V.4 'several Plants bound up into one Volume'

Recognizing the negotiations at the heart of any epistemic shift show how the book itself -- not just the concept of the book of nature, but the book as an artifact -- was in its own process of becoming something new: becoming science, becoming evidence, becoming a map of new worlds. In binding many plants into one volume, Nehemiah Grew does not simply adopt a new mathematical method of approaching the order of things, thereby tracing a new metaphor onto an old trope, but wavers between two worldviews: on the one hand, the nesting of plant-animal resemblences, one to many; on the other, the book as full stop, a blockage magnified to the point of distortion. In other words, if the world was once a book, with Grew, the book becomes a world, a microcosm of microcosms each mapping new ways of seeing nature.