perpetually heaping up of Natural Collections, with out Design of Building a Structure of Philosophy out of them, or advancing some Propositions that might turn to the Benefit and Advantage of the World.’13
Unperturbed by criticism, however, Sloane made up his mind how he would dispose of his treasures. Madame du Bocage, a French visitor, recorded with great surprise: ‘This curious old Gentleman intends, as it is said, to bequeath these fruits of his enquiries to the Royal Society of London.’ The curious old gentleman did just that. He left to the Royal Society ‘my library of books, drawings, manuscripts, Prints, medals and coins; ancient and modern antiquities, seals and cameos, intaglios and precious stones; agates and jasper, vessels of agate, jasper or crystal; mathematical instruments, drawings and pictures, and all other things’.14 The British Museum was born. Sloane himself, who had suffered from a paralytic disorder since 1739, died on 11 January 1753. He was ninety-two. His collection, together with the library of Sir Robert Cotton and the Royal Library, donated to the museum by George II in 1757, was initially housed in Montague House, Bloomsbury, and opened on 15 January 1759.
An account written by a twelve-year-old boy in 1780 already relates a museum experience that sounds familiar to modern visitors:
The next room was filled with all kinds of serpents and lizards once alive, and some of them with wings. There was a pair of gloves made from the beards of mussels, also some snakes and rattlesnakes and swordfishes etc., and a crocodile, which was such a monstrous great thing, he could have eaten three or four men for a breakfast. There were thousands of other things, which I have not time to enumerate, and indeed, we could not stay to look at half of them.15
The statutes of the museum stipulated that it was to be a ‘national establishment founded by Authority of Parliament, chiefly designed for the use of learned and studious men, both natives and foreigners in their researches into several parts of knowledge’. The learned and studious men were obviously keen to keep the treasures for themselves, for when the German historian Wendeborn called on the doors of the newly established institution in 1785 he found reason to complain that ‘persons desiring to visit the museum had first to give their credentials at the office and it was then only after a period of about fourteen days that they were likely to receive a ticket of admission’.16 Even then a visit to the collections was no leisurely affair. A curator, who made it clear that he regarded the visitors’ appearance as an imposition on his precious time, would walk his charges through the rooms, hardly giving them a chance to pause for breath, much less to look at individual objects, which were displayed without much organization, and without labels.
Sloane’s collection, more and more overshadowed by other treasures, had a chequered history in its new surroundings. A Parliamentary Select Committee investigating the conditions of the British Museum in 1835 found that much of the great man’s bequest had been lost. George Shaw, Keeper of the Department of Natural History and Modern Curiosities, told the committee: ‘Sir Hans Sloane had a method of keeping his insects which was very injurious to them. He squeezed them between two laminae of mica, which destroyed the specimens in most cases, even the wings of the butterfly. A few specimens of these insects remained, and we considered them as rubbish, and such were destroyed with other rubbish.’17 The few specimens fortunate enough to have escaped this barbarity are now housed in the Natural History Museum, where they continue to remind us of Sloane’s disordered riches.
Sloane was probably the last of the ‘universal’ collectors, a man standing on the cusp of the old tradition of the cabinet of curiosities and the new fashion for scientific collecting and methodical classification (another, even later, time-lagged polymath was the German poet, scientist, collector and politician Johann Wolfgang von Goethe).
Already during Sloane’s lifetime the nature of collecting had taken a dramatic turn. The Enlightenment and the rise of academies in which scholars met to discuss and to share their research had led to more methodical ways of approaching the material world and to more specialized forms of collecting. The ambition of collecting everything of note, a natural one for Aldrovandi and Tradescant, had given way to a division of disciplines, and within them a new project emerged: the rational classification and complete description of nature and, eventually, art.
A man in the vanguard of this new way of looking at the world, Carl Linnaeus (1707–78), had visited Sloane’s cabinet and voiced his disapproval, declaring the collections to be in ‘complete disorder’. Chaotic conflagrations of curios held no interest for him. Linnaeus was a pious man and believed that God’s work could be expressed and grasped in more systematic terms.
Born in rural Sweden at Råshult in the parish of Stenbrohult in Småland as son of a pastor and devoted amateur botanist, he had studied medicine and had made his name by recording the plants of Lapland as well as the customs of the indigenous Sami people. From Uppsala, the young man went to the Dutch university of Hardewijk and then, armed with an MD, to Leiden, one of the centres of natural philosophy on the continent. Here he found a patron in the famous physician and humanist Hermann Boerhaave (1668–1738), and worked on various botanical works. When he returned to Sweden in 1738 he had a solid reputation as a botanist but no employment and was forced to settle in Stockholm as a general practitioner. He was finally offered a Chair in Botany at his old university, Uppsala, eleven years later.
Here Linnaeus came into his own, cultivating rare plants in his botanical gardens, lecturing to crowds of adoring students, who later formed a worldwide botanical network and supplied more specimens for his collection, and continuing to catalogue plants according to his system of sexual classification.
Linnaeus found that he could subdivide the kingdom of plants according to the form and function of the reproductive parts of individual specimens. By this method he arrived at twenty-four classes and numerous orders, genera and species for further differentiation.
The Latin name of each plant was to consist of two parts, a binominal classification, one for the class and one for the identification of the individual species.
Linnaeus’s collection, most of which was sold to London by his widow and is now kept in drawers in a fortified basement room in Burlington House in Piccadilly, the headquarters of the Linnaean Society, is not very large and is spectacular for botanists alone. With his classification, though, he changed the face of the scientific inquiry into nature. He was not without his detractors, of course, but he had little difficulty holding his own. When the German botanist Johann Siegesbeck attacked his sexual system as ‘loathsome harlotry’, the gentle Swede found it fitting to name after him a particularly unappealing weed, still known as Siegesbeckia.18
A form of intellectual opposition, which was more serious than Protestant prudery, came from a Frenchman, the redoubtable George Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–88), the Director of the Jardin des Plantes. Buffon was everything Linnaeus was not: a flamboyant nobleman and scholar, independently wealthy, well connected and brimming with confidence in his own ability. Today, Buffon is remembered as a mathematician rather than a naturalist. At the age of twenty he formulated the binominal theorem, a significant contribution to mathematics. He also worked on probability and posited a surprisingly accurate way of ascertaining the value of p by throwing pins on a gridded sheet of paper.
In his own lifetime, however, it was the study of nature that occupied the nobleman most. Born in the same year as Linnaeus, he studied law, mathematics and botany, translated Newton into French and also championed the writings of Leibnitz. Forced to abandon his studies in Angers after fighting a duel, he set out on a Grand Tour together with the Duke of Kingston and visited Rome and London, where he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. Back in France, he took his father to court for trying to cheat him out of his inheritance and accepted the position as Director of the Jardin de Roi (today the Jardin des Plantes) in 1738. He was thirty-two years old.
He now began working on his magnum opus, the Histoire naturelle, géneérale et particuliére (1749–1804), projected to run to fifty volumes, though only thirty-six were completed. It was the first attempt made during the Enlightenment to represent systematically all fields of human knowledge in natural history, geology and anthropology. Buffon’s system differed radically from that of Linnaeus. Where the binominal classification sought to go into ever more detail and to fix every creature with the intellectual equivalent of a taxidermist’s needle, Buffon believed in the instability of species. Redundant features such as the hind toe of pigs, he argued, would eventually be bred out and vanish altogether, as indeed might the species itself. This evolutionary concept led him to posit an age for the earth that was much longer than previously thought and to speak of different periods during which species would have existed that had long since become extinct. The Histoire naturelle was a mixture of natural history and philosophy, intended partly to keep the work from becoming monotonous in its description of animals and plants. Style was important to the count: ‘Le style c’est l’homme même,’ as he famously declared in a lecture to the French Academy.
While Buffon’s system of classification according to form and function of plants and animals has not stood the test of time, his ideas about the instability of species, the common ancestry of apes and men, and about evolution in nature in general were to prove far-sighted beyond his own imagination and were taken up a century later by another impassioned collector and expert on worms, Charles Darwin.
The cabinets of the sixteenth- to eighteenth-century collectors had been full of objects and creatures that were extraordinary, out of the order of things. The whole point of this project had been to question and expand the kind of knowledge about the world that was extant in the West; dragons and mermaids, armadillos and blowfish, Indian headgear and Eskimo shoes all pointed to a world that was bigger than had been known, to a reality far beyond what had been thought possible. Classifications were anecdotal and uncertain, and, if not invented on the hoof, gathered with equal readiness from Pliny and local fishermen alike. What mattered was the sheer wonder of each object in itself, a material contradiction of the previously supposed limitations of the world.
The emerging scientific approach to nature turned this approach on its head. Now the objective was to place everything within the order of things, in its allotted place within the great system that was, at least potentially, capable of absorbing everything on earth and in the skies. Nature would bend to its ultimate classification and every last beetle and moss would have its place within the pages of Linnaeus, would appear somewhere in one of Buffon’s many tomes. The scientific mind was finally poised to master the order of things; indeed, according to some revolutionary writers, it was the scientific mind that established this order and imposed it on the universe.
