III.8 "as an Animal is a Plant"

As Diane McColley points out, the Greek term υλη, transliterated as hyle, means both wood and matter -- both the living tree and the dead timber. "These words carry trees in their etymologies," McColley writesDiane McColley, Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell (London: Ashgate, 2007): 110., "as Greek columns carry them in their forms." Over time, though, the living "hyle" that, for Aristotle, transformed primordial Chaos into structure gave way to lifeless matter manipulated by human hands, woods to wooden idols. When addressing his work to the Royal Society, Evelyn -- himself a deeply religious man -- participates in this transformation, adopting the emerging language of empiricism; in doing so, he transforms a trope of vegetable kinship into an ironic symbol for man's separateness from nature. Residual resemblences between plant and animal become metaphors distancing the human subject from his objects of study, which themselves are no longer rooted in a living system, a forest of meaning, but dried to a dead timber, exploitable by the human.