scholarly journals ‘Vividness’ in english natural history and anatomy, 1650–1700

2012 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 341-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Wragge-Morley
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Medical Discourse ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Rhetorical Device ◽  
John Ray ◽  
The Mind ◽  
It Knowledge ◽  
The Brain

This article concerns the use of rhetorical strategies in the natural historical and anatomical works of the seventeenth-century Royal Society. Choosing representative works, it argues that naturalists such as Nehemiah Grew, John Ray and the neuroanatomist Thomas Willis used the rhetorical device known as ‘comparison’ to make their descriptions of natural things vivid. By turning to contemporary works of neurology such as Willis's Cerebri Anatome and contemporary rhetorical works inspired by other such descriptions of the brain and nerves, it is argued that the effects of these strategies were taken to be wide-ranging. Contemporaries understood the effects of rhetoric in terms inflected by anatomical and medical discourse—the brain was physically altered by powerful sense impressions such as those of rhetoric. I suggest that the rhetoric of natural history could have been understood in the same way and that natural history and anatomy might therefore have been understood to cultivate the mind, improving its capacity for moral judgements as well as giving it knowledge of nature.

scholarly journals The English Connection: Jacob and Johann Philipp Breyne, James Petiver and Plants: The Correspondence between the Breynes and Petiver from the 1690s

2022 ◽  
Vol 128 (5) ◽  
pp. 167-198
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Pękacka-Falkowska
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central

The article discusses the hitherto unknown correspondence between the Danzig (present-day Gdańsk) botanist Jacob Breyne, his son Johann Philipp Breyne, and James Petiver in the last decade of the seventeenth century. Their correspondence documents contacts between one of the most important naturalists of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the second half of the seventeenth century and members of the Royal Society. The content of the letters reveals how books, naturalia and various artefacts circulated between Western and East-Central Europe. It also reveals the principles of reciprocity and friendship followed by those who conducted inquiries into natural history.

scholarly journals Attending to insects: Francis Willughby and John Ray

2012 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 357-372 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian W. Ogilvie
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Significant Contribution ◽  
Real Character ◽  
John Ray ◽  
History Of ◽  
Insect Classification ◽  
Francis Willughby ◽  
Deep Interest

Francis Willughby and John Ray were at the forefront of the natural history of insects in the second half of the seventeenth century. Willughby in particular had a deep interest in insects' metamorphosis, behaviour and diversity, an interest that he passed on to his friend and mentor Ray. By examining Willughby's contributions to John Wilkins's Essay towards a Real Character (1668) and Ray's Methodus insectorum (1705) and Historia insectorum (1710), which contained substantial material from Willughby's manuscript history of insects, one may reconstruct how the two naturalists studied insects, their innovative use of metamorphosis in insect classification, and the sheer diversity of insect forms that they described on the basis of their own collections and those of London and Oxford virtuosi. Imperfect as it was, Historia insectorum was recognized by contemporaries as a significant contribution to the emerging field of entomology.

scholarly journals Specimens, slips and systems: Daniel Solander and the classification of nature at the world's first public museum, 1753–1768

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
EDWIN D. ROSE
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
British Museum ◽  
Natural History Collection ◽  
John Ray ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Carl Linnaeus ◽  
New System ◽  
Public Museum

AbstractThe British Museum, based in Montague House, Bloomsbury, opened its doors on 15 January 1759, as the world's first state-owned public museum. The Museum's collection mostly originated from Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753), whose vast holdings were purchased by Parliament shortly after his death. The largest component of this collection was objects of natural history, including a herbarium made up of 265 bound volumes, many of which were classified according to the late seventeenth-century system of John Ray (1627–1705). The 1750s saw the emergence of Linnaean binomial nomenclature, following the publication of Carl Linnaeus' Species Plantarum (1753) and Systema Naturae (1758). In order to adopt this new system for their collections, the Trustees of the British Museum chose to employ the Swedish naturalist and former student of Linnaeus, Daniel Solander (1733–1782) to reclassify the collection. Solander was ordered to devise a new system for classifying and cataloguing Sloane's natural history collection, which would allow both Linnaeans and those who followed earlier systems to access it. Solander's work was essential for allowing the British Museum to realize its aim of becoming a public centre of learning, adapting the collection to reflect the diversity of classificatory practices which were existent by the 1760s. This task engaged Solander until 1768, when he received an offer from Joseph Banks (1743–1820) to accompany him on HMS Endeavour to the Pacific.

scholarly journals Truth and Wonder in Richard Head’s Geographical Fictions

Sederi ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 117-137
Author(s):  
Sonia Villegas López
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Floating Island ◽  
The Status ◽  
Geographical Discourse

In line with the method prescribed by members of the Royal Society for natural history and travel writing, Richard Head explored the limits of verisimilitude associated with geographical discourse in his three fictions The Floating Island (1673), The Western Wonder (1674) and O-Brazile (1675). In them he argues in favor of the existence of the mysterious Brazile island and uses the factual discourse of the travel diarist to present a semi-mythical place whose very notion stretches the limits of believability. In line with recent critical interpretations of late seventeenth-century fiction as deceptive, and setting the reading of Head’s narrations in connection with other types of travel writing, I argue that Head’s fictions are a means of testing the readers’ gullibility at a time when the status of prose, both fictional and non-fictional, is subject to debate.

Botany and zoology in the late seventeenth-century Philippines: the work of Georg Josef Camel SJ (1661–1706)

2009 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 262-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raquel A. G. Reyes
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Natural History Museum ◽  
British Library ◽  
History Museum ◽  
John Ray ◽  
Willem Ten Rhijne

Georg Josef Camel (1661–1706) went to the Spanish colony of the Philippine Islands as a Jesuit lay brother in 1687, and he remained there until his death. Throughout his time in the Philippines, Camel collected examples of the flora and fauna, which he drew and described in detail. This paper offers an overview of his life, his publications and the Camel manuscripts, drawings and specimens that are preserved among the Sloane Manuscripts in the British Library and in the Sloane Herbarium at the Natural History Museum, London. It also discusses Camel's links and exchanges with scientifically minded plant collectors and botanists in London, Madras and Batavia. Among those with whom Camel corresponded were John Ray, James Petiver, and the Dutch physician Willem Ten Rhijne.

Wordsworth's Dropsy: Flux and Figure in The Excursion

Romanticism ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-52
Author(s):  
Arden Hegele
Keyword(s):  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Formal Model ◽  
Medical Discourse ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Emotional States ◽  
Long Poem ◽  
Lyrical Ballads ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Hydraulic Process ◽  
The Brain

This essay traces how William Wordsworth engages with both Romantic medical discourse and aesthetic theory by insisting that the mind is physically embodied, and finds his most complex and compelling treatment of this subject in his long poem of 1814, The Excursion. Adapting the formal model of poesis as a hydraulic process that he had theorized in the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads, the Wordsworth of 1814 considers minds as embodied brains governed by the influx of both liquid and language: the discovery of a waterlogged Voltaire corresponds to the shape of the Solitary's psychology through the formal mechanisms of intake, excess, and outflow. In this poem, however, Wordsworth's well-established hydraulics take on a newly pathological function, as his characters employ the imagery of the dropsy of the brain, or hydrocephalus, as they investigate and attempt to treat the Solitary's morbid state of being. What emerges throughout The Excursion – and, in turn, in ‘Simon Lee’ – is that the physical register of disease stands in for the characters' emotional states as a sylleptic structure of feeling. Ultimately, Wordsworth's dropsical brains bring into focus the Romantic idea of poetry as organic form, to ask how mechanistic and organic models might be reconciled in his notion of the hydraulic mind.

scholarly journals XXIII. On the brain of the negro, compared with that of the European and the orang-outang

1836 ◽  
Vol 126 ◽  
pp. 497-527 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
British Government ◽  
Anatomy And Physiology ◽  
The Brain

I take the liberty of presenting to the Royal Society a paper on a subject which appears to me to be of great importance in the natural history, anatomy, and physiology of Man; interesting also in a political and legislative point of view. Celebrated naturalists, Camper, Soemmerring, and Cuvier, look upon the Negroes as a race inferior to the European in organization and intellectual powers, having much resemblance with the Monkey. Naturalists of less authority have exaggerated this opinion. Were it proved to be correct, the negro would occupy a different situation in society from that which has so lately been given him by the noble British Government. I propose in this treatise to examine more minutely the most important part of this doctrine, namely, the structure of the brain, the noblest part of the human body, in reference to its functions. A comparison between the brain of the Negro and that of the European and the Orang-Outang, hitherto much neglected, appeared to me most worthy of attention. I shall first of all try to answer the following two questions.

Rome and the Royal Society, 1660-1740

2004 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Cook
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Classical Education ◽  
John Ray ◽  
Federico Cesi ◽  
New Churches ◽  
Accademia Dei Lincei ◽  
Queen Christina Of Sweden ◽  
John Evelyn

Most Fellows of The Royal Society in the late seventeenth century knew Rome through their classical education and would have been attracted to visit it for the remains of antiquity and for the new churches and palaces of the papal city. John Evelyn, in Rome 16 years before the foundation of the Society, John Ray, Edmond Halley and Robert Nelson, and Bishop Burnet and G.W. Leibniz, also met people who had links to the Accademia dei Lincei of Prince Federico Cesi, and to the later Accademia Fisica-mathematica associated with Queen Christina of Sweden. Besides astronomy, they were especially interested in cabinets of curiosities and in Vesuvius and other volcanic sites. They met English residents in Rome, especially those around the Venerable English College.

The Fowls of Heaven and the Fate of the Earth: Assessing the Early Modern Revolution in Natural History

2005 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon Miller
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Natural Habitats ◽  
The Earth ◽  
John Ray ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Natural Histories ◽  
Modern Era

AbstractIn recent years scholars have begun to question in various ways the traditional notion of the Scientific Revolution, which has long been seen as a fountainhead of modern Western approaches to nature. One line of questioning involves the suggestion that there were significant, and perhaps revolutionary, developments during the early modern era not only in the realms of astronomy and physics but also in the field of natural history. This article takes up this suggestion and begins by examining the seventeenth-century transformation of natural history in relation to the work of two representative English naturalists—Edward Topsell and John Ray—by looking specifically at their contrasting ornithological descriptions of cranes. It then analyzes how the different theological orientations of these two devout naturalists shaped their natural histories and contributed to the shift from a symbolic to a literalistic understanding of natural entities. This change of mind is examined in light of the phenomenon of secularization and the loss of "the dimension of depth" and in relation to the promise and problems of a utilitarian orientation to the natural environment, with observations on cranes as they have migrated through history in the thought of some leading naturalists and across some changing natural habitats.

Neurologist, 13 years’ experience, Italy

2020 ◽  
pp. 160-161
Author(s):  
Markus Reuber ◽  
Gregg H. Rawlings ◽  
Steven C. Schachter
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Scientific Community ◽  
Physical Property ◽  
Epileptic Seizures ◽  
Unified View ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Two Sides ◽  
The Brain

This chapter studies how challenging it is to communicate a diagnosis of Psychogenic Non-Epileptic Seizures to patients. This could be due to the inability of one’s reasoning to get rid of the dualistic distinction of the mind from the brain. Plato was the first to believe that the soul, this indistinct, immaterial, and immortal entity devoid of any physical property, was imprisoned in the human body. Since then, this view has become deeply rooted among laypeople and even in the scientific community. The “substance dualism” was further elaborated by René Descartes in the seventeenth century and has its counterpart in the “mind–brain identity theory” discussed in modern Philosophy and Psychology. This dualism underlies the divide between Neurology and Psychiatry and has dissolved their harmonious primeval unity. Neurology is nowadays devoted to the diagnosis and treatment of disorders of the brain, whereas Psychiatry focuses on problems of the mind, as if it were possible to separate what, in reality, are two sides of the same coin. Hopefully, a better understanding of Psychogenic Non-Epileptic Seizures will bring people a step closer to producing a unified view of the human being.

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