V.5 'several Plants bound up into one Volume'

By limiting and filtering the visible, structure enables it to be transcribed into language. It permits the visibility of the animal or plant to pass over in its entirety into the discourse that receives it. And ultimately, perhaps, it may manage to reconstitute itself in visible form by means of words, as with the botanical calligrams dreamed of by Linnaeus. His wish was that the order of the description, its division into paragraphs, and even its typographical modules, should reproduces the form of the plant itself. That the printed text, in it vvariables of form, arrangement, and quantity, should have a vebetable structure. ... The plant is thus engraved in the material of the langauge into which it has been transposed, and recomposes its pure form before the reader's very eyes.The book becomes the herbarium of living structures. (Foucault 34Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaelogy of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994): 135.)