This bizarre quote comes from the dedicatory epistle to Nehemiah Grew's The Anatomy of Plants, published by the Royal Society in 1682. With eighty-two detailed plates showing the magnified structures of leaves, seeds, roots and cross sections of trunks -- much of it produced by looking through a microscope -- Grew's text collates over a decade's worth of research on the form and function of plants. It is generally thought to be the first major work of what would later become known as botany.
Despite its clear historical importance for both scientists and those who study the book, Grew's Anatomy has suffered from a lack of critical attention, especially compared with the other major Royal Society text on microscopy, Robert Hooke's Micrographia (1665). In literary criticism, Diane Kelsey McColley reads Grew's work alongside what she terms "hylozoic poetry" of the seventeenth century, highlighting the deep sympathy thought to exist between plant and animal life in Restoration-era poets, especially John Milton. Likewise, in the history of science, Adam Max Cohen pits Grew's book against the Micrographia, arguing that Hooke, unlike Grew, attempts to present a coherent vision with his microscope. The quote above also shows up in A. R. Hall's The Scientific Revolution 1500-1800 (1954) as a marker of Grew's "quaintness" (288) and, a century earlier, in Robert Kemp Philp's The History of Progress in Great Britain (1859), as well as several nineteenth-century pharmacueutical journals. Yet never has this quote -- a small world in itself, marking a transitional moment in the histories of both science and the book -- been unpacked with the care it deserves.
Using Grew's line as our experiment, the present project magnifies and dissects the series of analogies packed into this micromoment. Like the shrieking mandrake of the Renaissance, plants participate in the pain expressions of the animal; yet animals are also kin to vegetable life, as evident in the trope of the arbor inversa, man as an inverted tree. If today we look forward from Nehemiah Grew to Linneaus and his taxonomies, Grew himself had roots in sixteenth-century herbals and early seventeenth-century theological tracts that, as Foucault has famously pointed out, read the world as a series of resemblances folded in on each other. Updating Foucault, we might also read these resemblances as a process of becoming -- a metamorphsis that doesn't analogize, layering one distant form atop another, but transforms plant into animal, capturing animality in plantness.
However, in the circuit of plant-becoming-animal built into this strange little sentence, the book enters as a stoppage or block. The animal is in quires: suddenly its metamorphosis is cut short, animals and plants distanced from each other by the paper, the deadened vegetable life that comes between them. "Or rather" the plant is several plants -- a multiplicity, a pack of plants rolled into one organism: the metaphor of the quires mutates back into plant-animal circuitry, reanimating the paper. Yet, just as suddenly, Grew binds life back into the book. With this final sweep, metamorphic growth becomes a metaphoric comparison, and forms of life that once participated in each other become subject/object, observer/observed.
Thus more than a quaint fancy, Grew's sentence contains a microcosm teeming with forms of life active at this transitional moment in the history of ideas. By slicing into the language, subjecting it to our microscope, this project aims to better understand the epistemic structures that contributed to its formation, as well as our own observational standpoint as scholars looking back into a history whose later chapters we already know.
Whitney Anne Trettien
credits and bibliography