that never saw the light. A dozen of these papers are of a particular interest for better understanding the role that inscriptions played in mediating the experience of travel: sketches of insects, birds, and landscapes, as well as random observations, scribbles, and dated annotations share here the space of the same page. Let us focus for the moment on this last form of travel inscription: the discrete, diary-like entries spread across several of the loose sheets in the “Notes diverses” folder. The Minim reported in them very different sorts of annotations, from his personal experiences during the journey to systematic natural observations. Consider, for instance, this fragment written in a hurried handwriting:

> On the same day of the 3rd, captain Rambaldo arrived from Nantes. It rained several times. I draw the *Aster flore minore albo* . . . and described it. [Follows a description of the specimen in Latin.] The same day of the 3rd, Monsieur de la Motte . . . and captain Perudière . . . departed from here, Fort Royal, to join our army in Saint Christophe.<fnref n="75" />

Plumier’s notes combined unsystematically his experiences en route with natural observations, sketches of coastal landscapes seen from the ship, and even ink imprints of leaves, all in unbound sheets the size of a folio book of which most have been lost (fig. 3.11). How many of these materials were actually made in the field cannot be known, but some of these extant loose pages offer vivid glimpses into the everyday vicissitudes of traveling naturalists in a way not unlike travel logs would do in a much more systematic way a century later.<fnref n="76" /> In one of these rare fragments, for instance, Plumier narrated one of his journeys across the Atlantic:

> The first day of August we entered the Carénage around noon . . . I thanked the good Lord for our happy journey, thanks to a favorable wind, from La Rochelle to Martinique, where we arrived in less than thirty days. . . . During the second day, I unloaded my small luggage and started to look for housing. The Reverend Father . . . superior general of the Fathers [?]. . . offered me accommodation in their new house. The third day I paid my respects to

<footnote n="75">⁷⁵ BCMNHN MS 10, unpaginated: “Ce mesme iour 3me, Capitaine Rambaldo arriva de Nantes. Il pleut par diverses fois. Je dessina l’*Aster flore minore albo, caule rebense aspero, foliis persicariae asperis* et le decrivis. . . . Ce mesme iour 3me, Monsieur de la Mothe, capitaine du Mignat [?] et Monsieur de la Perudière, capitaine de la fregatte ditte La Friponne sont partis d’ici, du Fort Royal, pour aller joinder nostre armée à Saint Cristophle commandée par Mgcur le conte de Blenac.”</footnote>

<footnote n="76">⁷⁶ For latter examples on the role of logs in mediating the experience of travel, see Isabelle Surun, “Le carnet de route, archive du voyage. Notes manuscrites et récit du voyage de René Caillié à Tombouctou,” *Revue de la Bibliothèque nationale de France* 22 (2006), 31-7, and Bourguet, “Portable World.”</footnote>
Monsieur de Gimosac, who acted as general in Monsieurs de Blenac's stead, and he showed me his satisfaction about my being back on the islands.<fnref n="77" />

Other sections among these loose pages of a journal show much shorter, more methodical observations of the journey. Plumier recorded in short daily entries the intensity and orientation of the wind,<fnref n="78" /> the direction of the ship, and the heights in degrees and minutes for calculating their position. This sort of daily observations was interspersed on occasion with accounts of the hazards of the journey. The longest extant fragment of Plumier's log occupies one sheet with worn borders: it registers the two last days of June 1689 and the first two weeks of July—that is, his third trip to the Caribbean islands. The usual short daily navigation entries are interspersed with longer narrations of episodes that seemed worth mentioning, such as the sighting of threatening ships, the capture of what seemed to be a shark and happened to be a dolphinfish (which he had already “drawn and described on his first trip,” but now was too small to “note well all [its] particularities”), the traditional baptism ceremony of those who were crossing the tropics for the first time, or a menacing storm that kept the crew awake for the good part of one night.<fnref n="79" /> Plumier's few extant dated entries are a surprising record of the experience of travel and scholarly observation, not only because of the immediacy they transmit, but also because they constitute an account in which (here again) both visual and textual elements interact. In a similar way to the interplay of images and writing in his anatomical drawings, the diary-like records slip through the blanks of images—in this case, portraying what was seen from the deck of the ship:

<footnote n="77">⁷⁷ BCMNHN MS 10, unpaginated. The entire extant fragment goes as follows: “un ordre a Monsieur De la Mothe, nostre commandant, de partir promptement pour St Cristophe, mais comme la fregate dite La Friponne estoit beaucoup incomodée par une voye d'eau qui depuis plus de dix iours travailloit beaucoup l’equipage a pomper, ou fut obligé de la faire entrer dans le carenage pour la redouber [?]. De suite que le premier jour d’aoust nous entrasmes dans le carenage environ a midi.”</footnote>

<footnote n="78">⁷⁸ je fis remercier le bon dieu de nostre bon et heureux voyage nous ayant favorisé d'un vent fort favorable depuis La Rochelle jusques à La Martinique ou nous avions arrivé en moins de trente jours sauf quelques vaisseaux marchands de nostre convoi qui avec toutes leurs voiles ne faisoint pas plus de chemin que nous avec une et qui nous causoit un grand ennuis.</footnote>

<footnote>Le 2 jour je fus occupé à debarquer mon petit bagage et a chercher un logement. Le Rd pere ... supérieur général des PP ... me fit la grace de me le donner dans la maison neuve.</footnote>

<footnote>Le 3me je fis rendre mes humbles respects a Monsieur de Gimosac [Gémozac] faisant pourlors les fonctions de gouverneur général à la place de Mr de Blenac, il me tesmoigna beaucoup de satisfaction de mon retour aux isles.”</footnote>

<footnote n="79">⁷⁹ This was precisely the seventh instruction in the “Directions for Sea-Men” circulated by the Royal Society of London in 1666: “To keep a Register of all changes of Wind and Weather at all hours, by night and by day, shewing the point the Wind blows from, whether strong or weak,” in “Directions for Sea-Men, Bound for Far Voyages,” *Philosophical Transactions* 1 (1665), 142.</footnote>

<footnote n="78">⁷⁸ BCMNHN MS 10, unpaginated</footnote>
On the morning of the 31st, at the break of day, we sighted the land of Martinique. I drew it as in the first figure AB, but since two of the ships of the convoy blocked my sight, I could not draw the other part of B. Some hours later, having moved away 6 leagues (*lieues*) or 20 miles (*milles*), I drew it seeing it as in the second figure, the cape being west ¼ to the southwest around noon (fig. 3.12).<fnref n="80" />

These on-the-spot inscriptions, graphic and textual alike, were as much a private
diary as a navigation log.<fnref n="81" /> Producing and collecting records of the sort described here—a
particular blend of private experiences, notes on the social and political context of the
islands, natural historical descriptions, and navigation observations—was part of the
reality of scholarly travel, and Plumier states in fact that he kept similar (now lost) travel
accounts (*relations*) on his previous journeys.<fnref n="82" /> This sort of field and travel inscription
manifest the naturalist as an observing and note-taking self, an aspect that becomes all
the more explicit in graphic and written notes in which the observer's point of view is
embedded.<fnref n="83" /> A case in point are Plumier's sketches of coastal profiles. One of these
pictures captures a “view” (*veüe*) of the small island of Redonda as it was seen “when one
is at a good league from it when coming from Montserrat to Nieves, the Rotunde being
in the northeast.” Similar sketches go into more accurate detail (“view of the island Saint
Croix at a distance of 18 miles, the ship's bow being towards the west-southwest, ¼
towards the west”) and the drawings included references in the form of capital letters
that indicate the orientation (“A. southwest, B. west-southwest”).<fnref n="84" /> By such devices, these
graphic and verbal travel notes capture the position of the observer. Consider, in this
respect, the example of three different depictions of the coastal profile of the island of

<footnote n="80">⁸⁰ BCMNHN MS 10, unpaginated: “Le 31 au matin à la pointe du jour nous descouvrimes terre de la Martinique. Je la dessina de la manière AB première figure, mais comme deux vaisseaux du convoy me firent obstacle, je ne peus dessiner le viste recus B. Quelques heures après, estant environ esigné 6 lieues ou 20 milles, je la dessina de la façon la voyant de la façon qu’est la seconde figure, le cap estant oest ¼ au sud oest sur le midi.”</footnote>

<footnote n="81">⁸¹ On logbooks as a (failed) epistemic tool and in relation to the history of scientific observation, see Margaret Schotte, “Expert Records: Nautical Logbooks from Columbus to Cook,” *Information & Culture: A Journal of History* 48, no. 3 (2013), 281-322.</footnote>

<footnote n="82">⁸² BCMNHN MS 10, unpaginated. On the tropic-crossing ceremony, he notes that “je ne repette pas ici cette ceremonie, l’ayant descrite assez au long dans la relation de mon premier voyage.” Another manuscript, BCMNHN MS 35, includes only the first three lines of a “Relation du second voyage du Père Charles Plumier religieux minime aux Antilles et a la coste de St Domingo par ordre de Sa Majesté en l’année 1689,” which suggest a narrative account: “Suite du voyage: L’année 1688 le 3 aoust estant de retour a Marseille de mon premier voyage des Antilles (où j’avois esté de la part de Sa Majesté conjointement avec Mr Surian pour la recherché des plantes et autres raretés qui se trouvent aux dites isles) Monsieur Bégon Intendant des Galères de Sa Majesté...”</footnote>

<footnote n="83">⁸³ Lisa Gitelman, “The Note-Taking Self,” *Take Note: An Exploration of Note-Taking in Harvard University Collections*, online exhibition, http://takenote.harvard.edu/node/110.</footnote>

<footnote n="84">⁸⁴ BCMNHN MS 33, unpaginated: “Veüe de la Rotunde quand on y est/ vis a vis a une bonne lieüe venant de/ montserrat a nieves, la rotunde restant/ au nord est”; “</footnote>
Martinique (fig. 3.13): they documented the moving vantage point of the naturalist observing from the boat. Each of these three “views” made visible different perspectives of the coast of Martinique—“view of the ‘Diamant’ and the ‘Grand Morne’ with a clear sky,” “another sight (*recognoissance*) of Martinique from around 6 leagues”—and letter keys identified the same elements across the three pictures and the cardinal directions.<fnref n="85" /> The same page registers the moving point of view of the naturalist on the deck and points at the ship as an often too-neglected space of scientific observation and work: the long transoceanic journey (a 30-day-long voyage from La Rochelle to Martinique seemed an acceptably short, uneventful one to our naturalist) gave leisure enough to scholarly travelers like Plumier for writing, drawing, and paperwork in general, as well as for observations.<fnref n="86" /> The term “view” (*veüe*) reflects the nature of these field notes as an attempt to register an observation as a personal experience, if not the naturalist’s deeper conviction that paper inscriptions worked as a reliable means for securing the impalpable act of looking. It can be related to another meaningful term used by Plumier in observation records as familiar already to us as the drawings of the crocodile: some of the notes described the images to which they referred as *apparences*: that is, the aspect of the crocodile as it was seen by the observer, the way in which it *appeared* to the eye of its viewer (“aspect of the arterial trachea,” “aspect of the sternum, very white”, “second aspect [of the crocodile] once the pectoral muscles were removed”).<fnref n="87" />

## Words in images

Another important point evoked in the example of the coastal profiles regards the place of letters, numbers, and symbols in building cross-references between texts and images—a system at work in most of Plumier’s manuscript records, whether of landscapes, plants, or animals. This was in a way not unlike *marginalia* and other forms of early modern notation of printed written texts that precede our quintessential footnotes. Placed usually at the side of the page, marginalia to seventeenth-century written texts did not always include letter or number references in superscript, but were often just placed

<footnote n="85">⁸⁵ BCMNHN MS 33, unpaginated: “veue du diamant et du grand morne a decouvert”; “autre recognoissance de la Martinique environ a 6 lieües.”</footnote>

<footnote n="86">⁸⁶ Richard Sorrenson argued that ships, in fact, were scientific instruments in their own right given that, far from mere mode of transportation, they held a mediating role between representation and reality: Sorrenson, “The Ship as a Scientific Instrument in the Eighteenth Century,” *Osiris* 11 (1996), 221-236. As Ann Blair and Peter Stallybrass have stated, “ships were one of the main schools for the development of note taking” and, since the beginning of the seventeenth century, different people began to keep journals on every ship: Blair and Stallybrass, “Mediating Information, 1450-1800,” in *This Is Enlightenment*, ed. Clifford Siskin and William Warner (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), 146.</footnote>

<footnote n="87">⁸⁷ BCMNHN MS 30, fol. 13-16.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_49.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3.12. (top) Loose sheet among Plumier’s “Notes diverses.” The dated entries of a travel log slip through the blanks left by the sketches of coastal lines, drawn by the naturalist from the deck of a ship. Fig. 3.13. (bottom) Three sketches of the same coastal profile of the island of Martinique, each documenting the naturalist’s moving point of view from a ship in transit. (Bibliothèque centrale du Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>
next to the passage to which they applied. In contrast, this sort of reference had a lofty tradition in scholarly printed images: they reached a particularly high degree of complexity in the field of anatomy during the first half of the sixteenth century. One of most famous examples are Vesalius’s engravings in the *Fabrica*. As pointed out by Nancy Siraisi, the *Fabrica* was a composite artifact, “simultaneously an anatomical atlas, a dictionary of anatomical terms, a dissection manual, and a detailed descriptive narrative about the human body.” This resulted in a dense web of cross-references bringing the reader “from text to picture and back again over a hundred times in a single short chapter.”<fnref n="88" /> The interaction of images and text became even more intricate in subsequent anatomical treatises, such as Juan Valverde de Amusco’s *Historia de la composición del cuerpo humano* (1556), in which the text referred to specific plates in the volume and concrete areas on those plates.<fnref n="89" />

This system of cross-references between images and texts was a common resource for illustrated printed books on natural history. Plumier used it in his *Nova genera*. Its plates, collected at the end of the volume, presented a few selected parts of each genus (normally the flower, seeds, and fruit): letter references guided the reader from these parts back to the textual description in the first half of the volume, where they were labeled and expounded. As much of the material characteristics of the *Nova genera*, this form of bridging text and images was adopted from Tournefort’s *Élémens de botanique* (1694), composed of three quarto volumes: one of text and two of engravings.<fnref n="90" /> Here too, each plate presented selected elements that were assumed to represent the best of each genus: both the text and the plates of the *Élémens* were sprinkled with capital letters that invited the reader to go back and forth between the first and the last two volumes. Such a way of interacting with text and images was not only intended by the authors, but usually also by the readers and printers. This is convincingly shown in an issue<fnref n="91" /> of the *Nova genera* now at the Historical Library “Marqués de Valdecilla” in Madrid, in which the problem of having to go back and forth between the text at the beginning of the volume

<footnote n="88">⁸⁸ Nancy G. Siraisi, “Vesalius and Human Diversity in *De humana corporis fabrica*,” *Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute* 57 (1994), 63-4.</footnote>

<footnote n="89">⁸⁹ Mandressi, “Images, imagination et imagerie médicales,” in *Les lieux du savoir*, ed. Christian Jacob, vol. 2, *Les mains de l’intellect* (Paris: Albin Michel, 2011), 643-4.</footnote>

<footnote n="90">⁹⁰ The relationship between Plumier’s *Nova genera* and Tournefort’s *Élémens* will be discussed below: see chap. 5.</footnote>

<footnote n="91">⁹¹ I am using here the vocabulary sanctioned by the English-speaking bibliography, which distinguishes between edition, issue, and state. See Fredson Bowers, *Principles of Bibliographical Description* (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), and Philip Gaskell, *A New Introduction to Bibliography* (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972).</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_50.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3.14. Issue of Plumier’s *Nova genera* in which the plates have been printed on larger paper than the text, so that the former can be unfolded and placed side by side with the latter. This allowed the reader to make a speedy use of the cross-references connecting the text with the images. (Biblioteca histórica “Marqués de Valdecillas,” Universidad Complutense de Madrid.)</figcaption></figure>

and the plates at the end was solved with a modification in its composition. In most of the extant copies of the *Nova genera*, the plates are printed on a lighter paper the same size as the pages of text. In most of the cases, too, they are placed at the end of the volume, right after the “Catalogus plantarum Americanarum,” a catalog of the plants discovered by Plumier on the American islands during his three journeys that was printed with the *Nova genera*. In the Madrid copy, in contrast, the plates were printed on larger paper, so that they could be unfolded and kept side by side with the text (fig. 3.14).<fnref n="92" /> It is also remarkable that they were placed not at the end of the volume, but right after the text of the *Nova genera* and before that of the “Catalogus,” thus making clear that, strictly speaking, they referred to (and thus needed to be consulted while reading) the *Nova genera*, not the catalog.

The system of cross-references between images and texts, whether in manuscript or print, was the result of a specific use that was imposed, in turn, upon the reader. They led the reader’s gaze from the very concrete visual details whose importance was sanctioned by a letter or a number to the adjacent written legend. In contrast to printed books, however, the intended audience of Plumier’s notes and manuscript drawings cannot be

<footnote n="92">⁹² BHMV MED 7015: it comes from the library of the “San Carlos” Royal College of Surgery in Madrid. I thank Fernando Bouza for bringing this state of the *Nova genera* to my attention.</footnote>
clearly delineated. Arguably, and in the field records at least, this sort of interaction
between images and text was not simply expository, for it aimed at directing the attention
of the observer/author no less than that of the reader. Normally in the form of letters of
the Latin alphabet (sometimes Greek letters or numbers), Plumier weaved with
references a network of bridges between, on the one hand, specific spots of his
handmade drawings (whether simple sketches such as those on coastal landscapes or
little artistic achievements like the pictures of the crocodile) and, on the other hand, the
galaxy of notes orbiting around them (fig. 3.2, top-left image). As a sort of legend, these
numbered annotations spoke for the images: the notes labeled and explained what the
images represented, they elaborated on the conditions of these records' making and on
aspects that the graphic medium could not capture.

Cross-references made those images more complex, thus acknowledging a sort of
intellectualization of the observational experience, one that could be found at the time in
lecture halls where botany and anatomy was taught: those, say, of the Jardin du roi.
Plumier's annotated drawings seem to correlate on paper to a mode of observation (one
proceeding part by part) on which the contemporary teaching of botany or anatomy was
based.<fnref n="93" /> While the numbered notes equated to the living word of the *démonstrateur*, the
keys over the images stood for his finger: they pointed to those parts that should be
looked at. This visual, demonstrative component was particularly clear in the way
anatomy and botany were taught in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Paris:
at the Jardin du roi the teaching was done in the form of “demonstrations” and by
“demonstrators,” which consisted of lessons carried out in the gardens, the chemical
laboratories, or the anatomical theaters. This sort of botanical and anatomical teaching
proceeded “by finger and by the eye” (*au doigt & à l'oeil*), sometimes with a baton
(*baguette*). Without being new, it epitomized the main meaning of the word *démonstration*
itself, for it denoted an “action by which we show, we indicate something” or “make
something clearly visible.” Some dictionaries of the period actually used the teaching at

<footnote n="93">⁹³ An official document from 1708 regulating the functioning of the Jardin du roi listed the obligations of the *démonstrateur de l'intérieur des plantes* (professor of the interior of plants) as to “teach [their] known virtues and uses by means of experiences,” as well as by the “analysis of the parts that compose them” (AN AJ¹⁵ 501, dossier 34 “Règlement ordonné par le Roy pour fixer les exercises de chaque professeur du Jardin Royal des plantes à Paris”). On the teaching at the Jardin du roi, see Yves Laissus, “Le Jardin du roi,” in *Enseignement et diffusion des sciences au XVIIIᵉ siècle*, ed. René Taton (Paris: Hermann, 1986), 287-341, and Jean-Paul Contant, *L'enseignement de la chimie au Jardin royal des Plantes à Paris* (Cahors: A. Coueslant, 1952) although the last one is mostly (but not exclusively) focused on the teaching of chemistry.</footnote>
the Jardin du roi as an example of what “to demonstrate” meant.<fnref n="94" /> The same sort of ceremonial and spectacular dimension present in this sort of anatomical and botanical pedagogy was not absent from Plumier’s drawings filled with letter keys connecting them to surrounding explicative notes.

The kind of observational experience embodied in cross-references between images and texts is better grasped when compared to cases beyond the boundaries of scientific practice. One of the most illustrative examples of this can be found a century earlier in another superb iconographic project: the set of 153 devotional engravings conceived by the Spanish Jesuit Jerónimo Nadal (1507-1580).<fnref n="95" /> Entitled *Evangelicae historiae imagines*, this collection of printed images was posthumously published without text in Antwerp in 1593; they were reprinted two years later with textual commentaries and a new title, *Adnotationes et meditationes in Evangelia* (fig. 3.15). <fnref n="96" /> Persistently said to have been commissioned by Ignatius of Loyola (of whom the Spaniard was the secretary), <fnref n="97" /> this collection of burin engravings illustrating the Gospels has usually been placed at the center of a “Jesuit visual culture”—that is, the idea that the cultivation of the visual arts among the Jesuits was as integral part of an active and conscious “corporate” apostolic

<footnote n="94">⁹⁴ Furetière, *Dictionnaire*, vol. 1, sig. TTTtt2r: “Démonstrer. Action par laquelle on montre, on indique quelque chose. Quand des parties ne sont pas d’accord sur quel heritage une redevance est duê, il en faut faire la démonstration au doigt & à l’oeil. Il y a au Jardin Royal un Professor Botanique qui fait la démonstration des plantes avec une baguette.”; César-Pierre Richelet, *Dictionnaire français, contenant les mots et les choses, plusieurs nouvelles remarques sur la langue françoise* (Geneva: chez Jean Herman Widerhold, 1690), 228: “Faire voire clairement.”</footnote>

<footnote n="95">⁹⁵ I owe the idea of this comparison, as many others along these pages, to Fernando Bouza. The literature on Nadal’s use of images is extensive: particularly useful for me were T. Buser, “Jerome Nadal and Early Jesuit Art in Rome,” *Art Bulletin* 58 (1976), 424-33; David Freedberg, “A Source for Rubens’s Modello of the Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin: A case Study in the Response to Images,” *The Burlington Magazine* 120, no. 904 (1978), 432-441; M. B. Wadell, “The Evangelicae historiae imagines: The Designs and Their Artists,” *Quarendo* 10 (1980), 279-91; Marc Fumaroli, “Sur les seuil des livres: Les frontispices gravés des traités d’éloquence,” in *L’école du silence: le sentiment des images au XVIIᵉ siècle* (Paris: Flammarion, 1998 [1994]), 421-44, and José Eugenio Borao Mateo, “La versión china de la obra ilustrada de Jerónimo Nadal *Evangelicae Historiae Imagines*,” *Goya: Revista de arte* 330 (2010), 16-33.</footnote>

<footnote n="96">⁹⁶ *Evangelicae historiae imagines: ex ordine Evangeliorum quae toto anno in missae sacrificio reictantur in ordinem temporis vitae Christi digestae* (Antwerp, 1593), and *Adnotationes et meditationes in evangelia quae in sacrosancto missae sacrificio toto anno legentur: cum Evangeliorum concordantia historiae integritati sufficienti: Accessit & Index historiam ipsam Evangelicam in ordinem temporis vitae Christi distribuens* (Antwerp: Martinus Nutius, 1595).</footnote>

<footnote n="97">⁹⁷ On Ignace having originally commissioned Nadal’s project and, more generally, the function of “imagination” in the spiritual exercises, see Pierre-Antoine Fabre, “Les ‘Excercices spirituels’ sont-ils illustrables?” in *Les jésuites à l’âge baroque, 1540-1670*, ed. Luce Giard and Louis de Vaucelles (Paris: Jérôme Milton, 1996), 197-209. Father Diego Jiménez wrote a letter to Pope Clement VIII that was placed at the beginning of the *Adnotationes et meditationes*, in that letter, Jiménez stated that the founder of the order commissioned to Nadal, in one way or another, the project of the *Imagines*. Fabre argues that it was on the basis of this “argument from authority” that the tradition weaved a “mystical contract” regarding not only the commission of an illustrated evangelical commentary, but the inscription of material images at the spiritual core of the Society of Jesus.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_51.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3.15. First engraving of Jerónimo Nadal’s *Evangelicae historiae imagines*, depicting the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary. Note the cross-references in capital letters connecting image and text, and tacitly guiding the attention of the viewer. (Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.)</figcaption></figure>

program.<fnref n="98" /> Nadal’s *Imagines* had a long and versatile influence, from the Jesuit missions in China to Rubens’s composition of the *Assumption of the Virgin Mary* completed in 1626. The goal of the *Imagines* was originally to “afford the seminarians of the same Society [of Jesus] continual and ready material and profit for meditating and praying.”⁹⁹ In other words, the purpose was to provide the basis for a prayer based on focused observations, that is, “observations for meditation, that depend upon pictures.”¹⁰⁰ The *Imagines* gave printed form to one of the main aspects of Ignatius’s *Spiritual exercises*: the composition of place (*compositio loci*), a prelude to the meditation in which the worshipper engaged in “seeing the place.” Ignatius himself prepared his prayer by images he collected for this purpose, and Francis Borgia (1510-1572) gave a verbal formulation to this exercise based on attention to visual details: “to aid in meditation,” said Borgia, “one places an image that represents the evangelical mystery and, therefore, before beginning the meditation, [one must] look up to the image, *particularly noticing what is to be noticed*, in order to consider

<footnote n="98">⁹⁸ Gauvin Alexander Bailey, “‘Le style jésuite n’existe pas’: Jesuite Corporate Culture and the Visual Arts,” in *The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540-1773*, ed. John W. O’Malley et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 38–89.

⁹⁹ Diego Jiménez’s prefatory remarks to the *Adnotationes*, quoted and translated by Buser, “Jerome Nadal,” 425.

¹⁰⁰ Jiménez in *Adnotationes*, quoted and translated by Buser, “Jerome Nadal,” 425.</footnote>
it better during meditation and obtain its advantage.”<fnref n="101" /> What is remarkable in Nadal’s *Imagines* is precisely the articulation of textual and visual elements on the same plate by means of keys: capital letters identified specific details of the image as “what has to be noticed,” and a legend at the bottom of the engraving explained and gave an interpretation of it. As in the realm of anatomical imagery, the process of meditation and thought passed through a careful consideration of the details and the regulation of attention: it proceeded part by part.

Is it legitimate, then, to liken Nadal’s sixteenth-century devotional engravings to
Plumier’s field drawings? In the former the system of bridges between text and image by
means of letter references surely suggests something that became explicit in the second
half of the seventeenth century: the place of visual representations in linking
fragmentation and thought. Consider as an example the reflections of another Jesuit,
Claude-François Ménestrier (1631-1705), probably one of the greatest theorists of the
image in the early modern period. In the “avertissement” to his *Recherches du blason* (1673),
in which he laid down the principles of his “philosophy of images,” Ménestrier identified
six human faculties that “worked by means of images”: the eyes, imagination, memory,
judgment (*jugement*), understanding (*entendement*), and will (*volonté*). The eyes, said
Ménestrier, “receive all those [images] that are presented to them”; the imagination
“incise [*grave*] images in the soul and on the body”; memory “prints and arranges them”; and the inclinations, habitudes, and affections of will “are, in their own way, images.”<fnref n="102" />
Particularly interesting for our purpose are judgment and understanding. Judgment,
according to the Jesuit, “casts [*moule*] them by comparing them with one another,” a
capacity that illustrates also the part that visual representation played in late seventeenth-
century natural history for comparing different plants and animals.<fnref n="103" /> As for

<footnote n="101">¹⁰¹ “Para hallar mayor facilidad en la meditación se pone una imagen que represente el misterio evangélico, y así, antes de comenzar la meditación, mirará la imagen y particularmente advertirá lo que en ella hay que advertir, para considerarlo en la meditación major y sacar mayor provecho de ella,” quoted and translated by Ilenia Colón Mendoza, *The Cristos yacentes of Gregorio Fernández: Polychrome Sculptures of the Supine Christ in Seventeenth-Century Spain* (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 100.</footnote>

<footnote n="102">¹⁰² *Les recherches du blason. Seconde partie de l’usage des armoiries* (Paris: chez Estienne Michallet, 1673), sig. [ā4v]: “Il y a aussi six facultez de l’homme qui travaillent en Images./ 1. Les YEUX reçoivent celles de tous les objets qui se presentment à eux comme les miroirs, & les corps polis. . . / 2. L’IMAGINATION grave des images dans l’ame & sur le corps./ 3. La MEMOIRE les imprime & les arrange. . . / 6. La VOLONTÉ toute aveugle qu’elle est a ses inclinations, ses habitudes, & ses affections, qui sont à leur manière des Images.” *Les recherches du blason* was originally the second part of *Le véritable art du blason, et la pratique des armoiries despuis leur institution* (1671), a text that was reedited several times with varying titles. On the complex printing history of Ménestrier’s books, see Stéphane Van Damme, “Les livres du P. Claude-François Ménestrier (1631-1705) et leur cheminement,” *Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine* 42, no. 1 (1995), 5-45.</footnote>

<footnote n="103">¹⁰³ A field that, without being explicitly comparatist in the manner in which it would become in the
nineteenth century, was attempting to find a certain sort of order in nature on the basis of a process of</footnote>
understanding, it “paints and cuts,” said Ménestrier: “it unites things so as to draw consequences, and *separates them through Analysis so as to know them*.”<fnref n="104" />

However far Ménestrier’s “philosophy of images” was from Plumier’s actual use of visual representation as an instrument of knowledge (the Jesuit’s neoplatonism contrasts with the Minim’s sort of empiricism—one would be tempted to say, an almost Baconian one),<fnref n="105" /> they both bring into light (the former through his theoretical formulations, the latter in his actual practice) a conception that was common ground in European thought during the period: that images worked as *instruments of analysis*, that they were *analytical tools*. We have already encountered the word and concept of *analysis* as associated to the method of anatomy. It seems useful, though, to come back to it, for not only does it condense the epistemic grounds of the anatomic act, but may also help explain fragmentation through paperwork. The first editions of Furetière’s *Dictionnaire* (1690 and 1701) went along lines similar to those developed by Ménestrier: Furetière placed the French *analyse* in its etymological tradition, signaling the Greek origins of a word that connoted *dissolution*, from where its current meaning derived: “when we separate and we develop the parts of a thing that we did not know but in general [*en gros*], so as to know it in detail,” or still “when we *disassemble* a machine, we know all the *analysis* and the construction of it.” The following example he gave was a classic one: “when we make the anatomy of an animal, it is a sort of *analysis* that permits us to know those parts.”<fnref n="106" /> The dictionary of the French Academy designated it as a “dogmatic term” (a technical word used in the sciences), and directly defined it as a “way of knowing” (*une manière de connoistre*) based on “examining something by reducing it to its principles.” After some examples of usage (from the analysis of a plant to chemistry as a form of analysis), the authors defined *analysis* as it applied to the examination of a discourse: that is, “reducing

<footnote>delimitation (drawing limits between this and that, putting together some things and separating some others) that consisted, after all, of a visual comparison: I will have the occasion to return to this point in the next chapter.</footnote>

<footnote n="104">¹⁰⁴ Ménestrier, *Recherches du blason*, sig. [à4v]: “4. Le JUGEMENT les moule en les comparant les unes avec les autres pour les rectifier./ 5. L’ENTENDEMENT peint & taille, puis qu’il unit les choses pour en tirer des consequences, & les separe par Analysie pour les connoistre.” My emphasis.</footnote>

<footnote n="105">¹⁰⁵ I thank Stéphane Van Damme for pointing this out to me and sharing his expertise on Ménestrier.</footnote>

<footnote n="106">¹⁰⁶ Furetière, *Dictionnaire universel* (1690), sig. [K4v]: “quand on separe & on developpe les parties d’une chose qu’on ne connoissoit qu’en gros, pour la connoistre en detail. Quand on demonte une machine, on en connoist tout l’*analyse* & sa construction. quand [*sic*] on fait l’anatomie d’un animal, c’est une espece d’*analyse* qui en fait connoistre toutes les parties. . . . Ce mot est Grec, & signifie, *dissolution*.”</footnote>
it in its principal parts so as to know better the order and continuation” (*pour en mieux connoistre l’ordre & la suite*).<fnref n="107" />

Paper devices such as the depictions of the crocodile or non-anatomical sketches like the coastal profiles were far from self-evident: they embodied very concrete *manières de connoistre*, ways of knowing. Plumier’s witty use of images and text for capturing the personal experience of observation in the field was not entirely unconstrained or idiosyncratic, but rather the product of cultural practices of his time that were, on occasion, shared far beyond the study of nature and, more important, beyond the realm of the field. This last point is the subject of the next section.

**To note, to abridge, to copy: the naturalist as reader**

In his essay on travel (“Of Travaile”), Francis Bacon disapproved of the fact that note-taking seemed to be a practice of observation mostly performed in exotic latitudes: “It is a strange Thing, that in Sea voyages, were there is nothing to be seene, but Skye and Sea, Men should make Diaries; but in Land-Travaile, wherein so much is to be observed, for the most part, they omit it; As if Chance, were fitter to be registered, than Observations.”<fnref n="108" /> European travelers may well have been registering to a lesser degree their observations at home than they did in the tropics, but graphic and written forms of note-taking were far from limited to field observations. Plumier’s numerous ink drawings and their accompanying annotations compel us to reappraise such an “investment in paper”—or, in Ann Laura Stoler’s words, “commitments to paper.”<fnref n="109" /> True, the Minim friar (as other naturalists of his time) devoted a good amount of time and effort (and ultimately, also money) to producing, correcting, modifying, remaking, transporting, and stockpiling these records. But can this investment be explained solely by a conscious desire to accurately mobilize observations of things far afield? An examination of handmade records by Plumier confirms the need for an all-embracing approach to the manuscript culture in the work of naturalists from the 1680s to the 1710s. Rather than an instrument specifically employed for the long-distant mobilization of knowledge, paperwork was an integral part of the work of naturalists, whether in the field or beyond.

<footnote n="107">¹⁰⁷ Le dictionnaire de l'Académie française, dédié au Roy (Paris: widow of Jean-Baptiste Coignard and Jean-Baptiste Coignard, 1694), vol. 1, 38: "Terme dogmatique. Maniere de connoistre, d'examiner quelque chose que ce soit en la reduisant dans ses principes. . . . Faire l'analyse d'un discours. C'est le reduire dans ses parties principales, pou ren mieux connoistre l'ordre & la suite."</footnote>

<footnote n="108">¹⁰⁸ Francis Bacon, *The Essays or Counsels, Civill and Morall, of Francis Lo. Verulam, Viscount of St. Alban. Newly Written* (London: John Haviland, 1625), 100-4.</footnote>

<footnote n="109">¹⁰⁹ Ann Laura Stoler, *Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense* (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).</footnote>
Note-taking did not only accompany observation. Another scholarly experience also mediated by broadly shared habits of taking and storing notes was reading. The history of reading has demonstrated in the last decades that such a gesture was to a large extent a process of annotation, list-making, and extraction. It is thus tempting to correlate the practice of note-taking while observing with the logics of fragmentation and reconfiguration allowed by early modern practices associated with the act of reading allowed (e.g., commonplace headings). There is something telling about the analogy between observation and reading, at least in what regards the material traces that these ethereal practices occasionally (rarely in fact) left—the only through which the historian can aspire to grasp them. As much as naturalists and travelers took and saved notes as a form of stockpiling memory, so too did most early modern scholars read “quill in hand” still by 1700. They usually scribbled on the printed books they were reading themselves, but often also copied, abridged, and excerpted from them in loose sheets or note-books.<fnref n="110" /> In actual fact, a remarkable amount of Plumier’s manuscript materials did not result from his fieldwork, but was rather the product of practices of reading. Before attending to these, however, two points on Plumier’s act of reading need to be clarified. First, by “reading” I refer here to a form of appropriation that engages not only verbal texts, but also images. For just as scholars used the relatively malleable manuscript form to abridge, excerpt from, take notes of, or cut and paste from printed texts, so too did Plumier not slavishly duplicate printed images by hand. Second, two forms, at least, of material appropriation (of reading “quill in hand”) can be distinguished among the friar’s papers: he either employed the images literally (cutting from the original printed document and rearranging, annotating, and correcting them) or copied printed images by hand and modified them according to his needs.<fnref n="111" />

<footnote n="110">¹¹⁰ Plumier’s case falls mostly in the second category, but I have often found research on marks in books inspiring, and specially William H. Sherman, *Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England* (Philadelphia, PA: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).</footnote>

<footnote n="111">¹¹¹ An interesting case on the art of excerptation is that, in the second half of the eighteenth century, is that of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, to whose reading and note-taking practices Élisabeth Décultot has devoted some fascinating pages: Décultot, *Johann Joachim Wincklemann. Enquête sur la genèse de l'histoire de l'art.* Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000; “L’art winckelmannien de la lecture. Reprise et subversion d’une pratique érudite,” in *Lire, copier, écrire. Les bibliothèques manuscrites et leurs usages au XVIIIᵉ siècle*, ed. Élisabeth Décultot (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2003), 91-110; and, more recently, “The Art of Excerpting in the Eighteenth Century Literature: Subversion and Continuity of an Old Scholarly Practice,” in *Forgetting Machines: Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe*, ed. Alberto Cevolini (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 105-27. See also Décultot’s introduction to *Lire, copier, écrire* for a good summary of the art of excerptation in the early modern period: “L’art de l’extrai: définition, évolution, enjeux,” in Décultot, *Lire, copier, écrire*, 7-30.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_52.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3.16. First page of the Arsenal MS 2502, corresponding to the frontispiece of the first volume of Tournefort's *Élémens de botanique*. Plumier used this frontispiece at the beginning of his own "hybrid notebook" (half printed, half manuscript). Note the text at the bottom of the page: "par le Sieur Pitton de Tournefort Academicien, professeur Royal dans le Jardin du Roy à Paris." The annotation is by the anonymous author of the "avertissement" to the volume, probably a librarian at the Paris convent of Minims around the mid-eighteenth century who seemingly felt the need to state clearly that the volume, although in Plumier's hand, was not his own creation. (Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>

An example of the first case is MS 2502, nowadays kept at the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal in Paris under the name “Élémens de botanique.” This is a bulky quarto volume bound in brown calf and counting around 480 pages.<fnref n="112" /> The format and number of pages are not fortuitous characteristics, for they consisted of a manuscript appropriation of images printed in another author’s work: it is composed of the 451 intaglio engravings gathered in the second and third tome of the first edition of Tournefort’s *Élémens de botanique* (1694), plus the frontispiece opening the first tome (fig. 3.16).¹¹³

The material form deserves attention. The front pastedown bears the old shelf mark of the library of the Minim convent in Place Royale (“3/JR/17”), locating it among the *Manu scripta* section kept at the beginning of the eighteenth century above the Chapel of St. Francis of Paola, on the eastern side of the convent’s church. The recto pages, those showing the engravings of the *Élémens*, have been renumbered by hand. The verso of the printed pages, and sometimes even the blanks below the engraved spaces in the rectos,

<footnote n="112">¹¹² Ars. MS 2502 “Le P. Charles Plumier, religieux minime: Élémens de botanique.”

¹¹³ Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, *Élémens de botanique, ou methode pour connaître les plantes*, 3 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1694).</footnote>
are filled with Plumier's neat, small handwriting that colonizes most of the margins, sometimes well into the gutter (fig. 3.17). This seems to indicate that the volume was bound after writing, and it is thus quite plausible that the friar came into the possession of the engravings in the form of an unbound set of gatherings or sections at the Imprimerie royale, at which both Tournefort's *Élémens* and Plumier's *Description* (and some years later, the latter's *Traité des fougères*) had been printed. The Arsenal manuscript volume opens with the plate originally used as the frontispiece to the first volume of the *Élémens*; below the figure, a few lines in Plumier's handwriting identified the author of the book of which they were supposed to be part: "par le sieur Pithon de Tournefort Académicien et professeur Royal dans le Jardin du Roy A Paris." A leaf covered on both sides by a shaky handwriting different from our Minim's is placed right after the frontispiece and before the first plate. In the form of the classic "avertissement" ("Pour l'Intelligence de ce Volume qui est écrit de la main de nôtre R. p. Plumier Botaniste Royal, lisez ce qui suit"), it explained the composition of that strange hybrid book—half printed, half manuscript. The author of the "avertissement," in all probability one of the father librarians at the Parisian Minim convent during the first decades of the eighteenth century, explained that the tome gathered the plates of "Monseigneur Tournefort former Botanist in the King's Garden," collected by Father Plumier "so as to write, as he did," in the versos and the blanks, where he "copied" or "summarized" (abréger) Tournefort's book.<fnref n="114" />

MS 2502 is indeed a composite volume: the handwritten body in it does not correspond to one single, linear document, but juxtaposes distinct and discernable texts, most probably written at different times. Apart from the foreword by the anonymous and shaky hand, three texts can be differentiated in the volume. The three are by Plumier and do not follow one another linearly, but coexist on most of the pages. The first consists of notes related to the plates of the *Élémens*: they were taken from Tournefort's own text and written on the white page opposite the figure in question (the verso of the

<footnote n="114">¹¹⁴ Ars. MS 2502, fol. 1r-v: "Les Planches que l'on voit icy sont de monsieur Tournefort ancien Botaniste du Jardin du Roy. Le R. P. Plumier les a fait relier avec du papier blanc entre deux pour y écrire, come il a fait. / Il a mis d'abord les Explications des Planches, et on écrit qu'il n'a fait que (Coppier) en celui, le livre imprimé en 3 volumes in 8° de monsieur Tournefort, que nous avions en nôtre Bibliothèque, et qui n'ont nous ont été derobez. Peut-être as-ce été pour suppléer a ce sot [?] que le P. Plumier a fait le present volume manuscrit." This fragment includes two notes in the margin: the first seemingly corrects the word "Coppier," that was put into brackets in the text: "Abréger"; the second refers to Tournefort's book: "C'est l'imprimé de 1694." The volume, however, was probably bound after Plumier wrote in it, and not before, as the author of the foreword suggests, and he "copied" or "summarized" from Tournefort's French edition of the *Élémens*, not the Latin one of the *Institutiones rei herbariae* (1701). He does date it correctly in the margin, however.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_53.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3.17. Folios 18v and 19r of the Ars. MS 2502. In this hybrid notebook, both a printed book and a unique manuscript, Plumier gathered the engravings of genera in the *Élémens*, whose versos he used to summarize or excerpt from Tournefort’s description of each genus. Note that this excerpt, on the *Convolvulus*, only occupies half of the page; on the other half, separated by a line and the letter “E,” as well as on the space below the plate in the recto, the friar copied and abridged entries from Tournefort’s “Dictionnaire de termes botaniques,” in this case from the word “écaillé” (flaked) to “épi” (ear). (Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>

previous plate). “He put, first, the explanations of the plates,” wrote the author of the foreword, “and we think that he simply *copied* in this the printed book . . . of Monseigneur de Tournefort.” Significantly, the unknown commentator put the word *coppier* in brackets, and corrected it as *abréger* (summarize) in the margin.<fnref n="115" /> Indeed, this manuscript text was actually a summary of the written descriptions printed in Tournefort’s first volume of the *Élémens*. Moreover, it does so on the page opposite the picture it refers to, so that in Plumier’s manuscript, text and image are kept side by side,

<footnote n="115">115 Ars. MS 2502, fol. 1c-v.</footnote>
whereas the reader of the *Élémens* was supposed to handle the one volume of the text and
the two of plates at the same time.

Tournefort’s engravings can be divided into four main groups, as they appeared
originally in the *Élémens*: a preliminary one on botanical structures, the main one on the
different genera, a third one with genera included in the appendix, and a last one
illustrating the terms of a botanical glossary. The main set of plates went from the twelfth
to the 419th: each of these images was devoted to one or two specific classes—from the
*Mandragora* (the first genus of the first section of the first class) to the *Barba Jovis* (the fifth
genus of Section III in Class XXII). Letter references were scattered all over the images,
and referred to the written text in the first volume, in which Tournefort offered a
morphological description of the genus, a list of the known species included in it, and
some brief comments on the etymology of their names and what ancient and modern
authors said about them. In his volume, Plumier either copied these explanations
verbatim or abridged them by sorting some sentences and omitting others (he always
bypassed, for instance, the list of species for each genus). The friar proceeded likewise
for a group of supplementary plates illustrating those genera included in the appendix of
the *Élémens*: opposite each plate, Plumier summarized in his manuscript part of the
original descriptions by Tournefort—especially those explaining the letter references on
the plates.

Things were different with the preliminary group of plates of the *Élémens*, those
from no. 1 to 12. These images illustrated not specific genera, but general botanical
structures: their constitutive parts, different forms of stamens, pistils, calyxes, and
flowers, and so forth. Tournefort did not give a description for each picture as in the
others, but referred to them in an essay included at the beginning of the work and
entitled “On how to establish the classes of Plants,” in which he presented the general
principles of his method.<fnref n="116" /> An example: when explaining which parts of a plant were to
be considered for establishing classes, Tournefort entered into a discussion about some
“little threads” (*filets*) that come out of the edge of the embryo, “and in some flowers they
show some fur.” A superscript reference guided the reader to a marginal note, and from
there to “plate 3, figure L and I, the embryo is marked K, wrapped in a membrane N

<footnote n="116">¹¹⁶ Tournefort, *Élémens*, vol. 1, 17-25.</footnote>
with some fur M.”<fnref n="117" /> In contrast to the rest of the plates (each of them standing for a genus with its corresponding description), these first twelve pictures illustrated particularly obscure or technical notions used along his preliminary discourse. In his manuscript, however, Plumier was not interested in the academician’s essay, but in the images: he did not copy the entire text, nor did he even abridge it, but he rather used it to elaborate a legend for each of Tournefort’s twelve engravings on the opposite page. The legend listed the letter keys and gave the name and an explanation of what they were signaling on the image. These explanations were extracted from Tournefort’s essay—sometimes simply excerpting it as it was, others paraphrasing or rewriting several sections. The engravings in the *Élémens* that were meant to illustrate the most technical parts of Tournefort’s essay on his method became, in Plumier’s manuscript, something else, a visual vademecum with an annexed legend for each picture, thus transforming the original relationship between images and text.

Plumier’s handwritten excerpts of the *Élémens* occupied only part of the back of each engraving: he used the blanks left on the versos, as well as those below the space of the plate in the rectos, for taking notes on two other documents. The first of these texts was also drawn from Tournefort’s *Élémens*: it was a “Dictionnaire ou explication des termes de botanique et de quelques autres qui peuvent servir pour l’intelligence de cet ouvrage” (Dictionary or explanation of the botanical and other kind of terms that may be useful for the understanding of this work) included at the end of Tournefort’s first volume.<fnref n="118" /> This glossary was illustrated by the fourth and last group of plates in the *Élémens*, composed of 29 engravings picturing different forms of fruits, leaves and roots that were defined in the dictionary. On the blanks of over a hundred leaves (both on the versos and in the free space left on the rectos below the engravings), Plumier copied almost verbatim most (but not all) of the definitions given by Tournefort, from the word *abajour* (dormer) to *urne* (urn), although he excluded parts which were unrelated to the definitions or repetitive,<fnref n="119" /> included some other definitions omitted in Tournefort’s book

<footnote n="117">¹¹⁷ Tournefort, *Élémens*, vol. 1, 54: “En effet ces filets sortent de l’extrémité de ces embrions, & dans quelques fleurs ils sont garnis vers leur extrémité de quelquesᵇ poils chagez de poussière”; the note went as follows: “b. Pl. 3. Fig. L, & I, l’embrion est marqué K, enveloppé d’une membrane N garnie de poils M.”</footnote>

<footnote n="118">¹¹⁸ Tournefort, *Élémens*, 515-62. In the MS 2502, the glossary runs from fol. 3v to 62r.</footnote>

<footnote n="119">¹¹⁹ These included social niceties and the like, such as a note to the entry “Analise chimique des plantes” informing the reader that “Mr Bourdelin de l’Académie Royale des Sciences a porté ces sortes de travaux à un tel point de perfection qu’il est difficile de pouvoir aller plus loin.” Tournefort, *Élémens*, 516.</footnote>
because they had already been given in the body of the volume,<fnref n="120" /> and punctually created his own references. In other words, he did not simply copy by hand the *Élémens* glossary, but transformed it into a manuscript tool adapted to his own needs.

A third and last text can be distinguished in the written mass of the MS 2502: this occupies the blanks of the two hundred leaves following the dictionary, and consists of notes drawn from a printed text that was not, this time, Tournefort's *Élémens*. This was an anatomical treatise by a contemporary physician from Cambrai (by this time a city in Flanders), Amé Bourdon (1638-1706),<fnref n="121" /> who in 1678 published a series of eight double folio intaglio engravings on human anatomy (fig. 3.18).<fnref n="122" /> The plates, claimed by the author to have been engraved from his own drawings, were printed without text: this only appeared the following year in the form of a duodecimo volume entitled *Nouvelle description anatomique de toutes les parties du corps humain*.<fnref n="123" /> Both the double folio volume of the plates and the duodecimo written manual were in the library of the convent in Place Royale, at least when its collection was inventoried in 1722, and both may well have been in the convent at Plumier's time.<fnref n="124" />

<footnote n="120">¹²⁰ In the entries “Arbre” or “Plante,” for instance, Plumier included definitions that in the *Élémens* glossary were omitted and referred to previous pages on which they had already been given.</footnote>

<footnote n="121">¹²¹ The anonymous author of the foreword pays, once more, particular attention to the organization of these three bodies of written notes over the book and their mise en page: “Nota . . . le père Plumier ayant achevé d’écrire en ce livre tout ce qui regarde la botanique ; et ayant apperçu qu’il étoit resté beaucoup de places vuides, d’y écrire un traitté d’anatomie de Amé Gourdon [sic] ; ce traitté commence à la planche 62 et il continuë en remplissant tousjours les vuides qui étoint restez au bas des pages : il observe de mettre a chaque bas des feüillets, ce mot, anatomie, affin d’avertir que ce qui est ainsi au bas des feuillets n’est pas de la botanique, mais la continuiation de son traitté de l’anatomie, qui finit à la page 263.” Ars. MS 2502, fol. 1r.</footnote>

<footnote n="122">¹²² *Nouvelles tables anatomiques. Ou sont représentées au naturel toutes les parties du Corps humain, toutes les nouvelles découvertes, le cours de toutes les humeurs, les lieux où elles déponsent leurs excrements.* On y a joint un petit livre qui en fait *la description et en explique clairement les Usages, avec ordre et en peu de mots.* Le tout définé et composé par Amé Bourdon, medecin (Cambrai: Chez l’autheur, and Paris: Laurens d’Houry, 1678). Most of the plates are double signed: “Amatus Bourdon Medicus delineavit et excudebit C.[um] P.[rivilegio Regis” and “Daniel le Boßu sculp.[sit]” There are few works on Bourdon: see Ludwig Choulant, *History and Bibliography of Anatomic Illustration*, trans. Mortimer Frank (New York: Hafner, 1962 [1852]), 249; José Luis Crespo Fajardo, “Amé Bourdon y su atlas de láminas anatómicas,” *Tsantsa. Revista de investigaciones artísticas* 1 (2014). The plates can be consulted in the USA National Library of Medicine’s digital project “Historical Anatomies in the Web”: https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/historicalanatomies/bourdon_home.html</footnote>

<footnote n="123">¹²³ *Nouvelle description anatomique de toutes les parties du corps humain, & de leurs usages, avec le cours de toutes les humeurs. Sur le principe de la circulation, & conformément aux nouvelles découvertes. Le tout représenté au naturel sur plusieurs grandes Tables, reduit en un tres-bel ordre, expliqué en peu de mots, & d’une manière tres-lisible* (Paris: Jacques Langlois, 1679). The work was reprinted four times in the following decade: three times in Paris by d’Houry (1683, 1686, and 1687) and once in Lyon by Benoît Vignieu (1685). See Crespo Fajardo, “Bourdon y su atlas.”</footnote>

<footnote n="124">¹²⁴ The book is registered in the alphabetical catalog, Maz. MS 4147 “Catalogue alphabétique de la bibliothèque des Minimes de la Place Royale, à Paris,” 1722. One of them, with all security the plates tome, is listed as well in the second volume of the thematic catalog (AN LL 1569 “Deuxième tome du catalogue de la bibliothèque des Minimes,” 1776) with the name “Description anatomique du corps humain par Bourdon.” This last one was classed in the section P “Numismatum,” and the third subsection of folio volumes were gathered under the name of “Simbola et icones,” along with some of Plumier’s own books</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_54.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3.18. Plate from Bourdon’s *Nouvelles tables anatomiques*. Plumier copied or abridged from Bourdon’s descriptions in the blanks left on the pages of his “hybrid notebook” after having summarized Tournefort’s descriptions and dictionary by hand. It seems likely that Plumier learned most of his anatomical notions from Bourdon’s book. Note on this plate that the process described is the same that Plumier used in his dissections of Caribbean animals, one proceeding layer by layer. (National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD.)</figcaption></figure>

The *Nouvelle description anatomique* was probably one of the texts through which the friar learned the theoretical rudiments of anatomy. It formulated a recurrent idea of the contemporary anatomical thinking that also permeates Plumier’s drawings: that anatomy was a regime of knowledge proceeding by means of *analysis*. Bourdon gave written form to the premise of anatomy as a “manière de cognoistre,” according to which the complex things to be understood (whether human bodies, animals, or plants) were compounds of parts, and that only by dividing them into those parts and studying them first could one attain a proper knowledge of the whole. “One cannot work successfully in repairing [the movements] of the human body,” wrote Bourdon, “if we do not know enough the nature of the parts that compose it, their particular usages, the relation they bear one to

<footnote>and other richly illustrated works, like “Le cabinet de la Bibliothèque de Ste Genevieve par le P. Claude du Moulinet” published in Paris in 1672 and “Estampes et cérémonies des Turcs” (probably the *Explication de cent estampes qui représentent différentes nations du Levant avec nouvelles estampes de cérémonies turques qui ont aussi leurs explications*) printed in Paris in 1715.</footnote>
another, & the effect of their union.”<sup>125</sup> Bourdon’s plates also materialize codes that were commonplace in the anatomical literature and practice of the time and reappear in Plumier’s drawings. Two of these are worth mentioning: first, Bourdon used the two graphic ways of anatomical representation that reappeared in the Minim’s manuscript: the progressive discovery of different layers (tables 2 and 3) and the fragmentation into parts (tables 4 and 5); second, Bourdon’s engravings were also filled with letter keys identifying every figure in the plate and some of their parts and relating them to the text.

The appeal of his little book, Bourdon argued, was not only that it was written in vernacular and “in conformity with the new discoveries” like the “new system of circulation,” but precisely that it “comprised in few words, & in a very proper order, all what is badly disposed in big Volumes.” Just as the human body was constructed in parts and layers, so too the book was divided into six chapters which were themselves composed of between eight and fourteen articles.

In his manuscript copy of the *Nouvelle description anatomique*, seeping through the blanks of the MS 2502, the Minim kept this same organization into chapters and articles. In the free lower half of the verso of folio 63 and under the title “Traité d>Anatomie,” Plumier began copying Bourdon’s manual from the first article of the first chapter to the end; no reference was made to the author, to the original page or to the plates being made. Plumier duplicated Bourdon’s manual article by article, virtually verbatim, over the blanks of a hundred leaves, either on the versos or in the band under the images of the rectos, indicating in both cases where the copy of Bourdon’s manual began in the space of the page with a line and the word “anatomie” under it (fig. 3.19).<sup>126</sup>

MS 2502 is interesting, to start with, because it was a sort of hybrid in which Plumier used the engravings of Tournefort’s book, rearranged them, annotated them so as to serve new purposes, and filled the blank spaces for abridging and copying other documents, such as Tournefort’s botanical glossary or Bordon’s anatomical textbook. The volume, gathering in a single codex abridgments or notes on works of different

<footnote n="125"><sup>125</sup> Bourdon, *Nouvelle description anatomique*, sig. [a6r]: “car il est certain . . . qu’on ne peut jamais bien regler les mouvements d’une machine, si on n’en connoît parfaitement les ressorts, comment pourroit-on travailler avec succez à regler ceux du corps humain, dont la structure est infiniment au dessus de tout ce que l’art a de plus parfait, si on ne connoist pas assez la nature des parties qui le composent, leurs usages particuliers, & enfin la liaison & le rapport qu’elles ont entr’elles, & avec ce qui resulte de leur union.”</footnote>

<footnote n="126"><sup>126</sup> The omissions were few and significative: he passed over Bourdon’s paragraph on the feminine “external parts of generation,” and went from those of men directly to the “external parts of the arms and the hands.” Bourdon, *Nouvelle description anatomique*, 11-12; Ars. MS 2502, fol. 67v-68r.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_55.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3.19. Folios 63v and 64r, where Plumier’s excerpts from Boudon’s *Nouvelle description anatomique* begin. (Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>

authors, can partly be related to the practice of printed “miscellanies.”<fnref n="127" /> But MS 2502 was not the only example of Plumier’s manuscript work on a collection of engravings printed in another author’s book. The friar also reemployed (literally) the engravings of the book that a contemporary of his, the Italian Jesuit Filippo Bonanni (1638-1725), devoted to shells: the *Ricreatione dell'occhio e della mente nell'osservation' delle chiocciole, proposta à curiosi delle opere della natura dal P. Filippo Buonanni della Compagnia di Giesù. Con quattrocento, e cinquanta figure di testacei diversi, sopra cui si spiegano molti curiosi problemi* (Recreation of the eye and the mind in the observation of shells, proposed to those curious about the works of nature by Father Bonanni of the Society of Jesus. With four hundred fifty figures of different shelled mollusks, many curious problems which are here explained) was

<footnote n="127">127 Armando Petrucci, “Dal libro unitario al libro miscellaneo,” in *Società romana e imperio tardoantico*, vol. 4, *Tradizione dei classici, transformazioni della cultura*, ed. Andrea Giardina (Rome: Laterza, 1986), 173-87.</footnote>
published in Rome in 1681.<sup>128</sup> Bonanni was a prolific scholar with multifaceted interests: apart from the treatise on shells, he authored a treatise in favor of spontaneous generation published in 1691—its title, like the *Ricreatione's*, is priceless: *Observationes circa viventia, quae in rebus non viventibus reperiuntur* (Observations on living things that are perceived in non-living things); a several-volumes numismatic study of papal coins across history printed from 1696 to 1700; another catalog in 1709 on the collections of the splendidly famous museum founded by his fellow Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (whom he succeeded as the custodian) in the Collegio Romano; a study on Chinese lacquer in 1720, and still another catalog in 1722 inventorying musical instruments conserved at various European collections. Bonanni's oeuvre is a good example of the kind of culture of erudition that was assembled through print at the time: most of his works were folios and all of them counted numerous engravings, from the 67 plates of the *Observationes* to the 90 of the first volume of the *Numismata* to the 171 of the *Musaeum Kircherianum*.<sup>129</sup>

The *Ricreatione* was equally well illustrated: it included 106 plates, each of which assembled several figures of different shells and arranged them into three classes (“testacei univalvi non turbinati,” “testacei bivalvi,” and “testacei univalvi turbinati”). Plumier owned the 106 original engravings, now at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, and filled their versos with written annotations, colored in some of the figures, and completed the series with some of his handmade drawings of West Indian shells that he interspersed among Buonanni’s original plates. (fig. 3.20). Bonanni’s set of plates were for Plumier a material to work on and to be reworked.

It is indeed interesting to bring Bonanni’s catalog of shells closer to the study of
Plumier’s work, not only because the *Ricreatione*, authored by a noted member of the
Jesuit Collegio Romano, was published in the papal city the same year that the Minim
friar left the convent of Trinità dei Monti, but also because in the Italian’s work, many of
the interests that the Minim developed later in his own corpus were included. The most
obvious of these was a concern for the classification of natural things and the investment

<footnote n="128">128 Rome: per il Varese, a spese di Felice Cesaretti, 1691. It seemed to me worth reproducing here the entire title. Plumier’s copy is BNF Est. JB-68-4 “Coquilles gravées et dessinées provenant du Père Plumier.”</footnote>

<footnote n="129">¹²⁹ *Observationes circa viventia, quae in rebus non viventibus reperiuntur. Cum micrographia curiosa sive rerum minutissimarum observationibus, quae ope Microscopii recognitae ad vivum exprimuntur* (Rome: Typis Dominici Antonii Herculis, 1691); *Numismata summorum pontificum templi vaticani fabricam indicantia. Chronologica ejusdem fabricae narratione, ac multipli eruditione explicata, atque uberiori numismatum omnium pontificiorum lububrationi vleuti prodromus praemisa* (Rome: sumptibus Felicis Caesaretti, & Peribeni, typis Dominici Antonii Herculis, 1696), of which two further volumes appeared in 1699, and a fourth one in 1700; *Musaeum Kircherianum sive musaeum a P. Athanasio Kirchero In Collegio Romano Societatis Jesu jam pridem incoeptum nuper restitutum, auctum, descriptum, & Ionibus illustratum* (Rome: Typis Giorgii Plachi, 1709).</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_56.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3.20. Plumier's manuscript appropriation of the engravings in Filippo Bonanni's *Ricreatione dell'occhio et de la mente*. Plumier used Bonanni's engravings (but not the text that originally accompanied it), excerpted from Bonanni's original descriptions in the versos, and added his own manuscript drawings to complete Bonanni's classes with American shells observed by him. (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>
into print, although seemingly also in manuscripts: the Jesuit's eulogist noted not only his early inclination for the "noble art of drawing" (fino dall'età verde pendè col genio all'arte nobile del disegno), but also his work as custodian of the archive of the Collegio Romano.<fnref n="130" /> Two main parallels, therefore, emerge in the comparison. The first is an investment in the making of printed images—an integral part, one might reasonably say, of the study of natural history, although it appears more clearly as a crucial part of any erudite work, whether on plants, animals or historical coins. The second, closely related parallel regards the catalog form as a privileged mode of the material organization of data, which is further discussed in the next chapter.

These two manuscripts artifacts, the Arsenal MS 2502 and the BNF volume using Buonanni's plates, show convincingly that, at the turn of the eighteenth century, manuscript practices were a pervasive feature in the daily work of the naturalist, whether this took place in the field or in the cabinet, and whether they involved natural objects or printed books. Furthermore, these two cases offer material instances of what the history of reading has long been devoted to proof: that readers (early modern or not) do not passively receive texts, but rather construe them in sometimes very creative ways. Plumier appropriated Tournefort's *Éléments* and Bonanni's *Ricreatione* in a such a productive manner: his was a literal reemployment of printed materials that resulted in what Adrian Johns called "hybrids, half printed book, half unique manuscript."<fnref n="131" />

However, the appropriation of printed material by means of manuscript practices may not necessarily have entailed such a physical usage. Two important examples from Plumier's corpus may be cited in this respect. The first is an astonishing, superb document entitled "Synopsis botanica," a set of 152 leaves of manuscript images and text in Latin.<fnref n="132" /> Part of Plumier's corpus, nowadays conserved at the Bibliothèque centrale du Muséum national d'histoire naturelle in Paris, the "Synopsis botanica," is bound together with five other documents, all of them in the Minim's handwriting, including dictionaries and lists of botanical names and described in the next chapter. The "Synopsis" in the strict sense occupies about 160 pages. It opens with a rich frontispiece drawn in ink and colored with aquarelle bearing the title of the work: "Synopsis botanica / plantarum iam

<footnote n="130">¹³⁰ The eulogy was published in the *Giornale de' letterati d'Italia* 37 (1725), 360-380.</footnote>

<footnote n="131">¹³¹ Adrian Johns, *The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 386. For an overview, see Margaret J. M. Ezell, "Handwriting and the Book," in *The Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book*, ed. Leslie Howsam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 90-106, and H. J. Jackson, *Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books* (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).</footnote>

<footnote n="132">¹³² BCMNHN MS 10 "Synopsis botánica."</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_57.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3.21. Ink-and-watercolor frontispiece to Plumier’s “Synopsis botanica.” This is but one of the several richly illustrated “manuscript books” composed by Plumier. Plumier’s intentions in making this sort of manuscript books is not clear, and neither is their actual circulation. It seems quite possible that they were never meant to be printed. (Bibliothèque centrale du Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>

cognitarum / tam genera quam species / complectens / opera / p. Caroli Plumier Minimi / Botanici Regii / An.[nus] 1703" (Botanical synopsis of plants already known, including both the genera and the species, a work by Father Charles Plumier, Minim, Royal Botanist, in the year 1703) (fig. 3.21). Three parts can be differentiated in it: a twelve-page preface, a set of 34 images without text, and a group of around 150 leaves combining writing and drawing.<fnref n="133" /> This last series of leaves constitutes the bulk of the “Synopsis botanica”: it alternated pages of text (in the recto and the verso) with pages of images (on the two sides, too) so that, upon opening the manuscript codex, one page of figures and one page with their written descriptions lay under the reader’s eyes (fig. 3.22).

<footnote n="133">133 BCMNHN MS 10, fol. 25r-30v; 31r-47v, and 48v-203r, respectively.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_58.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3.22. (top) Ink-and-watercolor drawings in the “Synopsis botanica” of the genera *Mandragora* and *Belladona*. (Bibliothèque centrale du Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, Paris.) Compare with the two plates in Tournefort's *Institutiones rei herbariae* (bottom) from which Plumier “excerpted” these images, and note the modifications introduced in figures C-D of the *Mandragora* and C-D of the *Belladona* (Peter H. Raven Library, Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis.)</figcaption></figure>
These pages were also not the result of Plumier's observations in the Caribbean field, but of his cabinet work. They abridged into manuscript form Tournefort's *Institutiones rei herbariae* (Botanical institutions), an extended Latin translation of the *Élémens* printed in 1700 with the same engravings, plus several additions, that listed, described, pictured, and classified the different vegetable genera established by the academician. In the “Synopsis,” Plumier abridged or paraphrased the textual descriptions of the *Institutiones*, but omitted some parts—such as the legends to the letter keys on the plates and the list of species identified for each genus. In contrast to the Arsenal manuscript, however, the friar did not physically employ the original engravings, but copied the printed images by hand: he first outlined the figures in pencil, then retouched them in ink, and even enhanced some of them in gray-scale watercolor.<fnref n="134" />

The remarkable aspect of these manuscript copies of the *Institutiones* plates is that they are not slavish copies. Plumier here “excerpted” the engravings of Tournefort’s book, just as he had done with the text: he copied most of the figures but omitted others, and on occasion modified them too and changed their arrangement (fig. 3.29). The friar performed a similar sort of “graphic abridgement” in the 34 images preceding these verbal and visual inventory of genera in the “Synopsis”: this initial set of drawings had no text and most of them (but not all) copied a series of plates in the *Institutiones* that aimed at depicting not specific genera, but general botanical structures such as varieties of fruits, leaves, roots, and so forth. <fnref n="135" /> Here again Plumier made a sort of “visual abridgment” of these engravings: he excerpted selected figures from them while discarding others; he rearranged them, gave them a new order, and added some pictures of his own. In other words, he copied and modified Tournefort’s images so as to make them part of a new discourse (fig. 3.23). <fnref n="136" /> The friar briefly stated the aim of the manuscript in its preface: “this small work . . . I conceived it as a handbook (*enchiridion*), or at least to use it myself as a handbook.”<fnref n="137" /> The word *enchiridion* (from the Greek

<footnote n="134">¹³⁴ In fact, he only colored the first quarter of the images, what indicates that the “Synopsis” is after all an unfinished document.</footnote>

<footnote n="135">¹³⁵ These plates were placed at the beginning of the second volume (pl. 1-11, the same as the eleven first engravings of the *Élémens* discussed above) and at the end of the third one (pl. 447-75).</footnote>

<footnote n="136">¹³⁶ The correspondences of the drawings whose source I was able to establish is as follows (the first figure indicates the drawing’s original number; the one in parentheses the number of the folio in the BCMNHN MS 10, and those in italics after the colon the number of plates in the first edition (1700) of Tournefort’s *Institutiones rei herbariae*: 1 (31r): 1, 2, 3; 2 (31v): 4, 5, 6; 3 (32r): 7, 8; 4 (32v): 9, 10, 11; 5 (33r): 447, 448; 6 (33v): 449, 450, 451; 7 (34r): 452, 453, 454; 8 (34v): 454, 455, 456; 9 (35r): 457, 458; 10 (35v): 459, 460; 11 (36r): 461, 462; 12 (36v): 462, 463; 13 (37r): 464, 465, 566; 14 (37v): 467, 468; 15 (38r): 469, 470; 16 (38v): 471, 472, 473; 17 (39r): 473, 474, 475, and so forth).</footnote>

<footnote n="137">¹³⁷ BCMNHN MS 10, fol. 30v: “hoc opuscusculum ceu enchiridion, aut mihi manual, confeci.”</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_59.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3.23. (top left) Ink-and-watercolor drawing from the “Synopsis.” (Bibliothèque centrale du Muséum national d'histoire naturelle.) (top right and bottom) Original engravings in Tournefort's *Institutiones* from which Plumier composed the image in the “Synopsis.” (Peter H. Raven Library, Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis.)</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_60.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3.24. Sketchy calculation at the bottom of the last page of the “Synopsis botanica,” in which Plumier settled scores with Tournefort: the friar’s 806 genera vs. the 673 established by the professor. (Bibliothèque centrale du Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>

ἐγχειριδιον, “that fits in the hand,” and used, for instance, by Erasmus for his small guide book on how to live a Christian without much of the ceremonial fanfare of Catholics<fnref n="138" />) indicates the personal use Plumier may have had in mind for it: excerpting from printed books only the graphic and textual information that he needed in his field observations.

Far from a slavishly mimetic reproduction of Tournefort’s plates, the “Synopsis” (especially in this first part) used printed images to create a relatively new (manuscript) discourse: it was a productive, creative manuscript appropriation of printed text and images. The argument that Plumier was excerpting from Tournefort’s printed material to create a manuscript discourse of his own is beautifully illustrated by a sketch at the end of the “Synopsis,” a quickly drafted calculation at the bottom of the last page, settling scores with Tournefort: Plumier’s illustrated catalog counted 806 genera—133 more than the academician’s (fig. 3.24).<fnref n="139" />

A fourth and last example of Plumier’s manuscript “reading” practices is the MS 913 in the Bibliothèque de l’Alcazar in Marseille. The manuscript’s provenance was the library of the Minim convent of Marseille and, although it has no title (nor title page in fact), it was listed in a 1776 catalog of that collection (in the section of octavos) under the

<footnote n="138">138 Desiderius Erasmus, *Enchiridion militis Christiani* (Antwerp: Th. Martens, 1503).</footnote>

<footnote n="139">139 BCMNHN MS 10, fol. 202v. That makes 673 for Tournefort; in the *Corollarium institutionum rei herbariae* (1700), the academician counted up to 675. We can apply also to Plumier and his contemporaries in late seventeenth-century France Marie-Noëlle Bourguet’s conclusion for eighteenth-century German authors: “une fois qu’un érudit ou un savant a sous la main, dûment condensé dans son carnet, l’esprit de toutes les choses qu’il a lues, entendues et observées, il lui est loisible . . . de se rendre indépendant de ses sources. . . . Considéré sous ce rapport, l’art de lire, d’observer et de noter devient alors une technique heuristique, un art de l’invention.”</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_61.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3.25. Front and back cover of the MS 913 “Icones plantarum.” (Bibliothèque municipale de Marseille.)</figcaption></figure>

name of “Icones plantarum” with the comment “a MS by Father Plumier.”<sup>140</sup> The “Icones plantarum” is a small volume of more than one hundred folios bound in an inexpensive covering—so much so that it reused paper already bearing sketches of plants, flowers, parts of a landscape with a church, and even a man’s face (fig. 3.25). On the frontal flyleaf, a manuscript annotation identifies the Marseille Minim convent as the origin of the volume and Plumier as the author. Yet below this, a more modern hand annotation noted, as a sort of disappointed refutation, that “this is not at all a work by father Plumier, [but] this Botanist scholar excerpted from the works of Marcgraf and Piso when he had to go herborize to America on the orders of the King.”<sup>141</sup>

The “Icones plantarum” is composed of two sections. The first, which runs one 150 pages long, follows a structure along the lines of the manuscripts described above: full-page ink drawings of American plants on the recto of the leaves, facing their written description on the versos of the previous page. The second part (another hundred pages

<footnote n="140"><sup>140</sup> BMM MS 913, “Flore américaine, redigée en Latin,” and MS 1485 “Catalogus librorum bibliothecae massiliensis minimorum,” fol. 324.</footnote>

<footnote n="141"><sup>141</sup> BMM MS 1485, [fol. 1]: “Ce n’est point un ouvrage du pere Plumier, ce savant Botaniste tira cet extrait des ouvrages de Marcgrave et de Pison, lorsqu’il dut aller en ameryque y herboriser, par ordre du Roi.”</footnote>
long) splits images and their written descriptions: the sixty-six full-page drawings come first, and are followed by some forty pages of text. Here again the drawings show different degrees of completion, from simple line drawings to well-rendered chiaroscuros. They were, once again, entirely extracted from a printed book, this time Marcgraf's and Piso's respective books in the *Historia naturalis brasiliae* (1648). Those in the first part of the manuscript copied, in the same order, most (but not all) of the plants in Piso's fourth book of his “Medicina Brasiliensi,” from the *Acaju* to the *Janiparandiba*. In this part, also the written descriptions facing or following Plumier's drawings excerpted, totally or in part, the text by Piso (fig. 3.26). Some of the plant species were treated by both Piso and Marcgraf in their respective books, as in the case of the *Ibipitanga*: here Plumier retained some fragments of both descriptions (the images were, in these cases, actually the same in the two parts of the *Historia naturalis brasiliae*) and identified in the margin which part was excerpted from each author.142 The drawings of the second part mirrored (in a similar but not identical order) those in Marcgraf's “Historiae plantarum” (the first two books of his “Historiae rerum naturalium,” which constituted the second half of the *Historia naturalis brasiliae*). Plumier retained here a smaller number of plants, since he omitted those already treated by Piso in the previous part of the volume. In this manuscript, too, the pictures vary in quality, from simple line drawings to more detailed figures in ink to a few retouched in watercolor.

We do not know when Plumier made the “Icones plantarum” or even if it is older
than the other manuscripts mentioned here: the prefatory note (“Plumier . . . tira cet
extrait . . . lorsqu’il dut aller en ameryque”) seems to suggest that its composition just
preceded one of the friar’s journeys (perhaps during one of his stays at the Minim
convent while in Marseille) and that he departed without it. Perhaps a way of cultivating
his dexterity at drawing, such a sort of small manuscript copy of larger books could easily
have been a portable reference instrument for his work in the field. The practice of
copying, and especially of abridging not only text, but—and this was much more
important—also images from printed books therefore seems a crucial and neglected
activity in the work of seventeenth-century naturalists—perhaps a step preliminary to
travel and firsthand observation. As the disappointed annotation by an eighteenth

<footnote n="142">142 For a comparison of the *Ibipitanga* images and descriptions, see BMM MS 913, fol. 143-4, and *Historia naturalis Brasiliae, auspicio et beneficio illustriss.* I. Mauritii Com. Vassau illus provincie etmaris summi praefecti adornata in qua non tantum plantae et Animalia, sed et in digenarum morbi, ingenia et mores describiuntur et iconibus supra quingentas illustrantur (Leiden: Frans Hack; Amsterdam: Louis Elzevier, 1648), 121 (in Piso’s “Medicina Brasiliensi”) and 116 (in Marcgraf’s “Historiae plantarum”).</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_62.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3.26. (above) Drawing and description of the *Camara iuba* (shrub verbena) in MS 913. Note the names of Marcgraf and Piso in the margin of the left page indicating from which author the written description is excerpted. (Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, Marseille.) (left) Original woodcut of the *Historia naturalis brasiliae* from which Plumier copied the image. (Peter H. Raven Library, Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis.)</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_63.png" /></figure>
century archivist suggests (“this is not at all a work of Father Plumier”), the erudite practice of copying and excerpting from books probably lost its central place in the daily work of the natural historian from the mid-eighteenth century, when new notions of authorship and originality emerged.<fnref n="143" />

In different ways, these four manuscripts illustrate the central place that manuscript practices in general, and that of copying in particular, occupied in Plumier’s work as a naturalist. Manuscript replication was never completely mimetic: it selected and excerpted, abridged and adapted. More generally, as it has been argued here, copying by hand from printed books was not a marginal scholarly practice in the early modern times. Isabelle Charmantier has shown that Linnaeus copied by hand diagrams and tables from published books in his first notebook, the “Ortabök”; the flyleaves of his copy of Martin Johnren’s *Vade mecum botanicum* (1710) were also filled with images of flowers that the “Prince of botanists” patiently transcribed from Tournefort’s books.<fnref n="144" /> But, as classicist Michael D. Reeve pointed out, this is “a phenomenon that has too often been ignored or greeted with surprise.”<fnref n="145" />

How are we to construe manuscript practices such as copying (whether slavishly or creatively), excerpting from, or abridging both visual representations and written texts? The obvious, immediate interpretation is one in terms of conservation: rewriting by hand was on occasion the only way of keeping a copy of a document. This is the hypothesis in the Arsenal manuscript by the foreword’s anonymous author: Plumier, the commentator wrote, “only *copied* [crossed out and corrected in the margin as “abridged”] the printed book in 3 octavo [sic: quarto] volumes by Monseigneur of Tournefort, which we had in our Library and were stolen from us. Perhaps it was to compensate for this loss that Father Plumier made the present manuscript volume.”<fnref n="146" /> Yet that precise manuscript reemployed the very original engravings from Tournefort’s *Élémens*. More generally, most of the printed books analyzed here were of a medium or small size, and one can conjecture that they were not particularly unaffordable.

<footnote n="143">¹⁴³ On this regime of textual production (previous to the development of the romantic aesthetic of the individual work and the figure of the author), see Roger Chartier, “The Author’s Hand,” in *The Author’s Hand and the Printer’s Mind*, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), 73-86.</footnote>

<footnote n="144">¹⁴⁴ Isabelle Charmantier, “Carl Linnaeus and the Visual Representation of Nature,” *Historical Studies on the Natural Sciences* 41, no. 4 (2011), 371-4.</footnote>

<footnote n="145">¹⁴⁵ Michael D. Reeve, “Manuscripts Copied from Printed Books,” in *Manuscripts and Methods: Essays on Editing and Transmission* (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2001), 175-83.</footnote>

<footnote n="146">¹⁴⁶ Ars. MS 2502, fol. 1r (“on croit qu’il n’a fait que (coppier) [between brackets, and correction on the margin: “abréger”] en cela, le livre imprimé en latin en 3 volumes in 8° de Monseigneur de Tournefort, que nous avions dans nôtre Bibliothèque, et qui nous ont été derobez. Peut-être ai-ce été pour suppléer à ce vol que le père Plumier a fait le présent volume manuscrit.”)</footnote>
Another speculative answer could also be advanced here to this question: the exercise of copying from printed books was sustained by the purpose of publishing—under the form of commentaries or similar, for instance. Anthony Grafton considered this idea to be based in an anachronistic hypothesis, even for Renaissance humanism, for “was not copying a form of reading in itself, a tribute, letter by letter, to the power of the original?”<fnref n="147" /> Grafton associates this copying from printed books to the proliferation of note-taking itself: “the humanist read quill in hand, and wrote as he read.” This was both a reading practice and a form of sociability in the Renaissance, for notes were shared between scholars. This applies to the 1700s, too: when the English naturalist Martin Lister visited Plumier in his cell at the Paris Minim convent in 1698, he was stunned by the vast collection of botanical and zoological drawings that the friar had brought from the American islands. Lister was especially pleased by those depicting sea snails, on which he was a renowned expert—at that time, he had already published about five books on shells that are still deemed by many as the founding works for the discipline of conchology.<fnref n="148" /> The way in which the friar depicted those creatures was particularly compelling to the eyes of the physician: “because the *Murex* and [the] *Buccinum* was drawn with the Animals creeping out, I desired a Copy of them, which he [Plumier] freely and in most obliging manner granted me.” On 23 March, the day after they met in the convent, Plumier sent to Lister a copy of the drawings via Tournefort.<fnref n="149" /> Four of these images of gastropods and arthropods—a centipede, a land snail, a murex snail, and a millipede—were reproduced by Lister in his *Journey to Paris* (fig. 3.27).<fnref n="150" />

If anything, the manuscript practices of visual appropriation of printed materials described here suggest a double parallel. The first of these symmetries regards traditions of textual information management: the examples described here convincingly suggest that Plumier’s paperwork with images may be seen as akin to several of the modes that defined these traditions, such as reading by means of notes and commonplaces. Bacon, for instance, wrote some advice on research techniques to cope with the distressing fact

<footnote n="147">147 Anthony Grafton, “Le lecteur humaniste,” in *Histoire de la lecture dans le monde occidental*, ed. Guglielmo Cavalho and Roger Chartier (Paris: Le Seuil, 1997), 243. Grafton evokes in this respect the German polymath Johannes Trithemius, who in his *Praise of Scribes* (a denunciation of printing) claimed that “fortius enim, que scribimus, menti imprimimus, quia scribentes et legentes ea cum morula tractamus” [every word we write is imprinted more forcefully on our minds since we have to take our time while writing and reading].</footnote>

<footnote n="148">148 Anna Marie Roos, *Web of Nature: Martin Lister (1639-1712), the First Arachnologist* (Leiden: Brill, 2011), chap. 12: “The Art of Science: The Historiae Conchyliorum and the Historia Piscium.”</footnote>

<footnote n="149">149 Plumier to Lister, Paris, March 23, 1698, Bodl. Ms. Lister 2, fol. 137.</footnote>

<footnote n="150">150 Martin Lister, *A Journey to Paris in the Year 1698* (London: printed for Jacob Tonson, 1699), 72–73. The original drawings (or at least a manuscript version of them) is now at BCMNHN</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_64.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3.27. Engraving of the *Purpura Americana* (murex) from Lister’s *Journey to Paris*, after one of the drawings that Plumier shared with Lister after the former’s visit to the friar in his convent at Place Royale. (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>

that “Knowledge is so infinite, and the Writers of every sort of it so tedious.” In his discussion about note-taking and commonplacing, the Lord Chancellor distinguished between the “Epitome, or Abridgment” and “Heads and Common Places”: the first “is but a short Narration of that which the Book itself doth discourse at large,” and the second, “of far more profit, and use,” consisted of commonplaces in which passages and “a kind of Observation” were copied verbatim and organized methodically.<fnref n="151" /> True, commonplace reading (concentrating on small fragments of text, excerpting them and placing them into notebooks, lists or other textual devices) was not among the practices that can be traced in Plumier’s work—or, for that matter, in his contemporary naturalists’. It had in fact lost most of its prominence among European scholarly methods by this time. Yet there is something telling in the comparison, for both are ways of reading/observing “quill in hand,” and instanced a form of reading as a process of annotation, extraction, and—more importantly—reconfiguration.

The second parallel, much more relevant for this chapter, concerns field records. By examining both field and reading records, we have seen that notes can take many forms—not only verbal, but also graphic. Just as written notes could adopt wide variations (from a hasty comment on the color of the neck of the pelican to a journal-like dated annotation of travel experiences, or from a one-word entry in a handmade legend

<footnote n="151">151 Vernon F. Snow, “Francis Bacon’s Advice to Fulke Greville on Research Techniques,” *Huntington Library Quarterly* 23, no. 4 (1960), 369-378, and Blair, *Too Much To Know*, 72.</footnote>
to an engraving to a faithful transcription of a printed text), so too did manuscript images
go from a perfunctory sketch to an ink-and-watercolor depiction. More importantly, the
analysis of Plumier's reading manuscripts and notes convincingly suggests the need of an
all-embracing approach to the manuscript culture deployed in the work of late
seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century naturalists. Only such a perspective can reveal
logics of inscription shared between, on the one hand, travel and field notes and, on the
other, forms of manuscript inscription that are not necessarily linked to circulation far
afield. A good example are the few extant loose sheets of Plumier's travel journal, mixing
in a crabbed handwriting descriptions of obscure species of plants, dreary observations
on the intensity and direction of the wind, and precious comments on his journey's
experiences and the political life of the American islands. Lorraine Daston has pointed
out, in this respect, the "kinship of form (short, private dated entries) and coincidence of
timing (16th and 17th centuries) of the diary and the notebook of experiment and field
observation."<fnref n="152" /> All in all, the case forcefully asserts that the appropriation "quill in hand"
of the little books of men was indissolubly linked, via ink and paper, with the Book of
Nature.

Conclusion

This chapter has addressed the role that Plumier’s graphic field records played in
mediating his observations of the American flora and fauna. Manuscript drawings and
notes, such as those on the anatomy of animals, are a case in point of how inscription
through images and text not only accompanied the impalpable act of observation, but in
fact were the site at which *voir* was constructed into *bien voir*, to use Fontenelle’s words. In
his anatomical drawings, Plumier fragmented natural specimens into their constitutive
parts—as the anatomical method Plumier learned (either in books, or else in the
anatomical lessons that took place at several Parisian institutions at the time) stipulated—
and profusely and meticulously annotated these depictions through letter keys. In doing
so, the friar was not only “dissecting through paper,” but was also registering his
observations so as to make them travel and be accepted as accurate and “exact” back in
Paris. The preoccupation of late seventeenth-century naturalists in France about making
“exact observations,” especially overseas, accounts for both the anatomical approach—
one proceeding part by part—and for the specific forms of note-taking and inscription in
Plumier’s papers. Sketches of coastal profiles are a good example of how inscriptions of

<footnote n="152">152 Lorraine Daston, “The Moral Economy of Science,” *Osiris* 10 (1995), 23.</footnote>
the kind aimed at registering what the naturalist saw overseas in a way that was deemed
ordered, learned, and, in Perrault's words, “exact.” The cross-references through letter
keys scattered all over Plumier's field drawings reflect the ordered attention of the
scholar—part by part, and layer by layer—that made his observations those of a
“travelling Philosopher,” praised by Fontenelle and Perrault as a precious rarity.

The crucial mediating role of practices of inscription in the act of scientific
observation has become more and more evident in recent years.<fnref n="153" /> Yet, as this chapter
argued, graphic and textual note-taking was far from limited to the direct observation of
the world: they pervasively accompanied other seemingly impalpable scholarly practices
such as reading. Plumier's observational drawings were the result of cultural practices
that were specific to his time, but were not exclusive to fieldwork. As shown in the last
section of this chapter, the inscription strategies deployed by Plumier in the drawings of
the crocodile or those of Martinique's coastline were not limited to field records. To
understand how and why manuscript inscriptions became, then and there, a reliable
means for transporting and accumulating data on natures far afield we need to examine
them as part of a broader scribal culture. And this includes reading practices of copy,
excerption, abridgement, and so forth. Among Plumier's manuscript papers were not
only notes taken overseas, but also intriguing documents that attest to the pervasive
practice of reading “quill in hand.” The “Synopsis botanica,” the “Icones plantarum,” or
the untitled manuscript at the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, show the often surprising ways
in which Plumier appropriated not only printed texts, but also printed images that he
copied, modified, and rearranged.

We need to turn now to another of the naturalist's material practices: not those by
which images were made, but those by which they were collected, stockpiled, and
arranged.

<footnote n="153">153 An exemplary recent analysis in this regard is Omar W. Nasim's study of graphic records in nineteenth-century nebular astronomy: *Observing by Hand: Sketching the Nebulae in the Nineteenth Century* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013).</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_65.png" /></figure>
4. “Soit en dessein, soit en nature”

The Order of Images in the Knowledge of Nature

John Ray liked ferns. “Who would not be delighted,” asked the English naturalist, “to see an arborescent fern, of a single woody stem, straight and undivided, bearing leaves only at the top like a palm-tree[?]”<fnref n="1" /> Whoever was such a great fan of this kind of non-flowering plant could not avoid at least two works. One was that of Hans Sloane, in particular his 1696 catalog of Jamaican plants, which Ray was actually prefacing when he found himself confessing his botanical preferences. The other was that of “one Father Plumier, who hath published at Paris two folios of West India Plants.” Though in fact only one volume—the *Description des plantes de l’Amérique*—had been printed by then and almost a decade was to elapse before the *Traité des fougères* would see the light of day, the English botanist soon spotted priority issues: “It is like he,” wrote Ray to Sloane, “may have anticipated your discovery.”<fnref n="2" /> Some months earlier, however, he was rather suspicious of that French monk of whom he had heard through his colleague at the Royal Society, the physician Tancred Robinson. Ray was by then struggling with the third volume of the *Historia plantarum*, his colossal attempt to make all known plants fit into the boxes of his classificatory system. Plumier’s images were part of the immense amount of information—texts, figures, and dried specimens—that he was managing to this end. In 1694, he complained to Sloane that “I have not yet compared the titles of your capillaries with Plumier’s descriptions, for the figures I have not by me.”<fnref n="3" />

<footnote n="1">¹ This was not the only kind of fern Ray enjoyed: “or, 2dly, capillaries of almost all kinds creeping on trees, or rocks, or the ground, with wires after the manner of strawberries; or, 3dly, capillaries, the tip of whose leaves turning downwards, and touching the earth, takes root and puts forth a new plant, so propagating their kind; or, 4thly, capillaries putting forth from the middle stem of their leaves two shoots, each bearing a spike of flowers and seeds?” Unpublished preface of John Ray for the *Catalogus Plantarum* by Hans Sloane, dated around 1695-6, in *The Correspondence of John Ray*, ed. Edwin Lankester (London: The Ray Society, 1848), 465-6. I thank Sebestian Kroupa for providing this quotation and, at a more general level, for his attentive eye to spot any reference to Plumier in his own sources. For he, too, likes ferns.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² John Ray to Hans Sloane, Black Notly, November 29, 1693, in BL Sloane MS 4036, fol. 158, transcribed in *Correspondence of John Ray*, 270.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ Ray to Sloane, Black Notley, February 3, 1694, in BL Sloane MS 4036, fol. 222-3: “I shall not be able to finish my Supplement this summer. I take into it all the last six volumes of ‘Hortus Malabaricus,’ and Plumier’s first vol. I hear there is a second published already, but have not yet seen it,” and Ray to Sloane, Black Notley, February 21, 1695, in BL Sloane MS 4036, fol. 227-8: “I have not yet compared the titles of your capillaries with Plumier’s descriptions, for the figures I have not by me, having remitted the book Mr. Smith sent me.”</footnote>
Delightful as they were, ferns became particularly problematic for Ray, both because of the absence of flowers or fruits (“the difference of these plants must consist in the different figure and texture of the leaves”) and because of the remarkable number of sometimes closely similar individuals. He initially considered the images of that obscure French friar with a certain circumspection.

> I cannot but wonder how and from whom he should procure so many Jamaica capillaries;
> who in that island should be so skillful and diligent as to find out and collect so many; and
> whether he did not get a sight of some sheets of your [Sloane's] Catalogue. I dare say before
> your discovery, no herbarist imagined there had been half that number to be found there,
> nay, I think I may say in all America.<fnref n="4" />

Underneath the flattery, Ray's lines reveal a legitimate concern: there were far too many ferns. A couple of months later, Ray had to acknowledge that, indeed, this multiplicity was not an exaggeration, especially when he saw Sloane's catalog: “I confess, when I first saw the author's [Sloane's] stock of dried plants collected in Jamaica, and some of the Caribee islands, I was much surprised, and even astonished, at the number of capillary kind, not thinking there had been so many to be found in both the Indies. I might say much of the other generas [sic].”<fnref n="5" />

Ray's amazement reflected that of a community of naturalists engulfed by the anxiety of what they saw as a crushingly multitudinous (although not infinite) variety of the natural world. The number of plant species was believed to be constant from the time of Creation until the end of days, but those known by scholars had grown swiftly in the previous two hundred years or so: in the early sixteenth century, Matthias de l'Obel described about 500 species of plants; by the mid-century, Hieronymus Bock was listing 800, and a few decades later, Dalechamps was already at 2,000; by the 1640s, Bauhin counted at least 6,000, and Tournefort raised the number to more than 10,000.

The sheer number of images produced and stockpiled by Plumier reflected not only the perception of information overload that had prevailed among scholars by then, but also the relatively new contours of a field that was adopting an increasingly documentary approach. Take for example the *Traité des fougères*, open it to, say, plate 29 and begin to turn one page at a time. What do you see? A species of bracken, a *Dennstaedtia*, another *Dennstaedtia*, a *Polybotrya*, a *Losophoria quadripinnata*, a *Ctenitis*, and another 170 engraved

<footnote n="4">⁴ Ray to Sloane, Black Notley, July 22, 1696, in *Correspondence of Ray*, 298-9.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ Ray's unpublished preface to Sloane's *Catalogus Plantarum*, in *Correspondence of Ray*, 466.</footnote>
images of ferns strikingly similar to each other for the eye of the non-specialist. Take now one of Plumier's folders of manuscript drawings to find another arresting series of images. On fishes, for instance: a greater weaver, a smooth trunkfish, a common snook, a bonefish, a species of tilefish, a great barracuda, and almost 120 others.<fnref n="6" /> Plumier's manuscript corpus of drawings and printed books actually consist of long series of images on different—although perhaps often quite similar—Caribbean animals and plants. A rapid survey of the friar's extant manuscripts reveals noteworthy numbers. It comprises more than a hundred sheets of drawings of shells (with several figures each), about 180 pages of depicted birds, and nearly 300 of fishes. At least 1,100-odd pieces of botanical iconography can be counted on American plants alone, plus all those on specimens growing in France, either naturally or at the Jardin du roi.<fnref n="7" /> Numerous were also the pages of written descriptions, catalogs, and lists, as well as the volumes of graphic and textual copies and excerpts that were one of the riddles of the previous chapter. Even his printed volumes, examined in the next chapter, are a good example of visual seriality: the *Description* had 108 engravings, while Plumier intended to include more than 220 plates in the *Traité des fougères*, but these eventually had to be cut to only 172.<fnref n="8" />

Just like Ray's bulky, carefully ordered catalog of all known plants, Plumier's images both accepted and attempted to make sense of the crushing variety of natural forms—arresting even for an area as limited as that of the French West Indian islands. Both scholars were struggling with the same issue: not so much order and classification, but rather clear identification. Naturalists by 1700 could simply not do without books: a good amount of their time was devoted to collating literary sources and contrasting the information they drew from them with the real world. But where Ray patiently listed each of the large variety of ferns and any other plant that purportedly existed in the world (giving the literary source from which he was borrowing the names and, when available, a brief description), Plumier carried out this endeavor by means of the

<footnote n="6">⁶ For the modern equivalences of these ferns and fishes, I used David B. Lellinger and George R. Proctor, "The Ascriptions of Plumier's Ferns Plates," *Taxon* 32, no. 4 (1983), 565-71 and Theodore W. Pietsch, "Charles Plumier (1646-1704) and his Drawings of French and American Fishes," *Archives of Natural History* 28, no. 1 (2001), 1-57.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ Among Plumier's volumes of drawings on plants growing in France are BCMNHN MS 11-5 "Penu botanicum, ex omni plantarum genere adstructum...," MS 16 "Area umbelliferarum Horti regii parisiensis, seu plantae umbelliferae, quas in Horto regio demosntrbat clarissimus D. Jos. Pitton Tournefort," and MS 17-8 "Hortus botanicus ex singulis plantarum generibus ad leges institutionum rei herbariae constitutis singulari et vulgatiori specie consitus. Area prima... Anno 1702 Area secund. Annis 1703-1704." Further research would perhaps need to be made on these volumes of drawings to study their function.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ Compare with cases of seriality in the nineteenth century: Nick Hopwood, Simon Schaffer, and Jim Secord, eds., "Seriality and Scientific Objects in the Nineteenth Century," special issue, *History of Science* 48 (2010), 251-499.</footnote>
iconographic form. Ray's goal was to craft a comprehensive and ordered list of all flora—including all novelties, but getting rid of any repetition, such as those due to a same plant being named diversely by different authors. The goal of Plumier was slightly different: he aimed at making an exhaustive catalog, too, but only of those plants and animals that he had encountered during his wanderings through the islands—a catalog that stood for the objects themselves and allowed scholars like Ray, aspiring to encyclopedic enumerations, to contrast the information provided by previous authors. The ideas of identification and inventory were behind both endeavors; they both drove the project of natural history at the time. Here, the order sought was not so much that of nature itself, but rather that of the knowledge naturalists had of it: at a more mundane and down-to-earth level, this was about ordering images, papers, and records.<fnref n="9" />

In his many, many drawings and copperplates of the vegetables and creatures inhabiting the West Indian islands, Plumier was proposing the visual form as an instrument of knowledge, a device serving the purposes of natural history in several ways: each drawing captured the unstable, volatile act of observation onto paper, yes, but the combination and accumulation of one picture after another also was part of the naturalist's quest for knowledge. To put it another way, the abundance of images in Plumier's corpus is a historical question in itself, one at the confluence of contemporary phenomena such as the collecting of art, books, and natural specimens, the inventorial concerns of botanists, and the technologies of information management through paper records. Such a stockpiling approach to the visual representation of exotic floras and faunas was neither new nor specific to Plumier. It should actually be related to a series of cultural and epistemic developments that affected the work of students of nature by 1700.

<footnote n="9">⁹ Probably the most famous discussion of order in natural history at the turn of the eighteenth century is the famous one given by Michel Foucault in his *Les mots et les choses. Une archéologies des sciences humaines* (Paris: Gallimard, 1994 [1966]). I would have liked to offer here a more thorough discusison of Foucault’s chapter on natural history, but I find it (as most of Foucault’s writing) as beautifully written as confusing. The idea of order I have in mind here is rather the one articulated by Roger Chartier for the book: “whether they are in manuscript or in print, books are objects whose forms, if they cannot impose the sense of the texts that they bear, at least command the uses that can invest them and the appropriations to which they are susceptible. Works and discourses exist only when they become physical realities. . . . Understanding the principles that govern the ‘order of discourse’ supposes that the principles underlying the processes of production, communication, and reception of books (and other objects that bear writing) will also be deciphered in a rigorous manner. . . . Keen attention should be paid to the technical, visual, and physical devises that organize the reading of writing when writing becomes a book.” Roger Chartier, *The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europea between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries* (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994 [1992]), viii-ix.</footnote>
This chapter deals with Plumier as a compiler and with his iconographic corpus in
terms of accumulation. I consider his drawings and copperplates along other, non-
graphic scriptural genres and look at how they worked as material instruments for coping
with a vertiginous growth of information on flora and fauna. While the previous chapter
analyzed the role that iconographic and non-symbolic inscriptions played in
mediating the act of observation in the field and reading from printed books, this chapter
deals with the way in which paper served to collect, manage, and organize observations
in large numbers. It interrogates what Plumier might have had in mind while he was in
the process of compiling such a gargantuan number of drawings on the natural things
growing in, and wandering through, the French West Indies, and which his cultural
references may have been when doing so.

**Collection and collation<fnref n="10" />**

The abundance of drawings in both Plumier’s manuscript corpus and printed
volumes requires attention in itself. The naturalist’s work with series of images involved
not only his own depictions, but also those of others, as instanced in the friar’s copy of
Filippo Bonnani’s engravings of shells from his *Ricreatione dell’ochio et de la mente* (1681),
which he colored carefully, annotated profusely in Latin, and completed with images of
American seashells from his own corpus (fig. 4.1).<fnref n="11" /> Indeed, working with series of
images by other authors meant both making use of them and appropriating them not
only in an abstract way, but sometimes in a very material one, as chapter 3 demonstrated.
The *Synopsis botanica* offers yet another example of this blurry boundary between original
and unoriginal work, for the parts drawn from Tournefort and Plumier’s own additions
and corrections intermingled. These cases not only instantiate the pervasiveness of
material practices of appropriation, such as copying and abridging, but also the centrality
of various kinds of paper records to deal with the scholarly perception of an overload of
information—of natural specimens as much as of the books dealing with them.

Perhaps the only reason for Plumier’s collection not being but a “paper” one was
just the result of the Atlantic journey’s hazardousness: Lister reminded us that the friar
had “lost his *Specimens* of all things” in a shipwreck but, by pure chance, not the drawings
and notes, “having fortunately logged them in other Vessels”; and he stressed: “so that

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ I use the title of Staffan Müller-Wille, “Collection and Collation: Theory and Practice of Linnaean Botany,” *Studies in History and Philosophy of the Biological and Biomedical Sciences* 38, no. 3 (2007), 541-62.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹ BNF Est. JB-68-4, “Animalium testacerum observatio A. P. Philippo Bonnani Societatis Iesu. Ad usum Fr. C. Plumier minimi Botanici Regii.”</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_66.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 4.1. Plumier’s manuscript additions to his copy of Filippo Bonanni’s *Ricreatione dell’occhio et de la mente* (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Estampes et de la photographie, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>

the things themselves I did not see.” Nevertheless, Plumier’s work with collections of images (both others’ and his own) can be seen as an attempt to exploit the materiality of paper to create meaning through the accumulation and arrangement of images. As it has been suggested in chapter 1, the descriptive endeavor of natural history was germane to its cumulative ambitions. This also was not new: “paper museums” pervaded the study of both nature and antiquities during the early modern period, and one of the best-studied examples is that of Cassiano dal Pozzo’s *museo cartaceo*.<fnref n="12" /> Here again, antiquarianism provides a handy comparison. The ten volumes plus five of supplements of Montfaucon’s *L’Antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures* are worth recalling: Montfaucon had not originally collected the thirty to forty thousand figures included in the plates with

<footnote n="12">¹² On the “paper museum” tradition in antiquarianism, see Élisabeth Décultot, ed., *Musées de papier. L’Antiquité en livres (1600-1800)* (Paris: Éditions du Louvre and Gourcoff Grandenigo, 2010), and Décultot, “Du musée d’images au musée imaginaire. Les recueils d’antiquités et la tradition des musées de papier aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles,” *Revue de l’Art* 182, no. 4 (2013), 19-26. On dal Pozzo’s case in particular, see Francis Haskell’s introduction to *The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo* ([Ivrea]: Olivetti, 1992), 1-10; Irene Baldriga, *L’occhio della lince: I primi Lincei tra arte, scienza e collezionismo (1603-1630)* (Rome: Accademia nazionale dei Lincei, 2002); David Freedberg, *The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), and more recently Stephanie Moser, “Making Expert Knowledge through the Image: Connections between Antiquarianism and Early Modern Scientific Illustration,” *Isis* 105 (2014), 58-99, esp. 65-76.</footnote>
the intention of printing them (or at least this is what he tells us), but as part of the
“Collection of Drawings and antique Pieces” that he had begun “about six and twenty
Years ago.” His work on antiquity consisted partly—and crucially—in the gathering of
antiquities both literally and by means of images. <fnref n="13" /> Montfaucon’s “collection of
drawings,” as we have seen in chapter 1, were also related to the practice of travel: he
declared to have “spent the most part of the time” during his three-year journey to Italy
with “increasing my Collections (*mes recueils*).” <fnref n="14" /> Montfaucon knew that he was not
inventing paper museums; he referred in particular to the “incomparable” Nicolas-
Claude Fabri de Peiresc, the Aixois antiquarian, insatiable collector, and prolific
correspondent in the early-seventeenth-century European Republic of Letters. Peiresc, in
the words of Montfaucon, “collected more monuments on almost every part of
Antiquity, either in images or in kind [soit en dessein, soit en nature], than anybody else we
know.” The Maurist praised particularly Peiresc’s “short explanations” and lamented that
most of his corpus of manuscripts was “either lost or dispersed here & there,” for this
corpus “supplied [fournissoit] materials to most of the scholars in Europe.”<fnref n="15" />

The case of Peiresc's collection of antiquities, by means of either the objects
themselves or images reproducing them, and its inscription within the networks of
European scholarly exchange hints at both the social and the intellectual position that
such collections of drawings occupied in seventeenth-century descriptive fields of
knowledge—be they the study of nature or that of the past's remains. The specific
problems of credit and authority related to such forms of accumulation will be dealt with
later in this chapter. Here it is sufficient merely to note once again the parallel between
antiquarianism and natural history in this period. In terms of visual seriality, collections
of drawings constituted both a documentary and expository mode for organizing and
accumulating data, one closely related to the culture of collecting in late-seventeenth- and

<footnote n="13">13 Bernard de Montfaucon, *Antiquity explained, and represented in sculptures, by the learned father Montfaucon*, trans. David Humphreys, vol. 1 (London: printed by J. Tonson and J. Watts, 1721), sig. [b1r]."</footnote>

<footnote n="14">14 Montfaucon, *Antiquity explained*, trans. Humphreys, sig. [b1r].</footnote>

<footnote n="15">15 This translation is my own, for Humphreys omits in his translation the sentence “soit en dessein, soit en nature.” Bernard de Montfaucon, *L’antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures*, vol. 1 (Paris: chez Florentin Delaulne, Hilaire Foucault, Michel Clousier, Jean-Geoffroy Nyon, Etienne Ganeau, Nicolas Gosselin, et Pierre-François Giffart, 1719), viii: “l’incomparable M. de Peiresc, qui a plus ramassé de monumens sur Presque toute l’antiquité, soit en dessein, soit en nature, que nul autre que nous connoissons, qui ajoutoit ordinoirement à ces monumens des explications courtes, que nous voions encore aujourd’hui dans quelques-uns de ses manuscrits, & qui fournissoit des materiaux à la plûpart des savans de l’Europe: c’est dommage que ce grand nombre de manuscrits soit ou perdu ou dissipé d’un côté & d’autre.” On Peiresc, the indispensable reference is the work of Peter N. Miller: *Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century* (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), and *Peiresc’s Mediterranean World* (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).</footnote>
early-eighteenth-century France. Engravings, etchings, and manuscript drawings were among the preferred items of collection for amateurs and connoisseurs—including Louis XIV himself, as shown in the so-called *vélins du Roi*, the extensive series of botanical and zoological drawings on vellum initiated in the 1660s, or the collection of books of engravings printed by the Imprimerie royale and known as the *Cabinet du Roi*.

The culture of collecting had specific forms in the work of the naturalist around 1700, when accumulation became increasingly specialized and linked to an ideal of exhaustive inventory. Herbaria, or collections of dried plants, offer an opportunity for comparison. As noted by Brian Ogilvie, the herbarium (also called “winter garden” or *hortus siccus*, “dried garden”) developed in connection with the voracious Renaissance appetite for curious things of any kind. Unlike other collections, however, herbaria were not always an end in itself, but often a tool of knowledge for naturalists, too. Ogilvie also indicates that “with the transition to phytographic natural history [that is, the one concerned with the detailed descriptions of plants], techniques for reinforcing memory,” such as the field notebook and the herbarium, became central to naturalists’ undertakings.<fnref n="16" /> Far from declining, herbaria became even more prevalent during the eighteenth century: it is worth recalling the case of Hans Sloane, who gathered a collection of dried plants of more than 250 volumes (partly through acquisitions, such as Petiver’s considerable collection). Linnaeus, too, is reputed to have made extensive use of an unbound herbarium that he stored in a purpose-built cabinet designed by himself.<fnref n="17" />

Collections of dried plants were resources de rigueur for the students of nature in seventeenth-century France. It was a crucial instrument for the stockpiling of botanical information—especially, but not exclusively, from far-flung locations—and the drying and affixing of plants onto paper constituted one of the basic tasks of traveling naturalists, although it was not necessarily an easy one. A good example of this practice is the Jesuit Adrien Le Breton (b. ca. 1662), a missionary wandering through the West Indies in the early eighteenth century—he never coincided with Plumier. Le Breton was a

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ On herbaria, see Brian Ogilvie, *The Science of Describing: Natural History in the Renaissance* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 42-3, 150, 165-74, and Jean-Baptiste Saint-Lager, “Histoire des herbiers,” *Annales de la Société Botanique de Lyon. Notes et mémoires* 13 (1885), 1-120</footnote>

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ Sloane’s herbarium has been the object of a digital database by the London Natural History Museum: http://www.nhm.ac.uk/research-curation/scientific-resources/collections/botanical-collections/sloane-herbarium/index.html. See Charlie Jarvis, Mark Spencer, and Robert Huxley, “Sloane’s plant specimens at the Natural History Museum,” in *From Books to Bezoars. Sir Hans Sloane and His Collections*, ed. Michael Hunter, Alison Walker, and Arthur MacGregor (London: British Library Publishing, 2012), 137-57. On Linnaeus’s *hortus siccus*, see Staffan Müller-Wille, “Linnaeus’ Herbarium Cabinet: A Piece of Furniture and Its Function,” *Endeavour* 30, no. 2 (2006), 60-4.</footnote>
correspondent of, and supplier of specimens for, naturalists in Paris like the Jussieu brothers and Fagon, and he actually shipped several boxes of specimens to France, along with lists and inventories of their contents. He sent to his metropolitan fellows plants dried as well as possible (for, he complained, it was difficult to find good drying paper in those remote places), as well as grains and vegetable gums stored into coconuts, for “lack of small vases.”<fnref n="18" /> The unsung Jesuit was not alone in expressing his troubles with drying plants overseas to his satisfaction: during his journey to the Levant, the great Tournefort, too, regularly sent specimens to colleagues and especially to patrons in Paris. In a letter of June 1700 addressed to the abbé Jean-Paul Bignon (1662-1743), the démonstrateur explained that he was sending “three [plants] of each species . . . & if upon my return you want to give me one . . . for it is very difficult to dry many [plants].”<fnref n="19" />

In actual fact, Tournefort was at the origins of one of the largest French herbaria of the eighteenth century—along with the one assembled by Sébastian Vaillant some years afterward. The botanist referred to the herbarium in terms of a seemingly boundless stockpiling of natural information—terms that can easily be applied to Plumier’s collection of images. In the “Dictionary or Explanation of Botanical Terms” included in his *Élémens de botanique*, the professor at the Jardin du roi defined an herbarium as “precisely a pile [*amas*] of dried plants that we conserve in boxes or books, so that we can examine them in detail during all the seasons of the year.” Tournefort highlighted that *herbier* was a homonymic term, for it could also denote “a Treatise, or a History of plants”—in English, an herbal.<fnref n="20" /> He was in fact the first to use the term “herbarium” (*herbier*) to designate what was previously referred to as mainly *hortus siccus* or “dried

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ BCMNHN MS 667 “Description des plantes de l’Amérique par le Père Le Breton, avec une lettre de ce Religieux.”</footnote>

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, “Mémoires que Monsieur Tournefort, docteur en médecine de la Faculté de Paris, associé-pensionnaire de l’Académie roiale des Sciences, a envoiez, en différens temps, pendant son voyage en Orient, à monsieur l’abbé Bignon, conseiller d’Estat et président de ladite Académie des Sciences, depuis le mois de mars 1700, jusques au mois de mai 1702,” quoted in Denis Lamy and Aline Pelletier, “La conservation et la valorisation de l’Herbier de Tournefort au Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle,” *La Lettre de l’OCIM* 130 (2010), 20: “trois [plantes] de chaque espèce . . . & si à mon retour vous voulez m’en donner une . . . car il est fort malaisé d’en sécher beaucoup.”</footnote>

<footnote n="20">²⁰ Tournefort, *Élémens de botanique ou méthode pour connoître les plantes*, 3 vols. (Paris: de l’Imprimerie royale, 1694), vol. 1, 547-8: “Herbier. C’est proprement un amas de plantes seches que l’on conserve dans des boites ou dans des livres; afin de les pouvoir examiner avec soin dans toutes les saisons de l’année. . . . Herbier signifie aussi un Traité, ou une Histoire de plantes. Gesner avoit dessein d’écrire une grande Histoire de Plantes, qu’il apelloit *Herbarium. Brunfelius* a intitulé son Traité des Plantes *Herbarium*, &c.” On Tournefort’s herbarium, see Lamy and Pelletier, “Herbier de Tournefort”; Philippe Morat, Gérard-Guy Aymonin, and Jean-Claude Jolinon, eds., *L’herbier du monde. Cincq siècles d’aventures et de passions botaniques au Muséum national d’histoire naturelle* (Paris: Muséum national d’histoire naturelle and Les Arènes/L’iconoclasme, 2004), and Thomas Grenon, ed., *L’Herbier du Muséum. L’aventure d’une collection* (Paris: Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, 2013).</footnote>
garden”—the term was erstwhile used only for illustrated books of plants. But more generally, Tournefort’s work as a naturalist entailed a well-tended collection that was not limited to plants: the writer of the well-known guide to the most curious places in Paris, Germain Brice, presented the professor as the owner of “a very curious cabinet, full of all what he was able to gather along his long journeys to various places: not only extraordinary & bizarre productions, such as Minerals, Congelations [i.e. “solidifications,” such as stalactites], natural Salts, sea Excrescences, Petrifications; but particularly very rare Shells, of which he has a gathering of more than three thousand of an admirable beauty & choice.” There also were “Skeletons of different monstrous animals, Fruits from the Indies of an extraordinary figure, & thousands of other things of this sort.” But the jewel of Tournefort’s cabinet, Brice tells us, was the herbarium:

> His dried Garden [*Jardin sec*], as he calls it himself, is also a unique singularity that, no doubt, one can see nowhere else. It is composed of more than seven thousand dried Plants, from different places, affixed very properly on leaves of paper, with their names & their histories on the bottom.<fnref n="21" />

The English naturalist Martin Lister, of course, did not miss the chance to visit Tournefort and his collection during his journey to Paris in 1698, although most of his attention went to his beloved shells rather than the dried plants, about which he barely wrote a couple of lines: “I shall say nothing of his vast Collection of Seeds and Fruits, and dried Plants, which alone amount to 8000, and in this he equals, if not excells all the most curious Herborists in *Europe*."<fnref n="22" /> Bernard de Fontenelle (Tournefort’s biographer, so to speak) tells us that the botanist began his herbarium at a young age from his early herborizations in Southern France and Northern Spain; he also tells us (with an eloquence close to fiction) about the botanist’s “pleasure of seeing [those dried plants] in large number, complete, well conserved, and arranged according to a handsome order in

<footnote n="21">²¹ Germain Brice, *Description nouvelle de la ville de Paris, ou Recherche curieuse des choses les plus singulieres & les plus remarquables qui se trouvent à present dans cette grande Ville*, vol. 2 (Paris: chez Nicolas Le Gras, chez Nicolas Le Clerc and Barthelemy Girin, 1698), 15: “Il a un cabinet tres-curieux, rempli de tout ce qu’il a pû amasser dans les longs voïages qu’il a faits en differens endroits; non-seulement de productions extraordinaires & bizarres, comme des Mineraux, des Congelations, des Sels naturels, des Expressances de mer, des Petrifications; mais particulierement des Coquilles tres-rares, dont il a un amas de plus de trois mille, d’une beauté & d’un choix admirable. Son Jardin sec, comme il l’appelle lui-même, est encore une singularité unique que l’on ne verra point ailleurs, sans doute. Il est composé de plus de sept mille Plantes seches, de differens endroits, collées sur des feüilles de papier tres-proprement, avec leurs noms & leurs histoires au bas. . . . Avec ces choses il conserve des Squelets de differents animaux monstrueux, des Fruits des Indes d’une figure extraordinaire, & mille autres choses de cette sorte.”</footnote>

<footnote n="22">²² Martin Lister, *A Journey to Paris in the Year 1698* (London: printed for Jacob Tonson, 1699), 61.</footnote>
large Books of white paper.”<fnref n="23" /> Celibate and childless, Tournefort bequeathed his collection of natural history, herbarium included, to Louis XIV with a very explicit purpose: “to intend it for use by Messieurs of the Royal Academy of Sciences.” The most precious pieces, however, were eventually claimed for the king’s personal cabinet, while the rest of the collection went to the Jardin du roi. The notaries in charge of the collection’s inventory described it as consisting of four closets “full of dried plants, each on a leaf of gray paper.”<fnref n="24" /> Tournefort intended his herbarium to be, after his death, what he created it for: a research tool on paper.

So, what about Plumier? Were his images intended to replace the headache of
making, transporting, and storing an herbarium? It is not clear whether the friar
constituted some sort of “dried garden,” large or small, of his own. What we do know is
Lister’s reporting that the friar “was more than once Shipwrackt, and lost his *Specimens* of
all things.” However, a 1722 catalog of the library of the convent of Minims at Place
Royale listed, among Plumier’s materials, 8 volumes of “dried plants” (*plantes desseichées*).
When the friar’s collection was claimed by the Bibliothèque du roi, the keeper of the
print’s cabinet inventoried nine cardboard or parchment folio folders of a certain
“Herbarium vivum” or “Phitoxeron”—from the Greek *φυτόν*, “plant,” and ξηρόν, “dried
thing”—among his papers. The plants collected, however, were probably not from the
Americas but a work done at the Jardin du roi, for the keeper described it as “desiccated
plants collected from the Paris Royal Garden by Charles Plumier” (*Herbarium vivum seu
Phitoxeron vel Plantae dissicatae ex Hortu regio Parisiensi collectae studio et opera Car. Plumier*).<fnref n="25" />
Each folder was listed by the name of the first and last plants included: the first folder
beginning with *Mandragora folio rotundo* (the first species of the first genus of the first
section of the first class in the 1694 *Élémens*) suggests that it was arranged according to

<footnote n="23">²³ Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, “Éloge de M. de Tournefort,” in *Histoire de l’Académie royale des sciences. Année MDCCVIII* (Paris: par la Compagnie des Libraires, 1708), 146: “Il n’appartient pas à tout le monde de comprendre que le Plaisir de les voir en grand nombre, bien entieres, bien conservées, disposées selon un bel ordre dans de grands Livres de papier blanc, le payoit suffisament de tout ce qu’elles lui avoient coûté.”</footnote>

<footnote n="24">²⁴ G. Dupart, “Les manuscrits de Tournefort conservés au Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle,” in G. Becker et al., *Tournefort* (Paris: Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, 1957), 207-38; H. W. Lack, “Die frühe botanische Erforschung der Insel Kreta,” *Annalen des Naturhistorischen Museums in Wien* 98 B Suppl. (1996), 198; Lamy and Pelletier, “Herbier de Tournefort,” 22-3. The quotation from the notaries is from AN Minutier central des notaires de Paris, ET/LVII/247, quoted in Lamy and Pelletier, “Herbier de Tournefort,” 23.</footnote>

<footnote n="25">²⁵ It is by the name of “Herbarium vivum,” however, that the entire corpus of drawings by Plumier was mentioned by some authors during the second half of the eighteenth century and the nineteenth century, for instance by Piganiol de la Force in his *Description de Paris, de Versailles, de Marly, de Meudon, de S. Cloud, de Fontainebleau*, vol. 4 (Paris: chez Charles-Nicolas Poirion, 1742), 360.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_67.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 4.2. (**left**) A specimen of *Filix aurea, pinnulis rotunde incisis divisa* collected by Plumier and conserved in Tournefort's herbarium. (Muséum nationale d'histoire naturelle, Paris.) (**right**) The engraving of the same specimen included in Plumier's *Traité des fougères*. (Biblioteca histórica "Marqués de Valdecilla," Universidad Complutense de Madrid.)</figcaption></figure>

Tournefort's method. Whether issued from a hypothetical personal collection or not, some American specimens collected and dried by Plumier can also be found in several herbaria in Paris, mostly Tournefort's, but also Vaillant's, Jussieu's, and Danty d'Isnard's, all of them at the Jardin du roi. Researchers have been able to establish correspondences between Plumier's printed and unpublished images of ferns, on the one hand, and specimens at these herbaria, on the other (fig. 4.2): some of them were labeled in the friar's own handwriting, with references to his *Traité des fougères* and the same naming used for those plants in his book. Several other specimens gathered and prepared by Plumier also found their way into English collections, such as Sloane's herbarium in London.<fnref n="26" />

<footnote n="26">²⁶ Lister, *Journey to Paris*, 73; Maz. MS 4147 “Catalogue alphabétique de la bibliothèque des Minimes de la Place Royale, à Paris.” For Plumier’s dried specimens in other naturalist’s herbaria at the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle and correspondences to his manuscript and printed images, see Georges</footnote>
The comparison of Plumier’s manuscript depictions or the plates of his botany books with the contemporary practice of herbaria allows us to highlight the importance that seriality played in the work of naturalists around 1700. The parallels between the one and the other methods of collecting are certainly striking at times: the friar’s images come immediately to mind upon reading about Tournefort’s archive of plants “affixed very properly on paper, with their names & their histories in the bottom.” Just like Plumier’s images, Tournefort’s herbarium stood halfway between the culture of collecting and the practices of information management on which natural history was based. Several points of similarity can be established between a “dried garden” and a “drawn” one. To start with, they both enabled two of the main tasks of the naturalist, inventory and identification, by presenting one plant per page, carefully named and described. The pages thus served as both a repository of work and a curiosity worth a visit.<fnref n="27" /> Draftsmanship offered a viable alternative to the bothersome task of drying and conserving plants overseas—at least for those blessed with such a skill or able to afford a draftsman. For scholars like Plumier and Tournefort, therefore, it seems that herbaria and images were two of the principal means for establishing evidence in botanical knowledge: captured on paper in one way or another, they constituted the sources on which the work of identification and inventory could be accomplished. Take as an example the letter of Tournefort to the English naturalist William Courten (1642-1702), also known as Charleton:

> I would be very grateful if you could send me as soon as possible all the species of gramen [Secale] and Muscus that Mr Raius has named or described, for I intend to give them new names, given that in Mr Raius’s descriptions they cannot be distinguished as exactly as I would wish. It is not that this great man has not described them very regularly, but you know that this sort of plants need to be properly engraved or must be compared with the dry specimens.<fnref n="28" />

<footnote>Cremers and Cécile Aupic, “Spécimens de Charles Plumier déposés à Paris dans les collections de ptéridophytes américains de Tournefort, Vaillant, Danty d’Isnard et Jussieu,” *Adansonia*, 3rd ser., 29, no. 2 (2007), 159-93. For Plumier’s specimens in English herbaria, such as Sloane’s, see below ch. 6. On the difficulties of specimen conservation and transport in the eighteenth-century French and English Atlantic exchange of natural specimens, see Christopher M. Parsons and Kathleen S. Murphy, “Ecosystems Under Sail: Specimen Transport in the Eighteenth-Century French and British Atlantics,” *Early American Studies* 10, no. 3 (2012), 503-29.</footnote>

<footnote n="27">²⁷ For the social place of Plumier’s collection of drawings, see below in this chapter.</footnote>

<footnote n="28">²⁸ Tournefort to Charleton [William Courten], Paris, June 25, 1699, in BL MS Sloane 4062, fol. 317-8: “Vous m’obligerez tres sensiblement de m’envoyer au plutôt toutes les especes de gramen et de Muscus que Mr Raius a nommées ou decrites, parce que j’apprehende de les nommer sous d’autres noms, veu</footnote>
"Soit en dessein, soit en nature": either "engraved" (or simply drawn, for that matter) or "the dry specimens." Thinking about images as a collection helps us to understand Plumier's making and gathering of drawings on the West Indian flora and fauna in relation to the practices of knowledge by which nature was by that time studied. The friar understood his own natural historical work in terms of seriality, and very often referred to his printed volumes and some of his compilations of manuscript drawings with the term *recueil*.<fnref n="29" /> *Recueil* was a common word for referring to volumes in which several different works were bound together, but especially to collections, usually of curiosities—Furetière’s first definition of it was a “collection, a heap, an assemblage of several things,” and his examples referred to the king’s cabinet (“a *recueil* of the most beautiful, rarest curious things”) and to cabinets in general (“a *recueil* of the most beautiful medals, of the most beautiful paintings, the most beautiful prints of Europe”).<fnref n="30" />

It is not clear by which exact modalities images such as those by Plumier stood for the objects they represented: were images treated as if they were real specimens in terms of epistemic practices? What seems pretty clear is that a series of parallels, especially at the level of practices, can be drawn between the collection of drawings and that of naturalia. One of these—a crucial one actually—is the possibility of comparing different specimens. The use of analogous modes of representation for the depiction of different animals and plants in Plumier’s images reinforced the factuality of the specimens represented. Take, for instance, the drawings of seashells. Seashells were a coveted object of collection for both amateurs and naturalists, not only in actuality but also in the form of paper collections. The abovementioned case of Bonnani is a good example, for the author announced his book as a source of recreation for both the eye and the mind (“*É si curiosa, e si dilettevole la cognitione della natura!*”), and his book was openly

<footnote>qu'on ne les sauroit distinguer avec l'exactitude que je souhaite sur les descriptions de Mr Raius. Ce n'est pas que ce grand homme ne les ayt decrites fort regulierement mais vous savez que ces sortes de plantes doivent etre gravées proprement ou bien il faut les comparer avec des exemplaires secs."</footnote>

<footnote n="29">²⁹ "Je ne doute pas que ce recueil . . . des fougères, capilaires, &c. que j'ay découvert . . . ne fasse que plaisir aux curieux" (BCMNHN MS 32, unpaginated), or "j'avois mesme resoulu de faire un nouveau pinax, ou recueil générale des plantes" (Description, sig. â iii). The Secretary of State of the Navy also described Plumier's work with the same term ("il a raporté un recueil de ce qu'il a fait dans l'isle de la Martinique," AN MAR B² 66, fol. 252), as did some of the official documentation ("Sa Majesté envoyant aus Isles de l'Amérique le Père Charles Plumier . . . pour continuer le recueil qu'il a commencé des graines, plantes et arbres desdites isles et en composer un de poissons, oyseux et autres animaux de ce pays," ANOM COL B¹⁴, fol. 95).</footnote>

<footnote n="30">³⁰ Antoine Furetière, *Dictionnaire universel, contenant generalement tous les mots frangais tant vieux que modernes, & termes des sciences et des arts*, 2nd ed. (The Hague: Arnoud and Reineier Leers, 1701), vol. 3, sig. [Nnn3v].</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_68.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 4.3. Two views of the same white seashell. (Bibliothèque centrale du Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>

addressed to “*curiosi* who invested in the commerce of curiosities.”<fnref n="31" /> A good number of the drawings of shells among Plumier’s corpus might well have not been primarily aimed at neither publication, nor the constitution of a “working collection” in the way of Montafaucon’s or Peiresc’s (or in fact most of Plumier’s own) *recueils*, for they are too exquisitely drawn: their complex patterns and colors well-rendered, their exterior shaded, their suppositious shadows depicted, and the imaginary surface on which they lay painted so as to accentuate the light, whitish tones of some of them (fig. 4.3). In such cases, only occasionally did written notes stain the delicate beauty of the depiction. Of another kind were those figures in which the friar delineated the shells by pencil or ink: these were rarely painted, but included written comments to indicate the colors of each part of the structure (“fonds couleur de chair avec quelques touches couleur de rose, taches longues noires, le cul fauve foncé”), as well as to identify the species and to add some descriptions. These might as well have been preparatory designs for paintings. The

<footnote n="31">³¹ Dániel Margócsy, *Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014), 55.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_69.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 4.4. Two- or three-view images of five seashells. Note that each shell is depicted from several views and following the same pattern, from the body whorl to the aperture (Bibliothèque centrale du Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>

rendering was often no less deftly executed: their wavy or coiled calcareous outsides were finely depicted only by the means of ink or graphite (fig. 4.4).<fnref n="32" />

Carefully colored or not, Plumier's figures most often adopted a mode of exposition persistent in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century images of seashells: two views of the specimen were presented (the body whorl or the bulged "back" of the carapace, and the aperture or the "mouth"), sometimes even three or four, as if the object was turning on its own axis.³³ It is difficult to be sure of these drawings' intended audience—perhaps, as almost any of the friar's images, appreciation of their aesthetic qualities was coextensive with recognition of their standing for matters of fact. What is clear is that this mode of exposition, along the representational style described above, highlighted the "factuality" of Plumier's seashells. If there was any "paper museum" within Plumier's corpus, the bunch of drawings on shells was it.

<footnote n="32">³² BCMNHN MS 26 "Conchilia Americana Authore Patre Carolo Plumier Minimo," and MS 31 "Poissons et Coquilles dessinés par le Pere Plumier Minime." On shells as objects of art and nature in eighteenth-century Paris, see Bettina Dietz, "Mobile Objects: The Space of Shells in Eighteenth-Century France," *The British Journal for the History of Science* 39, no. 3 (2006), 363-82, and Charlotte Guichard, "La coquille au XVIIIᵉ siècle: un objet frontière?" *Techniques & Culture* 59 (2012), 150-63.

³³ On the importance of the "patterns of specimen placement in the page" for the case of eighteenth-century conchiliology books, see Emma Spary, "Scientific Symmetries," *History of Science* 42, no. 1 (2004), 1-46, and Margócsy, *Commercial Vision*, 29-73.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_70.png" /></figure>

Fig. 4.5. Seashells in a comparative grid: different views of the same shell were presented in the same row, and each view of a shell (i.e. back, side, aperture) was compared with the equivalent of the other shells. (Bibliothèque centrale du Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, Paris.)

Another aspect of these depictions that deserves attention is the fact that this code of representation (i.e. two, three, or even four views of the same shell, as if it was rotating in its own axis) organized most of the figures, sometimes even in the space of the same page. The result was something like comparative tables: different views of the same shell were presented in the same row, and each view of a shell (i.e. back, side, aperture) was compared with the equivalent of the other. Plumier's depictions of American seashells, therefore, introduced a double seriality: first, a horizontal series of two, three or four views of the different sides of the same shell; second, a vertical series comparing different sorts of shells. The resulting grid thus presents the items in a very codified manner: the specimens are shown the axis up and the apex down, and the horizontal series all follow the same pattern, from a view of the body whorl (an abapertural view) to one presenting the aperture (an apertural view). The grid, by "turning" the different specimens according to a same pattern, imposes a sort of morphological comparison of the shells (fig. 4.5).

Another case in point are Plumier's drawings of fishes. Here again, a closely similar iconographic scheme was applied to the large majority of drawings on the same category of animals: fishes were presented sideways, along with a cross-section so as to document
<figure><img src="image_71.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 4.6. (above) “Draco marinus sive Araneus Rondeletii. L.X C.XI 301. Gallice La Vive,” a species of weeverfish. This is one of the nearly 300 extant drawings of fishes by Plumier. (left) Three drawings of Caribbean fishes: note the cross-sections, the abundant notes, and the implicit comparative approach. (Bibliothèque centrale, Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>

the width and girth of the beast. Latin and French names were added to the manuscript images, usually accompanied by their bookish references (i.e. “Thrissa seu Alosa, Rondel. L.VII C.XV 200,” or Rondelet’s *Libri de piscibus marinis*, book 7, chapter 15, page 200³⁴). A certain number of Plumier’s drawings of fishes are colored, and it is likely that most of them are depicting the animals in their real size (fig. 4.6).<fnref n="35" /> This serial collector’s approach was also not new in the study of fishes. The two most salient scholarly references in the field, Guillaume Rondelet’s *Libri de piscibus* (1554) and Pierre Belon’s *La nature et diversité des poissons* (1555), were along similar lines. Both Rondelet’s and Belon’s illustrated accounts were still highly influential at the end of the seventeenth century. Both

<footnote n="34">³⁴ Although it was actually page 220.</footnote>

<footnote n="35">³⁵ BCMNHN MS 24 “Poissons, oiseaux, lézards, serpens et insectes, dessinés par le Père Plumier,” MS 25 “Poissons d’Amérique,” and MS 31. Theodore W. Pietsch, an ichthyologist himself, is the reference for Plumier’s work on fishes: “Charles Plumier (1646-1704) and his Drawings of French and American Fishes,” *Archives of Natural History* 28, no. 1 (2001), 1-57; “Charles Plumier’s Drawings of French and American Fishes: Concordance with Equivalent Illustrations found in the Vellums of Aubriet and Published Works of Gautier d’Agoty, Bloch, Lacepède, Bloch and Schneider, and Cuvier and Valenciennes,” *Archives of Natural History* 28, no. 2 (2001), 261-8, and “Plumier’s Passion,” *Natural History* 119, no. 7 (2011), 30-6. See also Michel Thireau, François J. Meunier, Marie-Louise Bauchot, Aline Hamonou-Mahieu, and Théodore W. Pietsch, “L’oeuvre ichthyologique de Charles Plumier aux Antilles (1689-1695),” in *Explorations et voyages scientifiques de l’Antiquité à nos jours*, ed. Christiane Demeulenaere-Douyere (Paris: Éditions du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 2008), 47-56.</footnote>
physicians by training, Belon and Rondelet made extensive use of dissection in their respective studies of animals; more important, they espoused an explicitly comparative approach to anatomy. Rondelet, who was actually a regius professor of medicine at Montpellier and skilled in botany as much as anatomy, stressed that even accidents and external forms were important in establishing differences between species of fishes. His book boasted about 250 woodcuts of “marine fishes,” broadly understood, organized in typologies: “crustacea,” “cetacei,” “plani pisces” (or “flat” fishes) and so forth.<fnref n="36" /> Belon was originally an apothecary—although he ended up studying medicine, too—who, at some point, found himself traveling through the Eastern Mediterranean and compiling abundant natural observations en route. In the years following his return to France, Belon published not only his travel accounts, but also a series of major, generously illustrated works on the natural history of birds, fishes, and plants.<fnref n="37" /> Two of them played foundational roles in the early modern natural history of animals: the two treatises in vernacular on fishes and birds, respectively, both printed in 1555.<fnref n="38" /> The former, *La nature & diversité des poissons*, was an octavo volume on diverse animals that fell under the category of “fishes”—from cods to whales, hippopotamuses, and lobsters—and included about 170 “naïf portraits drawn from the natural,” also in the form of woodcuts.

Although both Rondellet and Belon announced with fanfare the veracity of their depictions (“verae Piscium effigies expressae sunt”; “avec leurs pourtraicts, representez au plus pres du naturel”), a good number of them were actually drawn from bookish sources.<fnref n="39" /> Yet the two books, and especially the images, were to have a long-lasting

<footnote n="36">³⁶ Guillaume Rondelet, *Libri de piscibus marinis, in quibus verae piscium effigies expressae sunt* (Lyon: apud Matthiam Bonhomme, 1554), and Pierre Belon, *La nature & diversité des poissons, avec leur pourtraicts, representez au plus pres du naturel* (Paris: chez Charles Estienne, 1555). On Rondelet’s importance on accidents in his books on fishes, see Ian Maclean, “White Crows, Graying Hair, and Eyelashes: Problems for Natural Historians in the Reception of Aristotelian Logic and Biology from Pomponazzi to Bacon,” in *Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe*, ed. Gianna Pomata and Nancy G. Siraisi (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005), 165.</footnote>

<footnote n="37">³⁷ *Les observations de plusieurs singularités et choses memorables, trouvées en Grece, Asie, Iudée, Egypte, Arabie, & autres pays estranges, redigées en trois livres* (Paris: Georges Corrozet, 1553).</footnote>

<footnote n="38">³⁸ Belon, *Nature et diversité des poissons*, and *L'histoire de la nature des oyseaux, avec leurs descriptions, & naifs portraits retirez du naturel* (Paris: Gilles Corrozet, 1555), another issue of which appeared the same year, also in Paris, by Guillaume Cavelleta. There is a modern critical edition of the former, with a useful preliminary study: *L'histoire naturelle au XVᵉ siècle. Introduction, étude et critique de La nature et diversité des poissons de Pierre Belon (1555)*, ed. Philippe Glardon (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2011). On Belon’s study of fishes, see E. W. Gudger, “The Five Great Naturalists of the Sixteenth Century: Belon, Rondelet, Salviani, Gesner and Aldrovandi: A Chapter in the History of Ichthyology,” *Isis* 22, no. 1 (1934). As for the study of birds, see Philippe Glardon, “Les comparisons et les monstres: figures structurales de la description zoologique dans *L'histoire de la nature des oyseaux* de Pierre Belon du Mans,” *Anthropozoologica* 13 (1990), 27-43.</footnote>

<footnote n="39">³⁹ Which was not necessarily uncontradictory: in this regard, see William B. Ashworth, “The Persistent Beast: Recurring Images in Early Zoological Illustration,” in *The Natural Sciences and the Arts*, ed. Allain Ellenius (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wikell, 1985), 46-66.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_72.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 4.7. Comparison of the woodcuts of the sea turtle in Belon’s *La nature et diversité des poissons* (above) with Plumier’s manuscript drawings of the same (opposite). (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, and Bibliothèque centrale du Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>

influence on the study of animals through the entire early modern period. Copies of the two books were available at the library of the Parisian Minims,<fnref n="40" /> and references to both pervaded Plumier’s documents: in BCMNHN MS 24, to take but one example, 50 out of the 121 drawings of fishes refer to Rondelet—although only 7 to Belon, and 9 to Georg Marcgraf, the reference in American fishes, whose book was also profusely illustrated. The two Frenchmen’s serial approach to the depiction of animals is certainly to be found in the volumes of Plumier’s manuscripts devoted to birds and fishes: Belon’s two depictions of the sea turtle, in supine and prone position, can easily be compared with the manuscript drawings by Plumier of the same animal (fig. 4.7).

More important, however, was the fact that visual seriality—in Plumier’s drawings as in Belon’s and Rondelet’s woodcuts—entailed a comparison of the animals in their forms. By drawing such a number of the same kind of animals—be they fish, shells, or birds—under similar representational codes, the anatomies of the depicted specimens could be correlated. The extent to which we can speak of a comparative anatomy here is an entirely different question. Yet if there was not a comparative anatomy as it was to be shaped by Cuvier, Owen, or Huxley in the nineteenth century, a good number of early

<footnote n="40">⁴⁰ Maz. MS 4147 “Catalogue alphabétique de la bibliothèque des Minimes de la Place Royale, à Paris,” from 1722: by “Rondeletius,” there was “De Piscibus marinis in fol. 1 v.” and “Le même ouvrage en françois in fol. ibide.”; by Belon, “La nature et diversité des poissons in 12° 1 v. et in 8° 1 v.,” as well as “Sept livres de la nature des oyseaux in fol. 1 v.” Belon’s *La nature et diversité des poissons*, in its Paris edition of 1555 (that of Charles Estienne) was also among the quarto “Derelicti libri” (abandoned books) in Maz. MS 4149 “Index generalissimus omnia librorum bibliothecae conventus patrum minimorum Parisiensi” from 1776 (perhaps the is the same volume than the 1722 catalog).</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_73.png" /></figure>

modern authors used the visual form to correlate the anatomy of different animals,
sometimes even contrasting them with that of humans.<fnref n="41" /> The story of the Minim friar
Jean Germain’s *Breve e sostiantiale trattato intorno alle figure anatomiche delli pieu principali animali terrestri, aquatili, et volatile* (1625) has already been recounted in the previous chapter; here,
it suffices merely to remember that Germain’s book brought together the depicted
skeletons of beasts as miscellaneous as pigeons, turtles, dogs, mice—and men. Belon,
too, famously correlated the skeleton of birds with that of men in his *L'histoire de la nature des oyseaux*.<fnref n="42" /> The project for the anatomy of animals at the Paris Academy of Sciences
provides yet another late-seventeenth-century example of this comparative approach to
natural history by means of visual depiction. The different engravings that resulted from
the work of Perrault's circle presented a similar mode of representation: the entire
animal, as if it was alive, was represented below, and some anatomical parts of each beast
were exposed above. Admittedly, however, there were no specific parts correlated
between the different animals and plates in the volumes of the *Histoire des animaux*: for
the lion, its skull and main organs were presented; for the chameleon, the skeleton and

<footnote n="41">⁴¹ On the relation between anatomy and classification before the mid-eighteenth century, see Henri Daudin, *De Linné à Lamarck. Méthodes de classification et idée de série en botanique et en zoologie (1740-1790)* (Paris: Éditions des archives contemporaines, 1983 [1926]), 48-65.</footnote>

<footnote n="42">⁴² On the comparison of animals’ and men’s anatomies, see Daudin, *De Linée à Lamarck*, 108-9.</footnote>
the lungs; for the dromedary, the tongue, the penis, and the heart; for the bear, the stomach, the paws, and the kidneys, and so forth.<fnref n="43" />

So, can Plumier's series of drawings of fishes (or those on shells, birds, or ferns) be seen as a sort of comparative seriality? Comparative anatomy might well not have existed by 1700 as we understand it today, but the expression was used at least once in a way that may help us understand the rationale behind our friar's depictions. A remarkable case of seventeenth-century so-called "comparative anatomy" (perhaps the only one) is to be found, not in a majestic volume on exotic animals, but in a small octavo book on botany. Nehemiah Grew's *Comparative Anatomy of Trunks* (1675) aimed, as the author's previous *Anatomy of Plants* (1680), at extending to the vegetable world anatomical approaches that were mostly applied then to animals: "those things," Grew asserted, "are little less admirable within a Plant, that within an Animal." The *Comparative Anatomy of Trunks* comprised twenty-four copperplates, of which sixteen depicted identical sections (one per plate) of different trees' trunks, thus visually comparing them to each other: "that as the Variety of the parts (as to Size, Number, and Position) in every species; so their Regularity and Constancy in the individuals of each, are this way, much more clearly and certainly represented. All which [you] will best observe, by comparing our several Figures together" (fig. 4.8). By following the same visual code, a triangular slice of their cross section, Grew's images on the anatomy of trunks presented a straightforward visual correlation of both the "constancies" and "varieties" between the internal parts of the different kinds of trunk. Keeping the same graphic mode of representation was central, since the botanist set out to show "not only what their several *Parts* are . . . but also by a comparative prospect, in what respects they are specifically distinguished one from another."<fnref n="44" />

The plates in Grew's arresting little book sheds an interesting light on Plumier's use of consistent modes of representation in the depiction of broad natural groups of plants and animals. In the drawings by the friar, landscapes and environmental contexts, for

<footnote n="43">⁴³ Jean Germain, *Breve e sostantiale trattato intorno alle figure anathomiche delli piu principali animali terrestri, aquatili, et volatili, con la simpatia et convenienza che hanno, o in parte, o in tutto, con il corpo humano con maturi et succinti discorsi dalle loro naturali proprietà di geroglifichi, et moralità più curiosi, cavati* (Naples: per Domenico Maccarino, 1625), and [Claude Perrault, ed.] *Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire naturelle des animaux* (Paris: de l'Imprimerie royale, 1671). On comparative anatomy before the mid-eighteenth century, see Francis Joseph Cole, *A History of Comparative Anatomy: From Aristotle to the Eighteenth Century* (London: Macmillan, 1944); Andrew Cunningham, *The Anatomist Anatomis'd: An Experimental Discipline in Enlightenment Europe* (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), esp. 295-359; 375-80, and Anita Guerrini, *The Courtiers' Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV Paris* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), 57-63.</footnote>

<footnote n="44">⁴⁴ Nehemiah Grew, *The Comparative Anatomy of Trunks, Together with an Account of their Vegetation grounded thereupon; in Two Parts* (London: printed by J. M. For Walter Kettilby, 1675), sig. [A2v], sig. a, and 2.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_74.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 4.8. Copperplates of the sumac's and the walnut tree's trunks in Grew's *Comparative Anatomy of Trunks*. Grew's booklet is an example as surprising as exciting of the ways in which images were used by naturalists to establish the anatomical "constancies" and "varieties" between different plants and animals. (Bibliothèque nationale universitaire, Strasbourg.)</figcaption></figure>

instance, were omitted from the depictions; fishes were presented in profile, mostly with a cross-section of the creature; for shells, at least two views were pictured; larger animals were progressively anatomized along several drawings; plants were usually drawn in their real size, with details of the flowers and seeds, and so forth. Just like Grew's trunks, such visual strategies highlighted differences and correlations—mainly in form—between similar sorts of animals and plants. Consider, once again, the friar's anatomical depictions of reptiles and amphibians: the figures of the crocodile, it has been said, are included in a volume with anatomical drawings of five other beasts: a snake, a lizard, a sea turtle, a tortoise, and a frog.<fnref n="45" /> That these different sets of drawings ended up bound in the same volume is perhaps due to the rearrangements to which the corpus was subjected when it entered the Bibliothèque du roi in the mid-eighteenth century. Yet striking similarities exist in the manner in which these sets of images put the animals on paper. Just as those of the crocodile, the drawings of these five other creatures also followed the process of their dissection—from the picturing of the entire beast, as if it was alive, to that of their successive anatomical layers to that of some selected parts of their bodies. Most

<footnote n="45">⁴⁵ BCMNHN MS 30 "Tétrapodes dessinés par le Père Plumier Minime."</footnote>
importantly, by following a similar mode of representation, these manuscript drawings
highlighted the differences and correlations in form between the anatomies of these
various animals—or, in Grew's terms, the “Variety” as much as the “Constancies.”

Needless to say, comparative anatomy as we know it did not exist back then, but
comparison was one of the possibilities offered—and aims sought—by textual or graphic
seriality. And comparison was not absent from the work of naturalists by 1700. In 1702,
for instance, Plumier submissively requested to Bégon to “have a sardine of Royan
drawn, in its real size and natural form, by some of your draftsmen. I asked one of my
friends in Marseille to have one of Provence drawn for me, because I would be glad to
see their differences & whether they have both the same characters.”<fnref n="46" />

The gargantuan number of drawings made and gathered by Plumier was
representative of a series of contemporary developments of an intellectual, social, and
cultural nature—or simply artistic. I will survey the contemporary culture of print making
and collecting in the next chapter, but for the moment, it is useful to note that one of the
main categories of the print market was the *recueil d'images* or *recueil d'estampes* (or simply
*recueil*): collections or compendia of prints, usually by a single artist, that could be highly
specialized. Take the *suites* or series: sets of prints around a same theme, which invited
comparative contemplation. (In 1747, for instance, the artist Jacques François Saly
published a recueil of thirty etchings of vases.)<fnref n="47" /> At the same time, naturalists by 1700
were increasingly specialized stockpilers and collectors: not only because their field was
partially dependent on the broadly-shared culture of collecting, but also because the
widely held perception of an information overload incentivized scholars to develop
increasingly sophisticated techniques for managing bookish and observational facts.<fnref n="48" />
Tournefort's herbarium or Ray's ambitious *Historia plantarum* are but two further
examples of this. In the case of Plumier, however, his iconographic work might well
seem all-embracing, but it was not unrestricted.<fnref n="49" /> The flora and fauna represented by

<footnote n="46">⁴⁶ MMC MS 867 “Recueil de pieces,” fol. 151v: “Vous me pardonnerez bien la liberté que je prens de vous prier de me vouloir faire dessiner une sardine de Royan en toute sa grandeur et forme naturelle par quelques uns de vos dessineurs. J’ay priés un de mes amis de Marseille de m’en faire dessiner une de celles de Provence, je suis bien aise d’en voir leur différence & si elles ont toutes les deux les mesmes caractères.”</footnote>

<footnote n="47">⁴⁷ Elizabeth M. Rudy, “On the Market: Selling Etchings in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Perrin Stein et al., *Artists and Amateurs: Etching in Eighteenth-Century France* (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013), 41-67. See esp. 49-55 for the *recueil* and the *suites* and series of prints.</footnote>

<footnote n="48">⁴⁸ Ann Blair, “Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload, ca. 1550-1700,” *Journal of the History of Ideas* 64, no. 1 (2003), 11-28, and Blair, *Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age* (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).</footnote>

<footnote n="49">⁴⁹ Neither was that of Belon, for instance: “ie me suis addôné ces ans passez a nous en chercher
[poissons], & monstrer par figures ce peu que i’en ay peu autresfois veoir en divers ports & plages, tant en</footnote>
Plumier was explicitly circumscribed to that of a specific, relatively small geographical area. It is to this question that we now turn.

## Islands of knowledge

Unlike Tournefort's and Ray's natural historical projects, Plumier's work had very definite geographical contours: the books and most of the manuscript material he accumulated over time aimed at embracing a very limited spatial area: that of a number of islands in the West Indies under French sovereignty. But how many islands did the friar explore? Which were those islands? How was his work in the field organized? The sources allowing for a reconstruction of Plumier's activities and life in the West Indies are extremely scarce, though some spatial considerations of his botanical work on the islands can be traced in both his printed works and some of his manuscript notes. His written descriptions of plants, for instance, were usually organized into a similar structure: after a general descriptive account of the vegetables in question followed some lines on the history of its name and occasionally on which authors had previously written about them; the whole was often closed by some remarks on the locations in which Plumier found and described the plant under consideration. The written descriptions included in the *Description* and the *Traité des fougères* offer a fair indication of the friar's principal areas of activity across the West Indies; they allow us to sketch a cartography of exploration that happened to be mainly circumscribed to three islands: Martinique, Saint Domingue and, to a much lesser extent, Tortuga.

It is no surprise that the first two (along with Guadeloupe, only mentioned once) were the jewels in the crown of France's Caribbean dominions. On each island, too, Plumier seems to have privileged certain specific locations. In Martinique, for instance, the friar mentions two particular areas. The first was the Cabsterre (or Capsterre, or still Cabesterre), the northeastern half of the island labeled by Du Tertre as the "savages' land" (*la demeure des sauvages*); Plumier refers in particular to the basin of Sainte-Trinité and the peninsula of Caravelle, as well as the "morne" or hill named Calebasse (probably the one nowadays known as Mont Pelée), described by the friar as "one of the most beautiful places I have ever been due to the large number of plants, and especially ferns, that grow

<footnote>Asie, qu'en Europe, & principalement de Cōstantinoble, Rome, Venise, Genes, Aquitaine, Flādres, & Angleterre: & es lacs, estangs, & fleuves d'iceulx."</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_75.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 4.9. Map of Martinique by Guillaume Delisle. Along with Saint-Domingue and, to a lesser extent, Tortuga, Martinique was one of the few Caribbean islands to which Plumier actually plied his trade. (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>

there.”<fnref n="50" /> On the southwestern half of the island, the Basseterre (more densely inhabited by French settlers), he referred to coastal areas in the peninsula of the Grande-Anse, mainly between the bays of Arlet and Diamant (fig. 4.9 and 4.10).⁵¹ Saint-Domingue was a French colony in the western half of the island of Hispaniola—the eastern part, known as Santo Domingo, was in the hands of the Spaniards. Like Martinique, the geography of the French part of Hispaniola was mainly characterized by an indented coastline and strings of small islands facing it. (Tortuga was one of these, a piece of land in front of the Port-de-Paix in Saint-Domingue.⁵²) Plumier mentioned especially the northern coast of the island around Port-de-Paix and in front of Tortuga, as well as the northern part of

<footnote n="50">⁵⁰ Plumier, *Traité des fougères de l’Amérique* (Paris: de l’Imprimerie royale, 1705), 3: “un des plus beaux endroits que j’aye jamais vue pour le grand nombre de belles Plantes qu’il produit, sur tout à l’égard de Fougères de plusieurs espèces.”

⁵¹ In the *Description*, Plumier mentions the following places of Martinique: Fort Saint-Pierre (including the garden of the Jesuits), the Cabsterre, the Morne de la Calebasse, Fort-Royal, the Anse de l’Arlet and the Anse du Diamant (close to the house of M. de l’Orange), the Mont Noël (close to Fort Saint-Pierre), the paroisse de Sainte Marie (between Fort Saint-Pierre and the Cabsterre, and including the house of M. de la Calle), Cul-de-sac de la Trinité, and the quartier de la rivière du Lamentin. In the *Traité des fougères*, apart from those already mentioned in the *Description*, he refers to the Grand-Cul-de-Sac François, the quartier du Prescheur, and the vallon du Morne Rouge.

⁵² See James E. McClellan III, *Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue in the Old Regime* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010 [1992]), esp. 23-107. In the little island of Tortuga (opposite Port-de-Paix in Saint-Domingue), Plumier mentions the paroisse de Mirebalai, the house of a certain M. la Franchise, the valley La Ravine de la roussière, and Port-de-Paix (all of them mentioned in the *Description*).</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_76.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 4.10. "Veüe des deux anses d'Arlet de chez Monsieur d'Orange." (Bibliothèque centrale du Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>

the Tiburon Peninsula, between Petit-Goâve and Léogâne (where he dissected the crocodile).<fnref n="53" /> In the book of ferns, Plumier also made few references to territories other than these three islands, namely Saint Vincent and Guadeloupe.<fnref n="54" />

The question remains, however, of the gap between the locations that the naturalist publicly advertised in his printed books and the actual geography of his explorations—territories, for instance, that were not under French rule and, therefore, should have been left unmentioned. Yet even by considering the spatial references scattered across his printed books alone, it should immediately become clear that Plumier plied his trade to a very restricted number of islands—mostly two, in fact.<fnref n="55" /> This allowed him to delimit

<footnote n="53">⁵³ For Saint-Domingue, Plumier alludes in the *Description* to the Massacre (close to Port-de-Paix), Leogane, Petit-Goive, the Tapion, the Moustique (“environ à dix lieües du Port-de-Paix”), the river Trou du precipice (or Precipice du trou), lake Miragoan, Marsennou (owned by M. de Cussi-Tarin, former governor of the island), and la Grande-Orterie. In the *Traité des fougères*, he mentions also la Montagne ronde (as it is called by buccaneers), the Fond de Baudion (close to Leogane), the mount of Musique (as it was called by buccaneers), the Savane de la Fougère (from the Anses à Pitre to Leogane through the Grand-Cul-de-Sac, and according to the name given to it by bucanneers), the Fond épineux (as named by buccaneers), the Etang Somache (as named by buccaneers), and the Rivière froide.</footnote>

<footnote n="54">⁵⁴ Plumier, *Traité des fougères*, 108 and 111 for Saint Vincent (more specifically, in the latter, “le long d’un ruisseau du quartier que les Caraïbes appellent *Oullion*) and 130 for Guadeloupe.</footnote>

<footnote n="55">⁵⁵ This was not unusual: during his journey in the West Indies, Hans Sloane rarely moved far from Spanish Town (the residence of the governor) or out of St. Catherine Parish in Jamaica: “A Specialist’s Guide to the Sloane Database,” http://www.nhm.ac.uk/resources-rx/files/sloane-specialist-guide-128098.pdf</footnote>
discrete units of analysis in his colossal task of natural recension. And yet, the American aspirations of his natural history were boasted not only in the titles of his three printed books on botany ("Description of the plants of America," "New genera of American plants," "Treatise of the ferns of America"), but also in those of a good number of his manuscript works, such as the six volumes of his "Botanicum americanum, seu historia plantarum in Americanis insulis nascentium" (American herbal, or history of plants growing in the American islands), the "Botanographia Americana," the "Solum, salum, coelum Americanum" (American land, sea and sky).<fnref n="56" /> That the islands' flora and fauna stood synecdochically for much—if not all—of the American nature was an idea clearly articulated by some authors. In his *Histoire générale des isles de S. Christophe, de la Guadeloupe, de la Martinique, et autres dans l'Amérique* (1654), Plumier's near-contemporary Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre openly argued that, "even if here I deal only with some particular islands of the Americas, you have to judge both the *terre ferme* and the other islands that are between the Tropics as though they were the same; for it is the same temperature, the same soil, the same plants, & the same animals."<fnref n="57" />

But the association by Plumier of his work with the American continent by and large
can also be seen as a sign of the tension underlying the project of natural history in the
late seventeenth and early eighteenth century between the local scale in which it was
practiced and the universal ambitions of projects that aimed at classification in one way
or another—or, at the very least, at inventory. Two deceptively opposed ideas are at
stake in the spatial dimension of Plumier’s work. On the one hand, it summons the
geographical and conceptual entity of America as a unit—in line with Renaissance natural
histories identified with the “Indies,” such as Oviedo’s *Historia general y natural de las Indias*
(1535-49) or José de Acosta’s *Historia natural y moral de las indias* (1590), to name but two
of the most representative. On the other hand, Plumier limited his explorations to
specific, well-defined areas, participating in the secular perception of a surfeit of natural
information that required to be tackled in parts. In the preface of his unpublished

<footnote n="56">56 BCMNHN MS 2-7, 21, and 23 respectively. I have used manuscripts whose titles were identical in a catalog of Plumier's corpus elaborated in the mid-eighteenth century, since the collection had a complex story after the death of the author (it was reorganized several times during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) and it is difficult to establish with certainty which titles were by the friar himself or by the reorganizers of his archive.</footnote>

<footnote n="57">⁵⁷ Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, *Histoire générale, des isles de S. Christophe, de la Guadeloupe, de la Martinique, et autres dans l'Amérique* (Paris: chez Jacques Langlois et Emmanuel Langlois, 1654), sig. [a4r-v]: "Je t'avertis aussi, mon cher Lecteur, qu'encore bien que je traite seulement icy de quelques isles particulieres de l'Amerique, tu dois jugar sur le mesme pied, tant de la terre ferme, que des autres isles qui sont entre les deux Tropics; car c'est la mesme temperature, le mesme terroir, les mesmes plantes, & les mesmes animaux, exceptez quelques singes, & quelques bestes feroces qui ne se rencontrent pas dans les isles."</footnote>
"Solum, salum, coelum Americanum," the friar wrote on the contemporary perception of a hitherto unprecedented amount of information on the natural world: "the countless number of Nature's works is a fact as certain as the brevity of human life . . . what is confirmed in the smallest island of the West Indies, for a single one of them produce so great and numerous marvels to admire that the life of a single man entirely devoted to these concerns is not enough, no matter how many are the efforts made."<fnref n="58" />

Plumier's geographically restricted practice of natural history was not new. Regional natural histories were a remarkably extended phenomenon all over Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although mainly composed by physicians and apothecaries, these sorts of studies were also published by numerous renowned seventeenth-century botanists: Gaspard Bauhin, for instance, printed a catalog of plants growing in the vicinity of Basel in 1622; Jan Commelin, one on the plants of the province of Holland in 1683; Johann Jakob Dillenius, a catalog of the flora in the region around Giessen in 1719, as well as his better-known *Hortus Elthamensis* on the plants growing around Eltham, near London (1732).<fnref n="59" /> In England, naturalists became particularly prolific in this genre around 1700: John Ray gave a catalog on the vegetation of the Cambridgeshire in 1660—but also one on that of the entire country in 1677. This sort of regional floras was no less usual in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century France. Contemporaries of Plumier were perhaps among the most representative cases. In 1686, the botanist Pierre Magnol (1638-1715) authored a *Botanicum Monspeliens, sive plantarum circa Monspelium nascentium* (Montpelierite Herbal, or plants growing around Montpellier), which consisted of an alphabetical "index plantarum" with descriptions and some images of plants growing wild in the area around his city. A decade later, Tournefort printed his well-known *Histoire des plantes qui naissent aux environs de Paris* (History of the plants growing around Paris) and another Aixois botanist and friend of his, Pierre-Joseph

<footnote n="58">58 BCMNHN MS 23, fol. 2: “de vitae humanae brevitate, deque naturae openim innumerabilitate certior factus [est].. utpote quae nec multi insimul viri quantum liber studiosi per totum vitae curriculum perfecte tractare potentes adquam existant. Huic sententiae me ex insulis antillanis minima confirmat solidatque, tot etenim tantarumque rerum mirabilium ferax conspicitur ut in ipsis discutiendis post multos adhibitos labores vita unios viri non sufficiat.”</footnote>

<footnote n="59">⁵⁹ Gaspard Bauhin, *Catalogus plantarum circa Basileam spontè nascentium cum earumdem Synonymiis & locis in quibus reperiuntur* (Basel: Johan Jacobi Genathii, 1622); Jan Commelin, *Catalogus plantarum indigenarum Hollandiae* (Amsterdam: H. & viduam T. Boom, 1683); Johann Jakob Dillenius, *Catalogus plantarum sponte circa Gissam nascnetium* (Frankfurt-am-Main: J. Maximilianum à Sande, 1719) and *Hortus Elthamensis* (London: sumptibus auctoris, 1732).</footnote>
Garidel, gave a similar work in 1715 for the flora around this city and some other parts of Provence.<fnref n="60" />

Most of these regional natural histories shared two aspects that need to be stressed. First, they materialize a geographical approach for the study of nature and (more important) a logic of fragmentation. Plumier’s painstaking documentation of the nature of the West Indies needs to be understood not only against the backdrop of a tradition of European natural histories of the Americas (as it has been discussed in chapter 1), but also in relation to local floras as a genre. It is important to note that, as Alix Cooper has observed, this renewed fascination for the study of local floras in spaces such as the Italian peninsula, France, England, the Netherlands, and the Holy Roman Empire was partly a reaction to the growing presence of the exotic in European societies.<fnref n="61" /> When these catalogs of regional natural riches began to be written, their object was European floras (and to a lesser extent faunas), rather than colonial ones. But this region-by-region quest for the nature of the nation was eventually pursued overseas as well. Hans Sloane is a well-known example: the wealthy botanist published not only his *Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica* (1707-1725), but also a catalog of plants naturally growing in the latter (1696).<fnref n="62" /> The remark is useful in nuancing all-too-easy modern divisions between the natural research of Europe and that of the rest of the world—all the more so given that, as Emma Spary has pointed out, there was not a systematic distinction between exotic and indigenous plants in the work of authors like Tournefort.<fnref n="63" />

This principle of spatial regionalization in the study of nature was not unrelated to the logic of fragmentation in anatomy discussed in chapter 3: both were based on the

<footnote n="60">⁶⁰ Pierre Magnol, *Botanicum Monspeliense. Sive plantarum circa Monspelium nascentium index. In quo plantarum nomina meliora seliguntur: loca, in quibus plantae sponte adolescent, tum à prioribus Botanicis, tum ab Authore observata indicantur: & praecipuae facultates traduntur* (Montepellier: ex officina Danielis Pech, 1686); Tournefort, *Histoire des plantes qui naissent aux environs de Paris, avec leur usage dans la medecine* (Paris: de l’Imprimerie royale, 1698); Pierre-Joseph Garidel, *Histoire des plantes qui naissent aux environs d’Aix, et dans plusieurs autres endroits de la provence* (Aix-en-Provence: chez Joseph David, 1715).</footnote>

<footnote n="61">⁶¹ Alix Cooper, *Inventing the Indigenous: Local Knowledge and Natural History in Early Modern Europe* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).</footnote>

<footnote n="62">⁶² Ray, *Catalogus plantarum circa Cantabrigiam nascentium* (Cambridge: excudebat J. Field, 1660), and *Catalogus plantarum Angliae, et insularum adjacentium: tum indígenas, tum in agris passim cultas complectens* (London: typis Andr. Clark, impensis Joh. Martyn, 1677), and Sloane, *Catalogus plantarum quae in insula Jamaica sponte proveniunt, vel vulgo coluntur, cum earundem synonymis & locis natalibus* (London: impensis D. Brown, 1696) and *A voyage to the islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica, with the natural History of the Herbs and Trees, Four-footed Beasts, Fishes, Birds, insects, Reptiles, &c. of the last of those Islands* (London: printed by B. M. for the author, 1707-1725).</footnote>

<footnote n="63">⁶³ E. C. Spary, “‘Peaches Which the Patriarchs Lacked’: Natural History, Natural Ressources, and the Natural Economy in France,” *History of Political Economy*, Annual Supplement 38 (2003), 26.</footnote>
intellectual assumption that the wholeness should be tackled part by part.<fnref n="64" /> Islands of
natural knowledge (whether actual islands like Martinique or imagined ones like the area
around Paris) offered an epistemic strategy to cope with the overabundance of
information in the realm of botany at the turn of the eighteenth century: they allowed to
draw clearly circumscribed areas to which the inventorying, all-embracing endeavor of
natural history could be applied. Frank Lestringant has suggested that the island
constituted both a geographical reality and a mode of thought at the dawn of the
Enlightenment: “a laboratory extended to the dimensions of geography where the
productions of nature, as well as human and social singularities, are reviewed and placed
under the magnifying glass within a series of closed units.”<fnref n="65" /> Naturalists had their eye on
the part and their mind on the ever-escaping totality of nature. In other words, the
delimitation and fragmentation of the spaces of inquiry was not in contradiction to the
universalizing aspirations of the field, but its necessary corollary. The authors of local
floras usually highlighted the preliminary character of these natural histories, meant to be
only the pieces of a broader picture. With his natural history of the Parisian region, for
instance, Tournefort aimed at setting the foundations of a wider project: the idea was to
contribute to “the particular history of the Plants growing in the principal areas of the
Kingdom, so that we can have a general history thereafter.”<fnref n="66" /> Furthermore, Tournefort’s
catalog was in turn arranged into a series of “herborizations,” identified with specific
spaces in which he had divided the Parisian region: “along the river,” “in the Bois de
Boulogne,” “around Surène, Saint Clou & Sève,” and so forth. Islands and regions
offered a space of thought as much as an order of discourse that projected a vision of
nature with a strong geographical component. Just like the regional histories of plants
mentioned above, the work of Plumier in the West Indies was comprehensive and
encyclopedic within the realm of a well-delimited geographical area.

<footnote n="64">⁶⁴ A longstanding analogy linked anatomy and cartography in the early modern period. See, for instance, Caterina Albano, “Visible Bodies: Cartography and Anatomy,” in *Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain*, ed. Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 89-106, and Rafael Mandressi, “Livres du corps et livres du monde: chirurgiens, cartographes et imprimeurs, XVᵉ-XVIᵉ siècle,” in Christine Bénévent, Isabelle Diu, et Chiara Lastraioli, eds., *Gens du livre et gens de lettres à la Renaissance* (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 209-30.</footnote>

<footnote n="65">⁶⁵ Frank Lestringant, *Le livre des îles: Atlas et réctis insulaires de la Genèse à Jules Verne* (Geneva: Droz, 2002), 331: “c’est un laboratoire élargi aux dimensions de la géographie, où sont passées en revue et placées sous la loupe, en autant d’unités closes, les productions de la nature, mais aussi bien les singularités humaines et sociales.” See especially chap. 9 “L’insulaire expérimental au temps des Lumières,” on Tournefort’s herbal of the Levantine islands. I thank Stéphane Van Damme for bringing this brilliant book to my attention.</footnote>

<footnote n="66">⁶⁶ Tournefort, *Histoire des plantes qui naissent aux environs de Paris*, sig. a3r: “qu’on travaille à l’histoire particulière des Plantes qui naissent dans les principaux endroits du Royaume, afin qu’on puisse avoir dans la suite une histoire generale de celles qui se trouvent parmi nous.”</footnote>
The genre of regional natural histories was partly an ingenious solution to the
burning issue of information management in the practice of natural history, as the
feasibility of a universal inventory of all plants began to break down. This did not mean
that naturalists disowned any global approach to the study of flora, but this had to take
new forms by the turn of the century. Plumier himself had more universal aspirations in
his early years as a botanist. Upon his return from Rome in the 1680s, where he spent
most of his formative years, Plumier settled in Southern France and was granted
permission by his superiors within the order of Minims to travel around Provence and
the Alps for his botanical work. According to his own account in the preface of the
*Description*, he was then occupied with composing “a new *pinax*, or general *recueil* of
plants, with figures of which I had already a considerable number drawn.”<fnref n="67" /> But Plumier
abandoned the project of an iconographic *pinax* of plants soon thereafter, when the
opportunity to travel to the Caribbean islands came in 1687 for the first time from the
hand of Michel Bégon.

What was then a *pinax*, as opposed to the regional natural history of the West Indies
to which he eventually dedicated his life? The word has its roots into the ancient Greek
term *πίναξ*, which carried two main meanings: first, a wooden or metal board usually used
as a drawing or writing table and, more generally, any sort of plate drawn or engraved
(for example for a map or a votive table); second, a table in the sense of a list or catalog,
regardless of its physical support.<fnref n="68" /> Clay *pinakes* were purportedly used in the famous
library of Alexandria to inventory and organize into categories its holdings, thus offering
“a systematic order of knowledge,” as Markus Krajewski put it.<fnref n="69" /> Active in Alexandria by
the middle of the third century was Callimachus, a scholar to whom the authorship of
another *Pinakes* is attributed, this time a sort of reference text based on the collections of
the fabled library. Its subject was the body of Greek literature, onto which Callimachus’s
work imposed a systematic order.<fnref n="70" /> The term *pinax*, in other words, was understood to
denote a means for information management since antiquity.

<footnote n="67">⁶⁷ Plumier, *Description*, sig. a3r: “L’obeïssance m’ayant rappellé dans ma Province, j’obtins de mes Superieurs la permission de parcourir les costes de Provence, & les Montagnes des Alpes, pour y decouvrir ce qu’il y a de plus curieux en matiere de plantes: j’avois mesme resolu de faire un nouveau *pinax*, ou recueil general des plantes, avec les figures, & j’en avois déja un nombre considerable de dessinées.”</footnote>

<footnote n="68">⁶⁸ Christian Jacob, “From Alexandria to Alexandria: Scholarly Interfaces of a Universal Library,” http://dc-mrg.english.ucsb.edu/conference/2002/documents/christian_jacob.html</footnote>

<footnote n="69">⁶⁹ Markus Krajewski, *Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929* (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011 [German ed. 2002]), 6n8.</footnote>

<footnote n="70">⁷⁰ Blair, *Too Much to Know*, 17.</footnote>