Abstract
In this introduction to Nehemiah Grew's seminal 17th-century publication The Anatomy of Plants (1682), we discuss the various influences on and impacts of Grew's innovative approach to studying plant life. We offer a review of the current literature on Grew and argue for the importance of his work in its contribution to fields ranging from microscopy to agriculture and from comparative anatomy to scientific illustration. The articles included in this special issue on “The Making of The Anatomy of Plants” are also introduced. We make a case for Grew as a figure of great interest and relevance in our contemporary moment; as plant studies have taken hold in the humanities, historical narratives in the history of science are expanding to include more of the life sciences—a field that, as we show, Grew actively promoted and participated in throughout his tenure at the Royal Society.
The Anatomy of Plants, published in 1682, was the culmination of an ambitious research project begun over a decade prior by the English physician Nehemiah Grew. This book transformed the way people saw and understood vegetable life, presenting a novel vision of plants and their interiors. Applying insights from his medical background and the anatomical study of animals, Grew pursued the principles behind these vegetal bodies, examining their cycles of growth, their circulatory systems, and their reproductive organs. From his initial investigations of garden beans to his final lectures on the development of the seed in the pit of an apricot, he followed the general growth and development of plant life through its entire lifecycle. Grew's innovative studies of plants saw his career take shape from being a relatively unknown physician of modest means—the devout son of a nonconformist minister, who had to travel abroad in 1671 to receive his medical diploma due to ongoing religious persecution—to being, for a time, one of the key figures in the illustrious Royal Society, acting as their secretary and editor of the Philosophical Transactions.1 His program of study not only redefined his own professional life, but also influenced the research agenda of his broader community through his role at the Royal Society and the wide distribution of his plant-anatomical publications.
Grew's program of plant anatomy was premeditated from the beginning. In the opening paragraph of his very first book, The Anatomy of Vegetables Begun published in 1671, he argued that he would use “the Method of Nature her self” and make observations of first the seed, and then the root, trunk, branch, branch, leaf, flower, fruit, and finally, going full circle, the seed again.2 This was precisely what Grew did: between 1672 and 1677 he regularly presented his ongoing research as lectures at Royal Society meetings, while also publishing revised versions of these as stand-alone books that were interspersed with reflections on the vegetation of roots and trunks written in a more natural-theological vein. In 1677, having followed the growth and development of plants through their various stages, he gave his final lecture on the form and generation of seeds, and published all his plant-anatomical research as The Anatomy of Plants in 1682. Through his detailed verbal descriptions and carefully designed visual tables, Grew constructed a synoptic vision of the plant world that was aesthetically pleasing and had an air of completeness to it. Moreover, it offered a scalable view of plants. Not only could readers study the exterior and interior of plants, they could also suspend themselves down into the minute details of fibres, bladders, and vessels through Grew's representation of microscopic vision—and return back up again. The coherence between these multiple levels, Grew argued, was safeguarded by God's omnipotent handicraft.
As Elisabeth Yale has argued, early modern natural historians were not only producing more knowledge about the natural objects that they studied, but they were also engaged in a project to represent the nature of specific places, which were considered components of an ideal image of the nation as a unified space.3 In a time of political and religious turmoil, natural history served as a medium for actors from across divides to come together and form a scholarly reformed community. In the words of Robert Hooke, natural investigations functioned as a “universal cure of the Mind” bringing universal harmony back into a splintered collective body.4 The result could be hyper-local works like John Aubrey's Naturall Historie of Wiltshire, which described the winds, rivers, soils, minerals, animals, and plants as well as populations and architecture of Wiltshire; synoptic works like John Ray's Catalogue of English Plants, which enumerated all plants growing in England; or it could be like John Evelyn's description of forests growing “In his Majesties Dominions,” as he put it on the frontispiece of his Sylva, or, A Discourse of Forest-Trees.5
The political-economic utility of local natural history was not foreign to Grew. In his unpublished economic treatise written in 1706/1707, The Means of a Most Ample Increase of the Wealth and Strength of England, Grew proposed that the king should sponsor local surveys of natural resources both above and below ground, and that a “Register-Book” of these findings should be provided to each county.6 In addition, Grew suggested that these register-books should be exhibited along with a small repository of “a Perfect Collection of Samples” of the substances to be extracted or refined in the area. Spread across the country, these small local museums would help landlords and freeholders improve the production of their lands, just as their use—on a larger scale—would increase the general economy of England.
The Anatomy of Plants is, no doubt, a very different kind of book. In its pages, we find no direct mention of specific English lands, nor is it structured like a catalogue of plants. Rather, the book has an air of being far removed from such worldly considerations of economy, improvement, and utility. And yet, in his dedication of the book to Charles II, Grew established a connection between these pursuits. Contrasting the “Territories of Knowledge” with those of “Dominion,” Grew argued that to be a “Good Prince over Wise Men,” the King needed a map to guide him through the new lands of philosophy, which he called “another Utopia.”7 Thus, while The Anatomy of Plants did not provide a topographical or natural-historical atlas, Grew argued that it offered a model of an epistemically unified country. In this way, Grew's plant-anatomical observations were a central node in the Royal Society's attempt to present their activities as the foundation on which the harmony of England could be restored.
At the same time, Grew's individual plant-anatomical observations had a value and purpose in themselves. If we read the minutes of Royal Society meetings in the 1670s, it becomes clear that the direction of Grew's research—his choice of specimens, preparation techniques, and objects of study—was dictated by specific natural-historical discussions happening among his fellows, and not just by his own grand vision of a complete description of the anatomy of plants. For instance, at a Society meeting on May 8, 1672, the Fellows George Cock and Robert Hooke were discussing the colour of steel and how it should be polished in order to be used in a reflecting telescope. To resolve their disagreement, the Society as a collective made the decision that Grew, “the new curator for the anatomy of plants,” should make his observations on the matter, and to do so, the Society ordered that “Mr. HOOKE should deliver to him the Society's microscope.”8 Grew did not hesitate, and while he never produced any recorded observations on steel colour, he quickly began delivering “entertainments” in the form of microscopic observations on the pith of various plants. Grew's observations on roots continued in the following weeks and months, spurred on by the Society, who also gave him small assignments such as verifying the plant-anatomical descriptions sent to them by Marcello Malpighi and Martin Lister.9 In the following year, on June 11, 1673, he was “desired to give an account of those observations in writing,” which transpired as soon as June 16, when The Anatomy of Roots, dedicated to Society president William Brouncker and bound with An Idea of a Phytological History of Plants, was printed.10 As this example shows, the Royal Society fellows supervised Grew's research keenly and relied on his expertise to further their research projects.
With this introduction, and with the special issue as a whole, we seek to strike a balance between presenting The Anatomy of Plants as the product of Grew's own particular interests and that of the intellectual, social, and practical contexts in which it was made. To this end, we begin by situating Grew's research on plants within the early Royal Society, as we argue that the pursuit of plant knowledge played a crucial, if often overlooked, role in the Society's first years. We then discuss the wider economic implications of plants in early modern economies, and the ways in which Grew's plant anatomy contributed to the field of economic botany. After this, we turn to the interplay between the disciplines of animal and plant anatomy. Grew was a trained physician, who published dissertations on nervous fluids and the comparative anatomy of guts.11 Here, we discuss how his medical training influenced his approach to plants and how he modelled the new discipline of plant anatomy on the more established discipline of animal anatomy. Finally, we discuss the importance of Grew's image-making techniques and the ways in which his images were an integral part of his knowledge-making project.
At the Royal Society meeting on June 14, 1665, between an experiment in which a dog was bitten by a male black viper and the communal inspection of the skin of a monstrous two-bodied, seven-legged lamb, an account on garden cresses was read aloud.12 As explained in the account, an unnamed Royal Society fellow had carried out an experiment over a few weeks in which he had grown garden cresses inside the receiver of an air pump. The experiment was successful: during just one week, the garden cresses grew to the height of 2–3 inches in the air-filled receiver; whereas the week before, when the receiver had been sucked empty, the cresses “did not grow at all.”13 An air-filled glass receiver, it turned out, worked excellently as a simple greenhouse.
This air-pump experiment looks a bit different than the ones that we are used to encountering in the scholarship. In their seminal study on instrument use and experimentalism in the early Royal Society, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer analysed how Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke used the air pump to construct matters of facts about the properties of elemental substances such air, water, and mercury.14 Together with efforts such as the edited volume Robert Hooke: New Studies, this line of scholarship opened up research on the role of mechanists, technicians, and other practical experimenters.15 Here, Hooke, whose reception history had long been marred by comparisons with more “pure” scientific theorists, most notably Isaac Newton, emerged as a central figure through his crafty, aesthetic, and entrepreneurial qualities.16 But this story of brass and glass instruments also consolidated a narrative inherited from an earlier generation that centred this breakthrough moment in experimental philosophy around the disciplines of astronomy, fluid dynamics, and mathematised physics.17
Grew has never really found his feet within this scholarship on the Royal Society, even though he played a central role there for several years. From 1672 onward, he delivered regular lectures and entertainments as the appointed Curator for the Anatomy of Plants, presenting his own findings on plant anatomy and occasionally testing the theories and observations of his fellow microscopists Marcello Malpighi and Antoni van Leeuwenhoek. After the death of Henry Oldenburg in 1677, Grew took on the role of co-secretary for the Society, and acted as editor of Philosophical Transactions from 1677–1679. He was a constant presence and contributor to meetings throughout the decade. During his years as editor for Philosophical Transactions he was responsible for publishing many articles on natural-historical, economic, and agricultural topics, including Antoni van Leeuwenhoek's famous discovery of sperm using a microscope, which appeared in the same issue as a description of the cultivation of corn in New England.18 Yet, as Grew's primary disciplines of enquiry—botany, anatomy, theology, and occasionally chemistry and political economy—have been considered more peripheral to the core activities of the Royal Society, Grew has not been considered as the significant figure that he arguably was.
Instead, Grew has been studied within the individual historiographies on plant anatomy, microscopy, chemistry, and theology. In her pioneering work from the first half of the 20th century, Agnes Arber presented Grew as an observer of the vegetable word, who much more carefully than those preceding him pointed out details in the anatomy of plants that have since been accepted by botanists, such as his definition of the flower and his recognition of the gendered reproduction of plant and the importance of pollen.19 In particular, Arber singled out Grew's focus on the development of plants, such as his observations on buds, seeds, and beans as well as his descriptions of the manner by which year rings are created in trunks, known as second thickening.20 More recently, Domenico Bertoloni Meli has highlighted Grew's contributions to plant anatomy in relation to those of Malpighi.21
Historians of chemistry, most prominently Anna Marie Roos, have called attention to Grew's attempts to explain the qualities of specific plants through recourse to chemistry, an aspect that Grew developed in the seven lectures on saline chemistry that he delivered to the Royal Society at the end of his tenure as curator of plant anatomy, and which he appended to the Anatomy of Plants.22 Finally, Grew has also been studied by scholars investigating the place of vitalism in early modern natural philosophy, especially his publication of the anti-Spinozist treatise Cosmologia sacra (1701). In an important article, Brian Garrett has argued that Grew operated with the idea of a vegetative soul, which he understood to be the cause behind the beating of the heart in animals and the circulation of sap in plants.23 Through her critical dialogue with Garrett, Raphaële Andrault has expanded on the importance of Grew's vitalism through analysis of his discussion of fringe phenomena that Grew considering to be living, such as magnetic inclination and gravity, as well as substances bordering on the distinction between plants and animals like sponges and corals.24
Grew's observations have also been analysed among the historians writing about the use of microscopes in the period. In both Catherine Wilson's and Marian Fournier's studies, Grew is considered one of the most important microscopists of the 17th century, although their focus on the discipline of microscopy does not allow them to take the larger context of his work into account.25 Additionally, although his focus is primarily on Dutch microscopy, and especially Leeuwenhoek, Edward Ruestow's brief treatment of Grew should also be mentioned. In Ruestow's retelling of Leeuwenhoek's contacts with the Royal Society, Grew emerges as an active force, who both replicated Leeuwenhoek's findings and disagreed on some plant-anatomical issues, but also directed his colleague's research from afar, for instance by suggesting that he should study spermatozoa in a wider range of animals.26 In our view, Ruestow's analysis shows how vital Grew was to the activities of the Royal Society, and how important issues of anatomy, physiology and generation were to the Fellows.
In her article for this special issue, Oana Matei shows that Grew used a variety of experimental techniques to construct a science of vegetation.27 On Matei's reading, Grew's natural-historical enquiries were aimed at providing explanations of the causes and principles of the fundamental processes of plants, and thus they constituted a science. In this way, Matei's article reminds us that the early Fellows of the Royal Society were not just seeking to describe the nature of inert matter—mercury blobs, air particles, or bullets—but that they were making enquiries about the vital principles of living bodies, including plants, through equally systematic observations and experiments.
The focused nature of the Anatomy of Plants has often been regarded as its great strength: by introducing the method of anatomy, Grew did away with broader natural-historical descriptions of plants in terms of their general appearance, culinary and medicinal use, location, and temperament.28 Yet, as the articles of this special issue show, knowledge of the general use of plants was not absent from the Anatomy of Plants: Grew spoke of the role of the taste of plants both for classificatory and medicinal purposes, he related the structural make-up of different kinds of trunks to be used as timber, and he seriously compared plants grown in England and plants imported from its colonies. While Grew's observations and experiments may seem disinterested, they were indeed performed with an eye towards different kinds of agricultural application.
Importantly, this was also how his plant-anatomical research was perceived by his fellow naturalists. When Henry Sampson, Grew's half-brother, forwarded the manuscript of Grew's first treatise, The Anatomy of Vegetables Begun, to the Royal Society, it landed in prepared soil. The improvement of agricultural and horticultural practices had been on the mind of English naturalists since the days of Hugh Plat, Francis Bacon and Gabriel Plattes.29 As Kate Luce Mulry has argued, proposals to increase crop yield or identify better medicinal plants resonated with large-scale ambitions to boost the demographic strength and economy of England, thus making it a more powerful nation.30 In his Sylva sylvarum, Bacon had suggested a variety of ways to improve the production of vegetables, such as the use of hothouses to accelerate germination, new grafting strategies, and new garden designs, as well as some more fantastic interventions (through comparison to the medical practice of bloodletting, Bacon argued that bitter almonds could be turned sweet by letting the almond tree of some of its sap).31 After the founding of the Royal Society in 1660, the fellows set up the so-called Georgical Committee, whose first action was to write up a questionnaire on agricultural practices to be distributed among landowners throughout the country, so that the members would have enough information to publish a “History of Agriculture and Gardening.”32 Other activities included the compilation of long and quite fanciful lists of improvements, inventions, and experiments, such as the desiderata list written by Daniel Coxe, one of Boyle's close associates and a keen observer on all things vegetative.33 Although the Anatomy of Vegetables Begun was not compiled under the auspices of the Royal Society, it found an audience of interested readers who shared Grew's curiosity regarding the processes by which plants grow, bloom, and reproduce.
Recent scholarship has made clear that this kind of experimentation on plants was not carried out in isolation, but rather was closely connected with existing agricultural and horticultural practices. As Elaine Leong has forcefully reminded us, the gentlemen of the Royal Society did not spend most of their time in London, but rather on their estates, where they either oversaw or were directly involved in household production of an agricultural, culinary, or medical nature.34 Thus, experiments and observations carried out in kitchens, stables, and fields across the country had a direct bearing on the knowledge that was produced within the male-dominated spheres of institutions like the Royal Society.35 Similarly, scholars such as Antonio Clericuzio and Justin Niermeier-Dohoney have highlighted the economic incentives behind experiments with soil and plant chemistry, especially showing how procedures of yield-enhancement were developed and communicated through articles and books.36
Scholars of early modern botany have long argued that to European naturalists, plants from far-away places were not only curious wonders, but also highly profitable commodities.37 Methods for acquiring knowledge of plants, such as systems of classification and identification and ways of assessing medicinal qualities, were developed to ease the collection and transportation of plants from the colonies to Europe. Grew played his part in this knowledge economy, too. Through his compilation of the catalogue of the Royal Society's repository, the Musaeum Regalis Societatis (1681), Grew used verbal and visual description to render unfamiliar plants and seeds such as coconuts and dates recognisable to English readers.38 In his article for this special issue, Niermeier-Dohoney expands this argument through a comparative study of the Anatomy of Plants and Grew's unpublished political-economic manuscript The Means of a Most Ample Increase discussed above.39 As Niermeier-Dohoney argues, the colonial specimen trade also played a role in Grew's observations for the Anatomy of Plants, albeit in a negative sense. As he situates Grew's thoughts on the improvement of the English economy within discussions about England's future as an imperial power, Niermeier-Dohoney argues that Grew's economic arguments were guided by what he terms “imperial scepticism.” Grew's analysis of the strength of trunks, the generative potential of salts, and the qualities of mineral soil, Niermeier-Dohoney shows, were not only directed at the improvement of natural resources in England, but were also part of a strategic argument to make England independent of colonial trade.40
A similar argument is formed from a different angle in Christoffer Basse Eriksen's article.41 Eriksen shows that while Grew expanded the number of observed plant species, these were still primarily local English plants rather than foreign ones. As Eriksen argues, both practical and more ideological reasons were behind this choice. As Grew's observational method was highly interventionist—he cut to pieces the plants he studied—he needed a large supply of plants, which was easier with those that he could collect in local gardens and fields. Yet, his preference for native varieties also reflected his desire to identify and highlight the qualities of these species to encourage their propagation in gardens, fields, and forests across the country, in order to make England independent of foreign trade. From this perspective, Grew emerges as what Vera Keller has termed a “philosophical gardener,” that is, a botanist or gardener for whom experimentation was not directed towards immediate, incremental application, as was the case on the estates in Leong's account, but who rather took a sort of “high-risk, high-gain” approach to research.42 Grew did not prescribe new ways of raising crops in the Anatomy of Plants, but he did provide foundational knowledge on plant growth and reproduction on which further experimentation could be based.
Nehemiah Grew was also largely—but not solely—responsible for introducing comparative anatomical principles to the study of plants. He and Marcello Malpighi—both physicians—were engaged in preparing and publishing books on plant anatomy throughout the 1670s under the direction and imprimatur of the Royal Society. As discussed above, the Royal Society had their own political and economic motivations for pursuing more detailed knowledge of the mechanisms of plant growth, and both Grew and Malpighi approached the subject from a new and very promising angle, namely by applying the method of anatomy.43 Each had a strong background in studying human and other animal bodies from their medical training, granting them a familiarity with anatomy and the associated practices of specimen preparation and dissection, which they applied to their studies of plants.44 Grew received his original training as a physician and obtained a medical degree from Leiden in 1671 with a dissertation on the circulation of nervous fluids throughout the body, entitled Disputatio medico-physica de liquore nervoso.45 When the Royal Society were presented with Grew's preliminary work on plant anatomy, which he had initiated on his own some years before, they were sufficiently interested and impressed that they invited him to join the Society and gathered contributions from their members to pay Grew an annual salary to continue his work for them. Meanwhile, their secretary Henry Oldenburg had already been urging their regular correspondent and contributor in Italy, Marcello Malpighi, to perform the same investigations, leading to the curious overlapping of the two figures' findings and publications. In this way, the introduction of anatomical principles into the study of plants is not clearly attributable to one source, and interested readers would have had no shortage of new material to peruse in the 1670s and 1680s.
The effect of Grew's prior anatomical training on his studies of plants can be seen throughout his process, beginning with his method. Grew made clear that he considered himself to be extending his research beyond the traditional scope of his predecessors, writing poetically that by studying his personal nursery of plants through the anatomical method, he “might put somewhat upon that side the Leaf which the best Botanicks had left bare.”46 By this Grew meant that even the best botanists who had written on plants before him had not considered their subject matter from the perspective that he was offering. The difference in approach is evident from the outset: rather than focusing on whole plants or techniques for identification, Grew presents his readers with the minutiae of the plant, cut and torn into sections and thin slices in his search for information about what is happening beneath the surface. Grew's approach also differed from contemporary herbaria in its end goal: Grew was not primarily seeking to document the multitude of plant types for taxonomic reasons, and was certainly not creating a helpful tool for gardeners or collectors; rather, he aimed to discover principles that would apply across all plant species regarding the general mechanisms of growth and reproduction in plants. Grew was therefore looking more closely at plants than was typical, in order to elaborate on an incredibly broad range of novel theories about plant anatomy and physiology.
Grew's 1675 book on plant anatomy, The Comparative Anatomy of Trunks, has the distinction of being the first work to feature the term “comparative anatomy” in its title—and his work The Comparative Anatomy of Stomachs and Guts was the second.47 While Grew did not invent the comparative method, he did employ it with rigour and to great effect, especially in his study of plants. And yet, Grew not only applied a comparative approach among similar species, for instance by looking at the roots and branches of many species, but also across taxonomic kingdoms. Using anatomical procedures and preparation techniques, he dissected and investigated the fibrous interiors of trees and flowers and described the movement of fluids through different plants by using models typically reserved for humans and other animals. In doing so, he directly compared plants to animals and vice versa, inferring common functions based on shared morphological characteristics. As discussed in detail in Justin Begley's article for this special issue, these plant-animal analogies allowed Grew to see plants in a new way and to discover overlooked features and functions of different plant parts.48 By examining the analogies Grew made between sperm and pollen, blood and sap, and mouths and roots, Begley explores the productive power of Grew's comparative method, which often relied on a kind of analogical thought.
Perhaps it is due to the incomplete status of Grew's project studying animals, for which he only published some preliminary observations of stomachs and guts, that his reputation in the Royal Society was primarily as an investigator of plants.49 Grew, however, worked extensively for a time on expanding his comparative approach from plants to the study of animals, and the insights he took from this method pervade his writing. Grew's significant work compiling the Royal Society's catalogue, Musaeum Regalis Societatis (1681), has seldom been discussed, and there has been almost nothing published addressing the short attached treatise mentioned above, The Comparative Anatomy of Stomachs and Guts.50 Both of these combined publications are accompanied by a large number of well-produced engravings, and both employ a comparative approach.51 For the latter, in his typical fashion, Grew's discussion of animal guts sets out a wide variety of different species and morphologies to discover the principles of digestion and the role of different parts of the guts. He utilizes paradigmatic or more easily discernible examples to make general points, as when elaborating on the structure of a sheep's gullet, he writes that he has chosen them for description “because they are here, as well as in some other larger Animals, more conspicuous.”52 Here, Grew's approach resembled that of William Harvey, who also used “stand-in” animals to study structures that were difficult to observe in smaller animals, such as the use of ostrich eggs to study the unfolding generative processes in all animals.53 On a philosophical level, this underscores Grew's commitment to the Aristotelian notion of species continuity.54
In Musaeum Regalis Societatis, the larger work to which Stomachs and Guts was appended, Grew also displayed his comparative and morphologically sensitive approach to studying nature. The Musaeum is a detailed and illustrated repository of the Royal Society's collections, full of Grew's own interjections on specific objects and their significance for natural history and philosophy. He organized the collection in this book according to their type and position in a hierarchy of natural kinds, with humans as the guiding principle: they are categorized “according to the degrees of their Approximation, to Humane Shape, and one to another: and so other Things, according to their Nature.”55 Throughout this account, Grew compared freely across kinds and species: he explained the growth of coconuts in reference to chicken eggs, compared foetal bone growth to the hardening of wood, and likened the structure of a stone to the growth of plants. Grew thus adamantly argued for continuities across natural kinds.56 He wrote: “There being a Circulation amongst Minerals, as amongst Plants and Animals; the same Principles passing from one to another. And so, probably, amongst all Bodies, at least between the Atmosphere and the Centre of the Earth.”57
In his paper for this special issue, where he discusses the underlying philosophical program and theoretical framework that Grew mobilizes in his studies, Fabrizio Baldassarri highlights Grew's writing in the Musaeum in order to show the latter's idiosyncratic approach to natural history, as he freely compared types and forms across multiple traditional categories.58 He incorporates this into a larger argument about Grew's approach to the study of plants, which, although on the surface very mechanistic and materialistic, focusing on chemical and material processes, nonetheless possibly still followed a particular principle of life. These studies of Grew's contributions to the Royal Society's catalogue and overall philosophical program also allow us to better understand the scope of his interests and his contributions to wider agricultural concerns, as his systematic study of nature sought principles that might allow a more thorough and productive approach to plant life to bolster the local economy.
The Anatomy of Plants, beyond its botanical, philosophical, and economic scope, was also an ambitious visual project. It featured 83 printed copperplates, including multiple large foldouts, with a hybrid of etching and engraving across the collection and over 650 individually rendered figures. These images are striking in their bold and simple compositions, densely textured to show off to viewers the intricate material structures Grew discovered in his dissected plants. Not reducible to the existing standards of botanical illustration, these images more readily call to mind geometrical diagrams or decorative abstractions. The labour and expense required for this volume of illustration would have been significant, indicating that the images were an important component of the overall project and deserve attention for their intellectual and aesthetic contributions to The Anatomy of Plants and its subsequent reception.
Grew's visual language was unique in style and had a noticeable impact on subsequent visualizations of plant anatomy; copies of his illustrations were still used as part of the paradigmatic visual template for Plant Anatomy in the Encyclopaedia Britannica 160 years after their creation. The investment of time and resources by his peers places it alongside other lavishly illustrated works on microscopy released by the Royal Society in the early years of its operation, including Hooke's famous Micrographia (1665) and Malpighi's Anatome Plantarum (1679)—in fact, it includes more illustrations than either of those previous works. Together with Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, these figures pioneered the early visual culture of microscopy, with Grew's contributions weighing no less heavily than those of his peers.
Yet Grew's images have received limited scholarly attention. They are mentioned only in passing in the early literature on Grew, and are almost completely overlooked in the otherwise thorough bibliography of the physician and his writings published by Le Fanu in 1990.59 Corresponding, perhaps, to the visual turn in the history of science and the increasing interest in the epistemic function of images, some more recent publications have engaged in a more meaningful way with Grew's illustrations.60 Peder Anker provided one of the first significant engagements with Grew's visualizations in 2004 as he discussed the geometrical and theological premises underlying Grew's image program, which may explain their rigid and schematic structure.61 Later, in 2013, Al Coppola argued that the illustrations in The Anatomy of Plants showed evidence of Grew's cautious attitude toward discoveries made through the microscope, and that Grew aimed to communicate more clearly to viewers than his predecessors the method and source of his observations by developing visual aids and signposts.62 More recently, Eriksen and Mackenzie have both drawn on Grew's visual material for their work on Grew, centring his image-making practices as an important part of his overall work as a microscopist and botanist.63 In general, this special issue aims to highlight Grew's visual production and the role that images played in the creation and transmission of knowledge in early modern natural philosophy.
As discussed in Pamela Mackenzie's article for this special issue, even Grew's earliest plant-anatomy illustrations were diligently reproduced as his texts were translated and distributed across continental Europe in the decades after their creation.64 Mackenzie shows how Grew's visual material was tied into the knowledge-making project, exploring the role played by the publishers and engravers in both preserving and distorting meaning through their interventions during the printmaking process. She also discusses the impact of the translation process in particular on giving a new perspective to his work and illustrations. Given that very little original material of Grew's image-making survives, we are only able to assess his printed material, which is a hybrid of his own work with the printmakers he collaborated with, making these relationships important to understand where they can be parsed from existing documents. Mackenzie contributes to a growing body of scholarship focusing on the role of scientific images, how they were copied and made into multiples, and the important role of the printmakers and publishers in making these images accessible.65
Although understudied, Grew's hypnotic images have been capturing people's attention since their publication. In the centuries since the publication of The Anatomy of Plants, his plates have been copied with variable fidelity into microscopy manuals and into many issues of British encyclopaedias, used on the cover of books and as the basis for stained-glass windows at his alma mater Pembroke College, and found as a template for a contemporary collection of knitted lace scarf designs.66 The translation into decoration and textile is a natural fit for these illustrations, not only for their superficial resemblance to ornate fabrics, but as a reflection of Grew's understanding of the material he was studying as he perceived it. A consistent visual strategy that Grew employed, with a patterning of circlets packed within a structural linear architecture, has the same decorative effect as lace, as seen, for example, in the Sumach branch referenced earlier, along with its deconstructed counterpart. This textural effect reflects Grew's own musings on the visual effect of studying plants through such close looking, as seen in this short excerpt from a longer set of observations on the composition of plant fibres that accompanies the above Sumach specimen:
the most unfeigned and proper resemblance we can at present, make of the whole Body of a Plant, is, To a piece of fine Bone-Lace, when the Women are working it upon the Cushion, For the Pith, Insertions, and Parenchyma of the Barque, are all extream Fine and Perfect Lace-Work: the Fibres of the Pith running Horizontally, as do the Threds in a Piece of Lace.67
The aesthetic dimensions evident in this quote are not incidental to the methods and aims of natural philosophical inquiry in the 17th century. As discussed by Alexander Wragge-Morley, the perception of beauty and the discovery of order in nature was an integral component of the experimental and descriptive activities carried out at the Royal Society in the late 17th century.68 The correlation between beauty and truth elevated observations of aesthetically pleasing phenomena, and especially for Grew also gave evidence of divine handiwork. Moreover, his choice of textile metaphors—bone-lace, cushion, lacework, and threads—situates Grew's plants within upper-class society, in which pastimes such as embroidery were common. Thus, the links that Gijsbert van de Roemer and Mary Learner have established between early modern needlework and the representation of animal and plant bodies hold for Grew as well.69
Another visual strategy employed in a unique way by Grew is his extensive use of repetitive forms arranged in a sequence in order to facilitate the comparison of multiple specimens and species. For his work on trunks and branches for instance, Grew standardized 15 separate types of trees into full-page wedges, presented one after the other in order to point out the structural similarities and differences across each of his objects of study. One of these was the Sumach branch discussed above, meant to be compared with the 14 other branches that are similarly presented. Again, there is a connection between Grew's method and his use of images, where the images themselves and visual engagement with them are essential parts of the knowledge-making project. Grew was importing a comparative anatomical approach to his study of plants. This technique was still relatively novel in the field of human and animal anatomy and had not been applied to the study of plants prior to Grew, with the possible exception of his Italian counterpart Malpighi, whose complementary work on plant anatomy is discussed above. The thoroughness of the comparative method on a visual scale, and the reduction of the complex organic forms of plants into a standardized geometrical type, is an innovation entirely attributable to Grew, and one that went on to define a certain tradition of plant visualization thereafter.
As we have shown in this introduction, The Anatomy of Plants was a widely read and highly influential publication that not only contributed to late 17th-century botany, but pushed at the boundaries of how plants could be studied and imagined. From his inventive use of images to support his observations, to his innovative use of anatomical methods, Grew's theoretical approach to plants drew out principles of growth and reproduction with broad applications in agriculture and taxonomy. Furthermore, aiming to correct the historical record, we have shown how Grew himself was a far more integral member of the Royal Society than he is typically portrayed to have been, just as we have argued that investigations of plants were integral to the knowledge-making projects of this institution.
In recent years, knowledge of plants has broken out of the confines of plant sciences departments and become an object of research in the new field of plant humanities. As Caroline Cornish and Felix Driver have argued, the plant humanities offer a framework in which scholars from humanities and social-science backgrounds are able to come together to discuss the material histories of plants, their uses and collection, the ontologies associated with them, their connections to natural and manipulated environments, and how plants have been mobilized for political and economic gain.70 As the articles in this special issue show, Grew's Anatomy of Plants provides an excellent focal point for such discussions, immersed as its creation was in issues of gender politics, environment, political economy, theology, aesthetics, and geography. With this special issue, we hope to have paved the way for future critical reflections on Grew's role in shaping plant knowledge in the early modern world.
We would like to thank, firstly, our contributors for their great work and for the many larger discussions among the group that shaped this special issue. Special thanks to Anna Marie Roos, who provided our afterword, for her constant support and her invaluable and responsive feedback. Thank you also to the editorial team at Centaurus for their guidance, input, and fantastic copyediting, and to Dániel Margócsy for support and feedback on our work for this special issue. We owe a great deal of gratitude also to the 4a_Lab, the collaborative research group of the Institute for Art History in Florence, the Max Planck Society, and the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin, led by Dr. Hannah Baader: their support in organizing the original workshop upon which this special issue was based was formative and their participation and feedback has been greatly appreciated.
1 For Grew's biography, see Hunter (1982).
2 Grew (1672, p. 2).
3 Yale (2016).
4 Hooke (1665, p. 6). For discussion of this trope in the early Royal Society, see Corneanu (2012).
5 Aubrey (1847); Ray (1670); Evelyn (1664).
6 Hoppit (2012, p. 12).
7 Grew (1682, “The Epistle Dedicatory”).
8 Birch (1757, Vol. 2, p. 49).
9 For Lister, see Roos (2007b, pp. 65–87).
10 Grew (1673); Birch (1757, Vol. 3, p. 91); Fanu (1990, p. 15).
11 For Grew's doctoral dissertation on nervous fluids, see Roos (2023).
12 Birch (1757, Vol. 1, p. 56).
13 Birch (1757, Vol. 1, p. 56).
14 Shapin & Schaffer (1985).
15 Hunter & Schaffer (1989).
16 For recent scholarship revealing more sides to his activities, see Neri (2008); Doherty (2012); Lawson (2016); Wragge-Morley (2020, Ch. 3).
17 For such narratives, see Butterfield (1949); Hall (1954); Koyré (1957).
18 Leeuwenhoek (1679); Winthrop (1677). For a discussion of Grew's role as editor, see Fyfe, Moxham, McDougall-Waters, & Røstvik (2022, pp. 53–60).
19 Arber (1942; 1960). For another attempt to situate Grew within the history of the discovery of plant sex, see Taiz & Taiz (2017, pp. 328–337). For a critical discussion of Arber's contributions to the history of botany, see the overview provided by Feola (2019).
20 Arber (1942, pp. 13–14). For analysis of Grew's concept of fibres, see also Ishizuka (2016, Ch. 1).
21 Meli (2011, pp. 262–270). For a comparative study of Malpighi and Grew, see also Mackenzie (2022a).
22 Clericuzio (2000, pp. 154–162); Roos (2007a; 2007b; 2015).
23 Garrett (2003).
24 Andrault (2014; 2021). For Grew's engagement with the vitalism of Margaret Cavendish, see Begley (2017).
25 Fournier (1996, pp. 121–128); Wilson (1995).
26 Ruestow (1996, pp. 154, 198, 200).
27 Matei (2023).
28 For an overview of the genre of natural history in the Renaissance, see, for example, Egmond (2015); Findlen (2003); Kusukawa (2012); Ogilvie (2008).
29 For an overview of enquiries into plants in mid-17th-century England, see Clericuzio (2018).
30 Mulry (2021, Ch. 4). On the relationship between food and power, see also McCormick (2020).
31 Bacon (1682, pp. 89–105).
32 Birch (1757, Vol. 3, p. 407); Lennard (1932).
33 For this, see Coxe's queries read to the Royal Society on April 19, 1665, cf. Birch (1757, Vol. 1, pp. 32–40). For more on desiderata lists in early modern natural history, see Keller (2012; 2020).
34 Leong (2018).
35 For more on experiments carried out within such spaces, see Cooper (2003); Werrett (2019).
36 Clericuzio (2018); Niermeier-Dohoney (2021; 2022). See also the work by Jalobeanu & Matei (2020; 2022); Matei (2020).
37 Cook (2007); Margócsy (2014); Schiebinger (2009); Schiebinger & Swan (2016).
38 For Grew's rhetorical strategies, see Wragge-Morley (2010).
39 Niermeier-Dohoney (2023).
40 For Grew's studies of timber and its economic importance, see also Hartley (2010).
41 Eriksen (2023).
42 Keller (2021). For experimental plant-breeding in the early modern period, see also Ratcliff (2007); Savoia (2017).
43 For Grew's relationship with Malpighi and their synchronous research into plant anatomy, see Arber (1942); Mackenzie (2022a).
44 Meli (2011).
45 Roos (2023).
46 Grew (1682, Preface).
47 According to Cunningham, Grew's later publication on the comparative anatomy of stomachs and guts from 1681 was the first work to use the term “comparative anatomy” in the title relating to animals; this is a good indication that this earlier book on plants was the first to use the term in any title. See Cunningham (2010); Grew (1675).
48 Begley (2023).
49 Grew's association with botany has long been the case; Le Fanu (1971, p. 502) also makes the case that Grew's other intellectual output has been overshadowed by his work with plants.
50 Andrault (2021) also touches on the Musaeum. The Musaeum's textual composition is additionally discussed at length in Nelson (2019). Some interesting discussion of Grew's written descriptions in the Musaeum can be found in Wragge-Morley (2010).
51 There is some treatment of Grew's anatomical project in Cunningham (2010, p. 318).
52 Grew (1681, p. 16).
53 For a brief analysis mention of Harvey's observation of ostrich eggs, see Ekholm (2018, p. 222). For more on Harvey's scaling practices, see Eriksen (2022a).
54 As Rhodri Lewis (2012, pp. 19–21) notes, Grew was also one of the readers of William Petty's unpublished manuscript on the scale of creatures, in which Petty argued for continuity between the lowest and highest orders of nature. Grew even tried to advocate for the publication of Petty's manuscript in the Philosophical Transactions.
55 Grew (1681, Preface).
56 “Tis pleasant, especially with a Glass, to see the wrought Work on the surface of these Stones. In which the small and curious Striae which run by the length, answer to the Lignous Fibers, or the warp: and those which are transversly as it were interwoven; to the Parenchymous Fibers, or Woofe of a Plant. A more particular explication of which real Work in all Plants, hath been by me elsewhere given”: Grew (1681, p. 267).
57 Grew (1681, p. 339).
58 Baldassarri (2023).
59 Fanu (1990).
60 Bredekamp, Dünkel, & Schneider (2019); Daston (2015); Daston & Galison (2007); Hunter (2013); Marr & Heuer (2020); Kusukawa (2012); Doherty (2022).
61 Anker (2004).
62 Coppola (2013).
63 Eriksen (2022b); Mackenzie (2022a; 2022b).
64 Mackenzie (2023).
65 Fransen (2019); Fransen, Reinhart, & Kusukawa (2019).
66 See Adams (1747); the first through eight editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica published between 1771 and 1860, such as A Society of Gentlemen in Scotland (1771); Tishman (2017, Cover); and the self-published knitting manual Knitting Plant Anatomy by Julia Riede (2017).
67 Grew (1682, p. 121).
68 Wragge-Morley (2010; 2020).
69 Roemer (2010); Learner (2020).
70 Driver & Cornish (2021).
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