I.6 "a Plant is, as it were, an Animal"

For botanists today, Grew's text marks the point at which the study of plants moved out of the shadowy realm of Renaissance apothecary books and into a science of form and function. Here, the history of science tells us, the Society's empirical methods (and Grew's microscope) discovered knowledge of vegetable life in and of itself, separate from the natural histories and anatomies of animals which had been in production for over a century. Yet, even as it strives against reductive resemblances, the Anatomy exposes a deep, almost inextricable sympathy between plants and animals. For instance, as Grew outlines in his dedicatory epistle, a plant, "as well as an Animal, is composed of several organical Parts," including bowels; it "lives partly upon Aer" and "hath those Parts which are answerable to Lungs." In fact, when confronted with the problem of plant reproduction, Grew maps human sexual organs onto vegetable parts, introducing terminologies and conceptual metaphors that persist in botany today.