I.7 "a Plant is, as it were, an Animal"

Neither shrieking mandrakes nor Wilkins' dichtomies, Grew's plants exist between Renaissance resemblances and Linnean taxonomies -- or, rather, they contain both models in their description, each phrase an explosive Kuhnian Gestalt switch. Written at the brink of what we now see as an epistemic break, Grew is actively constructing new ways of seeing the world, ways that would become standard for the scientists who trace their lineage to his work; yet Grew himself was writing in a culture that imbued plant life with animality. For instance, Grew's contemporary Martin Lister describes the veins of plants as animal capillariesMartin Lister, Letters and divers other mixt discourses in natural philosophy. London, 1683. On Lister's theory of plants as having animal-like circulation, see Anna Marie Roos, The Salt of the Earth: Natural Philosophy, Medicine and Chymistry in England 1650-1750 (Netherlands: Koninklijke, 2007): 80-82., even turning the analogy back onto humans to justify bleeding as a medical practice. Thus analogized but not yet fully transformed into analogies -- objects distantly compared but not conjoined -- plants and humans still engaged in a mutual process of metamorphic becoming.