V.3 'several Plants bound up into one Volume'

While Robinson identifies a real disjunction, the break between these two "worldviews" is not so clean. Royal Society members like Locke do not merely represent but actively construct empirical methods for reading the "new" Book of Nature; likewise, tropes that to contemporary readers seem contradictory -- such as the simultaneous belief in both philosophical progress and human degenerationKen Robinson, "The Book of Nature," Into Another Mould: Change and Continuity in English Culture 1625-1700 (New York: Routledge, 1992): 89. -- more likely expose the nuances and negotiations of thought poured into Royal Society texts. If producing knowledge is a process by which one attempts to shape (rather than predict) future methodologies, then an archaeology must be sensitive to the pressures exerted on the past -- what Walter Benjamin theorizes as the historical nucleus, the point at which an artifact's "fore-history and after-history diverge."