overshadowed by better-studied centers of learning and research, such as the Jesuit
*Collegio Romano*. The inclination towards scholarship of that community as a congregation
of the order of Minims is difficult to explain in institutional terms, at least if compared
with other Catholic orders in the early modern period, such as the Company of Jesus. In
contrast to the Jesuits, the Minims did not count among their duties any kind of
educational apostolate; directing its members rather towards a contemplative and
penitential life, the order of St. Francis of Paola did not leave much place for learned
concerns in its founding regulations. <fnref n="9" /> That being said, libraries happened to hold a
central place within several Minim communities during the entire early modern period,
and the Roman convent provides a good example: a contemporary of Plumier noted that
the scholarly reputation of the community at the Trinità at the time was in good part due
to its richly furnished collection of books.<fnref n="10" />

Scholarship might not have been part of their institutional and spiritual disposition,
but their special situation (both geographical and political) in the middle of the tense
Franco-papal relations surely helped strengthen the Pincian community as lively hub of
intellectual exchange, particularly in the realm of exact and natural sciences. Naturally
enough, they established themselves as a human hinge between Rome and Paris. The
circulations between the Trinità and the Minim convent of Place Royale in Paris, where
Mersenne and Plumier himself spent most of their lives, appear to have been frequent
and dynamic. The Roman convent became a place where French scholars of the order
met and spent some time: Maignan stayed there for more than a decade; Plumier made it
his home between 1676 and 1681; the mathematician and artist Jean-François Nicéron,
close to Mersenne and a renowned expert on anamorphic optics and *trompe-l'ail* art—his
*Perspective curieuse* appeared in 1638—stayed for a short time in Rome with Maignan.<fnref n="11" />

<footnote n="9">⁹ Pascal Dubourg Glatigny and Antonella Romano, “La Trinité-des-Monts dans la ‘République romaine des sciences et des arts,’” *Mélanges de l’École française de Rome. Italie et Méditerranée* 117, no. 1 (2005), 17–20.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ This is the abbé Carlo Bartolomeo Piazza (1632-1713) in his *Euseuologio romano* (Rome: per Domenico Antonio Ercole, 1698), book XIII, chap. 22, quoted in Dubourg Glatigny and Romano, “La Trinité-des-Monts,” 22–23.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹ Jean-François Nicéron, *La perspective curieuse, ou magie artificielle des effect merveilleux de l'optique, par la vision directe; la catoptrique, par la reflexion des miroirs plats, cylindriques & coniques; la dioptrique, par la refraction des crystallux* (Paris: chez Pierre Billaine, 1648). Two other mathematicians and physicists of the order, Thomas Le Seur (1703-1770) and François Jacquier (1711-1788), sojourned in the Trinità during the second half of the eighteenth century. The two of them became particularly known in the scientific milieu of their time for their edition of Newton's *Principia matematica*, in which they clarified the work of the Englishman proposition by proposition and defended his physics against Cartesianism: *Isaaci Newtoni philosophiae naturalis principia, perpetuis commentariis illustrata communi studio PP. Thomae Le Seur et Francisci Jacquier*, 3 vols. (Geneva: typis Barillot et Filii, 1739-42). Later, Pope Benedict XIV charged them with the reform of Michelangelo's decaying dome at the basilica of St. Peter. Jacquier was also the first holder of the chair of experimental physics in the university of La Sapienza, where a large audience attended the spectacular magnetic,</footnote>
The lively intellectual atmosphere in the Roman congregation is partially echoed in the few comments by Plumier on his years in Rome. According to a chronicler writing at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Plumier lived there from September 2, 1676, to January 5, 1681, where he shared quarters for a year with another of Maignan's disciples (and his biographer) Jean Saguens (n.d.).<fnref n="12" /> It was in Rome where Plumier turned towards botany from his early interest in mathematics and optics, which had originally led him to Toulouse and to the convent of Trinità itself.<fnref n="13" /> In the preface of his *Description des plantes de l'Amérique*, printed not long before his third journey to the Americas, Plumier attributed the origin of his fascination for the study of plants to his Roman years and to the "curious demonstrations that the Reverend Father Philippe Sergeant, very skilled Pharmacist, friar of our Order from the Province of France, & Monsieur François d'Onuphriis, Roman Physician, made in our Royal convent of the *Trinité du Mont* in Rome. I then rudely left the study of Mathematics, which constituted my main occupation until that moment, and I applied myself to Botany."<fnref n="14" /> Little is known about this Father Philippe Sergeant, but his "curious demonstrations" impressed Plumier enough for him to dedicate his master a new botanical genus of American plants. The description of the *Serjeana* in the *Nova plantarum americanarum genera* came with a short biographic note on his former teacher: "expert on botany, and skilled physician," Sergeant seemingly spent about twenty-five years in Rome and came to epitomize, like Maignan and Plumier, the intellectual dynamism of the axis between Rome and Paris.<fnref n="15" />

<footnote>electrical, and pneumatic experiments he performed during his courses. On Le Seur and Jacquier, see J. B. Shank, *The Newton Wars & the Beginning of the French Enlightenment* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 390–91, as well as Federica Favino, “Minimi in ‘Sapienza’: François Jacquier, Thomas Le Seur et il rinnovamento dell’insegnamento scientifico allo studium urbis,” and Pascal Dubourg Glatigny and Marianne Le Blanc, “Architecture et expertise mathématique : la contribution des minimes Jacquier et Le Seur aux polémiques de 1742 sur la coupole de Saint-Pierre de Rome,” in Dubourg Glatigny and Romano, “La Trinité-des-Monts,” 189–218 and 159–87.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹² Charles Martin, “Histoire du couvent royal des Minimes français de la très sainte Trinité sur le mont Pincius à Rome,” quoted in Romano, “Mathematics and Philosophy,” 176. Jean Saguens, *De vita, moribus, et scriptis r. Patris Emanuelis Maignani Tolosatis . . . eulogium* (Toulouse: n.p., 1687).</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³ Laurent-Henri Vignaud, “Des mathématiques à la botanique. La conversion scientifique du père Charles Plumier durant son séjour à Rome (1676-1681),” in Dubourg Glatigny and Romano, “La Trinité-des-Monts,” 131-57.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ Plumier, *Description*, sig. a3r: “Je dois la première inclination que j’ay euë pour l’étude des plantes, aux curieuses demonstrations que le R. P. Philippe Sergeant, tres-habile Pharmacien, Religieux de nostre Ordre, de la Province de France, & M. François de Onuphriis Medecin Romain, firent dans nostre Couvent Royal de la Trinité du Mont à Rome. Je quittay deslors insensiblement l’étude des Mathematiques, qui avoient jusques à ce temps-là fait ma principale occupation, pour m’appliquer à la Botanique.”</footnote>

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ Charles Plumier, *Nova plantarum Americanarum genera* (Paris: apud Joannem Boudot, 1704), 34: “Reverendus Pater Philippus Sergeant Caletanus, Ordinis Minimorum Provinciae Franciae, Botanices peritus, Medicinae peritior, quam viginti quinque annorum decursu Romae tam foeliciter exercuit, ut parvis aeque ac magnis ob charitatem semper extiterit gratissimus. Tota lugens amisit Roma, tota exultans susceptit Lutetia.”</footnote>
As for the Neapolitan Paolo Boccone (1633-1704), he was one of the most distinguished
naturalists in seventeenth-century Italy: one of the “herbalists” of the Grand Duke of
Tuscany, Boccone traveled extensively throughout Europe, published a dozen books on
natural history (he was particularly renowned for his works on coral), and entered the
Cistercian order in 1682, about the same time when Plumier seemingly met him in Rome.

The sort of scholarly work developed by the members of the congregation at the
Trinità features another specificity that helps us to understand Plumier’s drawings on
West Indian plants and animals. The friars developed a tradition characterized by a
permeability between scholarly endeavors and the networks of artistic patronage. The
work of Jean-François Nicéron on catoptrics and dioptrics illustrates this bond between
artistic skills and natural pursuits, on which Plumier’s career at the service of the French
monarchy would be grounded. Another example is that of Emmanuel Maignan and his
research in the field of optical theory and instrumental practice: Maignan was particularly
interested in the theory of light, perspective, gnomonics (the science of sundials), and
anamorphosis (the art of distorted projections and visual delusions). He produced
stunning works that sought (and found) the delectation of both the learned and the
curious. In 1648, Maignan published his *Perspectiva horaria*, a treatise on optics drawing
from two practical experiences in this field carried out by him in the Trinità, and still
extant today.<fnref n="16" /> The first was a sundial drawn in one of the corridors of the convent and
indicating the hour in different parts of the world, including the Americas. The second
was an anamorphosis, or delusive fresco, in which what at first sight seemed like the
landscape of Calabria revealed itself, when looked at from an oblique angle, as the
portrait of St. Francis of Paola, the founder of the order (fig. 2.2).<fnref n="17" /> These two pieces by
Maignan instance the congruence of the delightful and the enlightening in works holding
at the same time aesthetic and intellectual values without conflict. As Matthew L. Jones
stressed apropos of Nicéron, “perspective and associated practices such as
anamorphoses were understood as powerful techniques for instructing, intriguing, and
delighting” in the late seventeenth century.<fnref n="18" /> As we will see more clearly in the case of
Plumier, the boundary between craftsmanship and scholarship was fluid and permeable

<footnote n="16">16 Emmanuel Maignan, *Perspectiva horaria, sive de horographia gnomotica tum theoretica, tum practica libri quatuor* (Rome: typis, & expensis Philippi Rubei, 1648). See Romano, “Mathematics and Philosophy.”</footnote>

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ Pascal Julien, “Anamorphoses et visions miraculeuses du père Maignan (1602-1676),” in Dubourg Glatigny and Romano, “La Trinité-des-Monts,” 45–71.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ Matthew L. Jones, *The Good Life of the Scientific Revolution: Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, and the Cultivation of Virtue* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 183.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_30.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 2.2. The elaboration of the anamorphic fresco of Saint Francis of Paola by means of distorted perspective, from Maignan's *Perspectiva horaria*. The anamorphosis was made by Maignan and probably Nicéron, both perhaps represented in this scene. The fresco can still be seen today in the convent of Trinità in Rome: while a front view of it presents what seems to be a Calabrese landscape, an oblique vantage point reveals this to be a portrait of the founder of the order of Minims, St. Francis of Paola. (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>

in the scientific work of the Minims; what is more, such works appeared to them as liable to be used for fostering a salutary curiosity among amateurs.

Both Maignan's anamorphosis and Plumier's drawings of America fauna and flora were composed of different layers: they constituted a way of expression of the scientific contributions of their authors, even of very concrete theoretical ideas: on catoptrics and dioptrics in the case of Maignan, on descriptive natural history in that of Plumier. At the same time, moreover, they called for aesthetic appreciations that allowed them to circulate beyond the borders (already fluid) of the most hermetic scholarly community, and thus enter the circuits of amateur patronage.

## Surian and the first journey to the Americas: the erratic fates of natural history overseas

Sometime around 1687, six years after his return from Rome, Plumier, aged forty-one, was instructed for the first time to cross the Atlantic and to do so “on the orders of the King.” In charge of this crown-sponsored project of natural exploration of the Caribbean basin was Intendant-General of the Galleys in Marseille Michel Bégon. Bégon was already by that time an influential patron, passionate for both the arts and natural knowledge, and he eventually came to be the most determining figure in Plumier’s career as a crown’s scholarly protégé. In the preface of his *Description*, Plumier tells us that Bégon, “so known by the scholars and who finds time, in spite of his important employments, to devote himself to the Study of the sciences, wished to satisfy the King’s orders to find someone able to make the travel to our West Indies Isles (of which he had been Intendant) in order to research the rarest & most curious things Nature has
produced.” The man they found, however, happened not to be Plumier, but a physician and botanist from Marseille, as little known at the time as he is now, called Joseph-Donat Surian. It was presumably on the suggestion of Surian that Plumier was hired for the mission: the latter tells us that Bégon “proposed this journey to Monsieur Surian . . . & charged him to find someone able to help him in the execution of this design. Monsieur Surian proposed the task to me: I accepted with pleasure, & some time thereafter we undertook the journey on the orders of His Majesty.”<fnref n="19" />

Apart from a few lines in the preface of the *Description*, information on this voyage is scarce, with the exception of some administrative documents. On July 22, 1687, Secretary of State of the Navy Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Marquis de Seignelay—Colbert's son and successor at the head of the French maritime forces—issued an order to give Plumier protection in the colonies. The document was addressed to the governor and lieutenant of the Isles of America, the count of Blenac, and to the intendant of the Windward Islands, Gabriel Dumaitz de Goimpy. It stated that the Minim friar was sent together with the physician Surian in order to “work on the properties of plants, seeds, oils, gums and essences, and to dry [desseicher] birds and fishes and other animals of that country.”<fnref n="20" /> In fact, the exact same formula was used in the order issued for Surian.<fnref n="21" /> No mention

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ Plumier, *Description*, sig. [a3r-v]: “M. Begon, si connu des savans, qui trouve au milieu de ses grands emplois des momens à donner à l’Etude des sciences, estoit pour lors Intendant des Galeres à Marseille. Il souhaitout pour satisfaire aux ordres du Roy, de trouver quelqu’un qui peûst faire le voyage de nos Isles Antilles (où il avoit esté Intendant) pour y faire la recherche de tout ce que la Nature y produit de plus rare & de plus curieux. Il en fit la proposition à M. Surian, fort capable . . . & luy donna en mesme temps commission de chercher quelqu’un qui fust en état de l’ayder dans l’execution de ce dessein. M. Surian m’en fit la proposition: j’y donnay les mains avec plaisir, & nous entreprismes quelque temps après le voyage par les ordres de Sa Majesté.” On Surian I only found two brief biographical notes in nineteenth century works: Louis-Gabriel Michaud, ed., *Biographie universelle ancienne et moderne, ou Histoire par ordre alphabétique de tous les hommes qui se sont fait remarquer* ..., vol. 44 (Paris: Michaud frères, 1826), 226; L. G., *Précis de l’histoire de la botanique pour servir de complément à l’étude du règne végétal* (Paris: Louis Guérin et Cie., 1871), 59. François Regourd wrote some interesting pages on Surian in his PhD dissertation, based mostly on the same sources I use here: Regourd, “Sciences et colonisation sous l’Ancien Régime. Le cas de la Guyanne et des Antilles françaises, XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles,” 4 vols. (PhD diss., Université Bordeaux III-Michel de Montaigne, 2000), 286-8.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">²⁰ Royal Order of July 22, 1687, in ANOM Colonies E 337bis, fol. 95: “Sa Majesté envoyant aux Isles de l’Amérique le père Charles Plumier Religieux de l’ordre des Minimes pour y travailler avec le sieur Surian Medecin Botaniste pour y travailler a descouvrir les propriétés des plantes, grains, huilles, gommes et essences et a desseicher des oyseaux et des poissons et autres animaux de ce pays, elle mande, et ordonne au sieur Comte de Blenac Gouverneur et lieutenant general desdites isles, au sieur Du Mainz de Goimpy, et au Gouverneurs particuliers et autres Officiers desdites Isles de donner au Pere Charles Plumier tout le secours et toute la protection dont il aura besoin pour executer ce qui est en cela de ces intentions.”</footnote>

<footnote n="21">²¹ Royal order of June 30, 1687, in ANOM Colonies B 13, fol. 25r, quoted in Odile Krakovitch, “La vie intellectuelle dans les trois couvents minimes de la Place Royale, de Nigeon et de Vincennes,” *Bulletin de la Société de Paris et de l’Île-de-France* 109 (1982), 112: “De par le Roy, Sa Majesté envoyant aux isles de l’Amérique le sieur Surian, médecin botaniste avec un religieux de l’ordre des minimes pour y travailler à découvrir les propriétez des plantes, grains, huisles, gommes et essences, et à desseicher des oyseaux et des poissons et autres animaux de ce país, elle mande et ordonne…”</footnote>
was made of Plumier's expertise as a draftsman and the formal object of the mission (at least as far as the official documentation reveals) was not to produce images of the American flora and fauna. Yet the Minim's artistic skills may have carried some weight in Surian's (or Bégon's) choosing him for the journey to the West Indies. To begin with, by the time the occasion presented itself to make the journey to the Americas in 1687, Plumier was already working on an illustrated catalog of plants while herborizing around Provence. Moreover, skilled artists had been hired in previous similar enterprises of natural history. The Jardin du roi in Paris, for instance, was the only garden in Europe at that time to fund a position for an artist: since 1666, the *peintre ordinaire du Roi pour la miniature* (king's ordinary painter for miniature) was charged with the only task of drawing the specimens kept at the institution.<fnref n="22" /> And, as mentioned above, Tournefort took good care to bring along, on his 1700 voyage to the Levant, not only a physician, but also an artist—no one less than Claude Aubriet, in fact: precisely the one appointed as peintre ordinaire at the Jardin the very same year he left for the Levant.

Whatever the reasons to engage Plumier in the expedition of 1687, it was Surian who was sent to the Americas by the French government. The story of how Surian came to enjoy—and ultimately to loose—the crown's support for his natural exploration of the West Indies is one that offers an exceptionally clear opportunity to counterbalance the self-serving myths of the monarchy. Surian's and Plumier's 1687 adventure, as all scholarly enterprises under the aegis of the king, were surrounded by a rhetoric according to which the initiative came from the French government. As Plumier put it in the preface of the *Description*, it was so as to “satisfy the King’s orders” that Bégon organized that journey. And again, a few lines earlier, the Minim described his work as being that of “executing the project [dessein] the King has always had of enlarging the sciences during his Reign.” This tone of scientific vassalage is recurrent in the travel accounts and scientific treatises resulting from such journeys (Tournefort’s account of his travel to the Eastern Mediterranean, for example, was meaningfully entitled “Account of a journey to the Levant made on the orders of the king”). It is, in fact, pervasive to any form of scholarship under absolutist patronage. As argued by Louis Marin for Louis XIV’s historiographer Paul Pellison or by Mario Biagioli for Galileo, becoming a legitimate author under the aegis of an absolutist prince entailed a certain self-effacement: the

<footnote n="22">²² Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, “Gardens of Knowledge and the *République des Gens de Lettres*,” in *Baroque Garden Cultures: Emulation, Sublimation, Subversion*, ed. Michael Conan (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2005), 120-1.</footnote>
scholar's service to the monarch required presenting oneself as the ruler's agent.<fnref n="23" /> Similarly, crown-sponsored scholarly journeys were not the result of a state project of natural exploration of their overseas dominions and of advancement of knowledge in general, but rather punctually successful attempts to secure royal patronage for specific enterprises. The individuals engaged in them were not so much agents of the state as they were *bricoleurs*.

The king's support to Surian's undertaking, for instance, was an arduously acquired one. In a letter of June 1687 Secretary of State of the Navy Seignelay assured Bégon that

> I have seen what you wrote to me about the physician botanist who offers to go to the Isles of America and I have presented it to the King. He has approved the proposition and is willing to accord him the 2,200 *livres* he asks for him and for a Minim friar who will be following him and to accept all the other propositions that you wrote me that he is asking; you can tell him to prepare to leave as soon as you let me know he is ready. I will make you be sent the necessary *sols* for these appointments. I send you, however, the order he is asking to receive all kinds of protection from the governments and intendants of the abovementioned isles.<fnref n="24" />

Rather than learned agents hired by the crown to serve a state project of natural exploration of colonial territories, naturalists like Surian were seeking the support of the crown through brokers like Bégon. The sum of 2,200 *livres* that the government accepted to accord to Surian was not trivial (as a way of comparison, a *demonstrateur* or professor at the Jardin du roi like Tournefort earned 1,500 *livres* per year during the same period)<fnref n="25" /> and raises the question of why the government accepted Surian's proposal of an overseas natural historical trip.

<footnote n="23">²³ Louis Marin, “Le récit du roi ou comment écrire l’histoire,” in *Le portrait du roi* (Paris: Éditions de Minut, 1981), 49-107, and Mario Biagioli, *Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism* (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993), 127-33.</footnote>

<footnote n="24">²⁴ Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Marquis de Seignelay, to Michel Bégon, Versailles, June 30, 1687, AN O¹ 61, fol. 466: “J’ay veu ce que vous m’éscrivez sur le medecin botaniste qui s’offre d’aller aux Isles de l’Amérique et j’en ay rendu compte a Sa Majesté. Elle a approuvé sa proposition, et elle a bien voulu luy accorder les deux mil deux cens livres qu’il demande pour luy et pour un religieux minime qui doit le suivre et a toutes les autres conditions que vous m’escriez qu’il demande; vous pouvez luy dire de se preparer à partir et aussy tost que vous m’aurez fait sçavoir qu’il est prest. Je vous feray remettre le fonds necessaire pour ses appointements. Cependant je vous envoye l’ordre qu’il demande pour luy faire donner toute sorte de protection par les gouvernemens, et Intendans desdites Isles, &c.”</footnote>

<footnote n="25">²⁵ AN O¹ 2124 “État du Jardin Royal, dépence [sic] fixe,” bundle 2 “Jardin des Plantes: arrêtés, lettres patentes, personnel, &c. 1635-1708,” pieces 11-20.</footnote>
One can wonder about the reasons to choose Surian for such a mission: he was neither well known nor connected to any scholarly institution.<fnref n="26" /> Surian's specific expertise was part of the answer. Plumier described Surian as a “very capable, not only in the knowledge of plants, but also in the secrets of chemistry.”<fnref n="27" /> Father Jean-Baptiste Labat, a French blackfriar and missionary in the West Indies (as well as a well-sold raconteur), also agreed on Surian's being knowledgeable in chemistry:

> [Plumier] had, among others talents, a marvelous genius for Botany, & an admirable hand for picturing plants. He had been sent to the Isles some years before [June 1697] with another Provençal, Physician by profession. The Court, who was funding them, entrusted the Minime to make the figures of the plants in all their size & dried; & the Physician Chemist to extract the oils, the salts, the waters & other trifles that we used nowadays to shorten the life of men, on the pretext of preserving their health.<fnref n="28" />

Despite Labat's usual exaggerations and open animosity, his and Plumier's noting the chemical knowledge of Surian is not to be taken lightly, for such expertise may not have been accidental for a botanical mission to the West Indies in those years. At the time of its unofficial foundation in 1666, the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris had launched a (eventually failed) project for composing a new general natural history of plants. At the end of the seventeenth century, the need of such a work was especially felt among European naturalists, after the number of known plants had quadrupled since the middle of the sixteenth century and no general catalog succeeded in substituting Gaspard Bauhin's *Pinax*, published in 1623. During the 1670s, some of the members of the Academy worked on a botanical project with a particular emphasis unusual for the

<footnote n="26">²⁶ The biographical information on Surian is scarce and confused. For instance, he is usually said to have died in 1691; according to some in Marseille, according to others in the West Indies. The most eccentric of the authors writing on Surian, Jean-Baptiste Labat (in his *Nouveau voyage aux isles de l'Amérique, contenant l'histoire naturelle de ces pays, l'origine, les maurs, la religion & le gouvernement des habitans anciens & modernes*, vol. 4 (La Haye: Pierre Husson et al., 1724), 23-4), goes as far as claiming that he died unintentionally poisoning himself and his family with certain exotic herbs—although in July 1693, two years after Surian's presumed death and manslaughter, Bégon was informing one of his correspondents of the return of the physician to France: Bégon to Esprit Cabart de Villermont, Rochefort, Jun 21, 1693, in “Lettres de Michel Bégon,” ed. Louis Delavaud and Charles Dangibeaud, vol. 1, *Archives historiques de la Saintonge et de l'Aunis* 47 (1925), 191.</footnote>

<footnote n="27">²⁷ Plumier, *Description*, sig. [a3v]: “M. Surian, fort capable, non seulement dans la connaissance des plantes, mais aussi dans les secrets de la chymie.”</footnote>

<footnote n="28">²⁸ Labat, *Nouveau voyage*, vol. 4, 20: “Le Pere Plumier . . . avoit entr'autres talens un genie merveilleux pour la Botanique, & une main admirable pour designer les plantes. Il avoit été envoyé aux Isles quelques années auparavant avec un autre Provençal Medecin de Profession & Chimiste. La Cour qui les entretenoit, avoit destine le Minime pour faire les figures des plantes entieres & dissequées; & le Medecin Chimiste, pour en tirer les huiles, les sels, les eaux, & autres minuties dont on se sert aujourd'hui pour abreger la vie des hommes, sous prétexte de leur conserver la santé.”</footnote>
period: they included the chemical analysis of plants as one of the crucial methods of
inquiry. The chemical analysis, based on distillation, was supposed to introduce a causal
element in the explanation of the botanical world, thus offering a philosophical approach
in contrast to, or complementing, a historical one that consisted of collecting and
describing the external appearance of the specimens. (It was within this last natural
historical conception of botany that Tournefort's system, based on particular external
characteristics of plants, and Plumier's iconographic archive developed.) As Alice Stroup
has demonstrated, the chemical analysis of plants was a highly controversial aspect of the
Academy's natural history project, and its actual utility was contested by a good number
of academicians (Perrault was among them).<sup>29</sup> Yet significant human and material
resources were invested in that and the election of Surian for the 1687 mission—or
rather the intendant's and Seignelay's accepting to fund the journey proposed by the
physician—may have seemed in tune with the Academy's undertakings. (After all, the
official 1687 order charged him and Plumier to “work on the properties of plants, seeds,
oils, gums, and essences.”) Surian's proposed enterprise may have seemed all the more
useful given that the Academy had from the outset disregarded the American flora, in
spite of their claims to universality.

That notwithstanding, Surian's mission became a disappointing enterprise in the eyes
of the government after barely two years in the Caribbean. In January 1689, Seignelay
wrote to Bégon on the subject of the “physician botanist” sent to the West Indies. The
minister complained that his expenses were “too considerable” and, “since it is necessary
to avoid in these times all those that are superficial,” ordered the intendant to make him
return as soon as possible.<sup>30</sup> Surian had to return to France and traces of him become
even scarcer thenceforth. On June 1693, Bégon wrote to a friend that

> The sieur Surian, physician botanist, is back; I have sent him from Marseille to that country
> [Martinique] in 1688 on the orders of the King with father Plumier in order to examine the
> virtues of plants and the usage that we could make of them in medicine; he has worked on it
> with success and has brought several volumes of the memoires that he made, which I have

<footnote n="29"><sup>29</sup> On the failed project for the chemical analysis of plants in the Academy of Sciences, see L. G., *Histoire de la botanique*, 59; Yves Laissus, “Les Plantes du Roi. Notes sur un grand ouvrage de botanique preparé au XVIIe siècle par l’Académie royale des Sciences,” *Revue d’histoire des sciences et de leurs applications* 22, no. 3 (1969), 193-236, and Alice Stroup, *A Company of Scientists: Botany, Patronage, and Community at the Seventeenth-Century Parisian Royal Academy of Sciences* (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 89-103.</footnote>

<footnote n="30"><sup>30</sup> Seignelay to Bégon, Versailles, January 12, 1689, AN O¹ 69, fol. 25v: “Vous envoyastez l’année dernière un medecin botaniste aux Isles de l’Amérique et comme la depence que cet homme fait est considerable, et qu’il est necessaire d’éviter en ce temps toutes celles qui sont superflues il faut que vous le fassiez revenir, et que vous luy en envoyez l’ordre par le premier vaisseau.”</footnote>
only browsed, not having enough spare time to examine them in depth; he is resolute to put them in order when he will have a rest in his home, and to give them then to the public.<fnref n="31" />

Surian certainly sent to his protector some of the herbaria he composed in the Caribbean islands, to which Bégon was refereeing. Among the volumes in the library of Bégon in Rochefort, there were “6 volumes of dried plants from Europe and the Americas,” of which some were probably the collections constituted by Surian in the West Indies and sent to the Intendant shortly before his death.<fnref n="32" /> A portion of the collection of dried plants entered the herbarium of Sébastien Vaillant, of which the brothers Bernard and Joseph Jussieu, and later their nephew Antoine-Laurent, made a catalog.<fnref n="33" /> Apart from this, little evidence of Surian’s work in the Americas exists today. In print, only two pamphlets were attributed to the physician: a six-page catalog of seeds of American plants was printed with Nicolas Leméry’s *Traité universel des drogues simples* (Paris, 1698)<fnref n="34" /> and another catalog appeared in the second edition of Pierre Pomet’s *Droguier curieux, ou catalogue des drogues simples et composées* (Paris, 1709), published by the same editor as Leméry’s *Traité*.<fnref n="35" />

<footnote n="31">³¹ Bégon to Cabart de Villermont, Rochefort, June 21, 1693, in Bégon, “Lettres,” vol. 1, 192: “Le sieur Surian, médecin botanique en est de retour [from Martinique]; je l’avois envoié de Marseille en ce pais là en 1688 par ordre du Roy avec le P. Plumier pour examiner les vertus des plantes et l’usage qu’on en pourroit faire dans la médecine; il y a travaillé avec succès et a rapporté plusieurs volumes des mémoires qu’il a faits que j’ay seulement parcouru, n’ayant pas assés de loisir pour les examiner à fonds; il se propose de les mettre en ordre lorsqu’il sera en repos chés lui, et de les donner ensuité au public.”</footnote>

<footnote n="32">³² Denis Roland, “L’intendant au jardin, Michel Bégon,” in *Le temps de Bégon* (Rochefort: CERMA, 2011), 32.</footnote>

<footnote n="33">³³ Frans A. Stafleu and Richard S. Cowan, *Taxonomic literature. A selective guide to botanical publications and collections with dates, commentaries and types* (Utrecht and Antwerp/The Hague and Boston: Bohn, Scheltema & Holkema/dr. W. Junk b.v., Publishers, 1986), vol. 6, 94-95. The catalog by the Jussieus is BCMNHN MS 779 “Catalogue des plantes sèches de Surian par Joseph de Jussieu,” composed of “Numeri plantarum herbarii Suriani, quales prius exstiterant et quales in herbario Vaillantii citantur” by Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu (fol. 1-5), “Catalogue des plantes ramassées par M. Surian dans les isles de l’Amérique” by Bernard de Jussieu (fol. 6-13) and “Nomina barbara herbarii Suriani” by Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu (fol. 14). Antoine-Laurent Jussieu also refers to Surian’s herbarium in MS 1204.</footnote>

<footnote n="34">³⁴ “Insignium et rariorum plantarum semina, ex insulis americanis recenter allata, offeruntur & communicatur à Josepho Donato de Surian, Doctore Medico Massiliensi, nec-non Botanophylo, in America Professore, Regis Christianissimi mandato misso,” in Nicolas Leméry, *Traité universel des drogues simples, mises en ordre alphabétique* (Paris: chez Laurent d’Houry, 1698).</footnote>

<footnote n="35">³⁵ “Catalogue des drogues & Medicamens des indes que m’a envoyé Monsieur Surian, Docteur en Medecine, & Professeur en Botanique, entretenu par Sa Majesté dans les Isles & Terres-fermes de l’Amérique, pour la découverte des facultez des Plantes & de tout ce qui regarde l’Histoire naturelle, où l’on verra quantité de Plantes rares, & plusieurs Semences, Racines, Ecorces, Gommes, Bois, Feüilles, Fleurs, Fruits, Sucs & autres singularitez concernant les Vegetaux, Mineraux, Animaux ou leurs parties,” in Pierre Pomet, *Droguier curieux ou catalogue des drogues simples et composées*, 2nd ed. (Paris: Laurent d’Houry, 1709), 67-72. See Stéphane Van Damme, *Paris, capitale philosophique, de la Fronde à la Révolution* (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2005), 110-6, where he connects scientific innovations (such as the information brought by Surian from the New World) and the Parisian market of books. On Pomet, see also Emma Spary, “Pierre Pomet’s Parisian Cabinet: Revisiting the Visible and the Invisible in Early Modern Collections,” in *From Private to Public:*</footnote>
Surian's failure to retain royal patronage hardly comes as a surprise given the conjuncture of war and economic decline of France at the end of the 1680s. The tension between the government's ambitions and actual possibilities in funding scholarly enterprises, overseas or not, springs frequently from the official correspondence. In March 1700, for instance, Secretary of State of the Navy Pontchartrain wrote to the échevins and deputies of commerce of Marseille—the municipal magistrates in charge of the Chamber of Commerce—to ask them to give Tournefort up to 10,000 *livres* for his travel to the Levant. To the demand was added the promise of being reimbursed by the crown for what actually was a very considerable sum indeed (compare it to the 2,000 *livres* accorded to Surian in 1687). In July 1702, more than two years later, Pontchartrain was still repeating his promises of reimbursement. Some months later, the Chamber answered only to refuse yet another demand by the minister, this time regarding armament, by arguing that there were no funds in the *échelles*, the trading outposts of France across the Eastern Mediterranean. The reasons argued by the échevins are worth noting: the interruption of the commerce a year earlier due to the War of the Spanish Succession had cut the inputs and “if there were any funds in the *échelles*, they have been mostly spent by the orders that Your Highness has previously given us regarding Mr de Tournefort of the Academy of Sciences, the Emir and the Patriarch of the Maronites, and the sieur [Jean-Jacques Le Noir] Du Roule on the occasion of his journey to Ethiopia.”<fnref n="36" />

Just like the 1700s, the 1680s were not times for “all those [expenses] that are superficial.” At this point, one may reasonably ask what happened to Plumier. The failure of Surian was surprisingly not that of the Minim friar. Just some months before his letter ordering the return of the “physician botanist,” the Secretary of the Navy wrote to Guy-Crescent Fagon, a professor of “plants and simples” at the Jardin Royal and a well-connected court physician (he would become the king’s “first physician” and *surintendant* of the Jardin only few years afterwards). Seignelay’s 1689 letter to Fagon was on the subject of Plumier and his work on the American isles:

<footnote>*Natural Collections and Museums*, ed. Marco Beretta (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2005), 59-80.</footnote>

<footnote n="36">³⁶ Archives de la Chambre de Commerce de Marseille AA¹² (Pontchartrain to the Chamber of Commerce of Marseille, Versailles, 3 March 1700), AA¹³ (Pontchartrain to the Chamber, Versailles, 26 July 1702), and BB²⁹ fol. 39 (the Chamber to Pontchartrain, Marseille, 22 November 1702), copied in AN AJ¹⁵ 511, piece 386.</footnote>
The King sent last year to the isles of America a physician from Marseilles and a Minim friar called Father Plumier so as to make an exact research on the plants of this country that are not in Europe; since the friar did not concurr with the physician, he has worked on his own and he has reported a collection [*recueil*] of what he has done on the island of Martinique. Since I would be very pleased to be informed about the merit of this work and to know if it is worth to continue it, I ordered him to present it to you, and I beg you . . . to examine it and, once you have seen it, to make me know your thoughts, and what you think that should be done therewith.<fnref n="37" />

In contrast to Surian, who was asked to return to France in the middle of his first
expedition, Plumier not only kept the favor of the crown's highest officers, but he
secured royal economic support for three more expeditions to the West Indies: in 1689,
in 1694, and in 1704, when he died shortly before the scheduled embarking on what
would have been his fourth journey. As the passionate and successful chronicler of
quarrels and defects that he was, Father Labat also noted the discord of Surian and
Plumier and reported that

dissension appeared between the Minim & him [Surian], & forced them to separate. They
returned to France after eighteen or twenty months of work, loaded with seeds, leaves,
roots, salts, oils, & other trinkets, & quantity of complaints the one against the other. . . . It
seems that the Minim was righter than the Physician, or that he was more listened, since the
former was dismissed, & the Minim was sent back to the Isles; to work again.<fnref n="38" />

Labat was right: Plumier's work during that 1687 botanical journey to the West
Indies held the attention of high officers of the crown like Bégon and Seignelay and, after
the death of the latter in 1690, that of his successor, Louis Phélypeaux de Pontchartrain.
On May 18, 1689, less than two years after his first voyage, a new order was issued from

<footnote n="37">³⁷ Seignelay to Guy-Crescent Fagon, Versailles, October 12, 1688, in AN Marine B² 66, fol. 252: "Le Roy envoïa l'année derniere aux isles de l'amerique un Medecin de Marseille et un Religieux minime nommé le Pere Plumier pour faire une recherche exacte des plantes de ce pays qui ne sont point en Europe, ce Religieux n'ayant pu s'accorder avec ce medecin a travaillé en son particulier et il a rapporté un recueil de ce quil a fait dans l'Isle de la martinique, comme je serois bien aise d'estre informé du merite de cet ouvrage et de ce sçavoir sil est a propos de le continuer je luy aye ordonné de vous le faire voir, et je vous prie de luy donner quelque heure de vos ... pour l'examiner, et apres que vous l'aurez veu vous me ferez plaïsir de me faire sçavoir ce que vous en pensez, et ce que vous croirez quil serai à propos de faire sur ce sujet."</footnote>

<footnote n="38">³⁸ Labat, *Nouveau voyage*, vol. 4, 23: "la discorde se mit entre le Minime & lui [Surian], & les obligeat de se separer. Ils revinrent en France après dixhuit ou vingt mois de travail, chargez de grains, de feuilles, de racines, de sels, d'huiles, & d'autres babioles, & de quantité de plaintes l'un contre l'autre. Il y a apparence que le Minime avoit plus de raison que le Medecin, ou qu'il fut mieux écouté, puisque celui-ci fut congedié, & que le Minime fut renvoyé aux Isles; pour travailler de nouveau."</footnote>
Versailles in favor of the Minim: it entitled him to embark once more towards the American islands in order to “continue the collection [recuei] that he began on seeds, plants and trees of the abovementioned islands and to compose [a new] one on fishes, birds, and other animals of that country.”<fnref n="39" />

That famous *recueil*, Plumier’s collection of drawings on West Indian plants and animals, earned the friar not only another state-sponsored journey to the Caribbean islands, but also a pension and a prize as grandiose as ambiguous in its actual implications: the right to call himself *botaniste du roi*, the king’s botanist.<fnref n="40" /> The pompous title, however, did not correspond to a permanent position in the way that *bibliothécaire du roi*, for instance, referred to a fixed employment (that of maître de la Librarie and garde de la Bibliothèque du roi). It seems rather an informal appellation that Plumier began using tentatively, with the crown’s acquiescence, after he was accorded a royal pension. The friar did not identify himself as *botaniste du roi* on the title page *Description des plantes de l’Amérique* in 1693 (where the author was only referred to as simply a “religieux minime”), but the large majority of the plates in the book were signed “Fr.C.P.m.b.r.d.,” or “Fr. C. Plumier Minimus Botanicus Regius delineavit”: “brother Charles Plumier, Minim friar and Royal Botanist, drew it.”<fnref n="41" /> Ten years later, on the title page of his *Filicetum americanum* (1703), Plumier was identified as “Minim of the province of France, and Botanist of the King” (*ordinis minimorum in provincia Francia & botanico regio*), whereas in the *Nova plantarum americanarum genera* (1703), the clarification *apud Insulas Americanas* (“in the American isles”) was added to the epithet. The French translation of the *Filicetum*, published in 1705, retained this form: “par le R. P. Charles Plumier, Minime de la province de France, & Botaniste du Roy dans les Isles de l’Amérique.”

The appellation of *botaniste du roi* appears rarely among other French authors (fig. 2.3). Before Plumier, only Jean Robin (1550-1629) and his son Vespasian (1579-1622) used a similar designation (*botanicorum regiorum*) in their *Enchiridion isagogicum* (1623).

<footnote n="39">³⁹ ANOM Colonies B¹⁴ F°, fol. 95r-v: “Sa Majesté envoyant aux Isles de l’Amérique le Père Charles Plumier Religieux de l’ordre des Minimes pour continuer le recueil qu’il a commancé des graines, plantes et abres desdites isles et en composer un des poissons, oyseaux et autres animaux de ce pays, Elle mande et ordonne au Sr Comte de Blenac gouverneur et lieutenant général desdites Isles, au Sr Dumaitz de Goimpy Intendant, aux Gouverneurs et autres officiers d’icelles de donner audit Père Plumier tous les secours et la protection dont il aura besoin pour executer ce qui est en cela de ses intentions.”</footnote>

<footnote n="40">⁴⁰ This bears comparison with André Thevet’s title as *cosmographe du roi* a century earlier. According to Frank Lestringant, “la fonction ne semble pas avoir existé en France avant lui. Peut-être l’a-t-il lui même crée sur les modèles espagnol et portugais. Les attributions en sont vagues, les rémunérations incertaines.” Frank Lestringant, *L’atelier du cosmographe, ou l’image du monde à la Renaissance* (Paris: Albin Michel, 1991), 21.</footnote>

<footnote n="41">⁴¹ On Plumier’s signing his plates and drawings, see below, chap. 4.</footnote>
<table><caption>Fig. 2.3. French naturalists including the title of “Botaniste du roy” or similar in the their publications.</caption><thead><tr><td>Naturalist</td><td>Publication</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Jean (1550-1629) and Vespasien Robin (1579-1622)</td><td>Enchiridion isagogicum ad facilem notitiam stirpium tam indigenarum quam exoticarum hae voluntur in horto D.D. Joannis et Vespasiani Robin, <b>botanicorum regiorum</b> (Paris: Pierre de Bresche, 1623)</td></tr><tr><td>Charles Plumier (1646-1704)</td><td>Filicetum americanum seu filicium, polypodiorum, adiantorum, &c., in America nascentium icones. Auctore P. Carolo Plumier, ordinis minimorum in provincia Franciae & <b>botanico regio</b> (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1703).<br/>Nova plantarum americanarum genera, authore P. Carolo Plumier ordinis Minimorum in Provincia Franciae, & <b>apud Isulas Americanas Botanico Regio</b> (Paris: Jean Boudot, 1703).<br/>Traité des fougères de l'Amérique, par le R. P. Charles Plumier, Minime de la Province de France, & <b>Botaniste du Roy dans les Isles de l'Amérique</b> (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1705)</td></tr><tr><td>Louis Feuillée (1660-1732)</td><td>Journal des observations physiques, mathématiques, et botaniques faites par ordre du Roy sur les Côtes Orientales de l'Amérique Meridionale, & dans les Indes Occidentales, depuis l'année 1707 jusques en 1712, par le R.P. Louis Feuillée, Religieux Minime, Mathematicien, <b>Botaniste de Sa Majesté</b>, & Correspondant de l'Académie Royale des Sciences (Paris: Pierre Giffart, 1714).</td></tr><tr><td>Pierre Barrère (1690-1755)</td><td>Essai sur l'histoire naturelle de la France equinoxiale, ou dénombrement des plantes, des animaux, & des minéraux, qui se trouvent à l'Isle de Cayenne, les Isles de Remire, sur les Côtes de la Mer, & dans le Continent de la Guyanne . . . par Pierre Barrère, correspondant de l'Académie Royale des Sciences, Docteur & Professeur Royal en Médecine à l'Université de Perpignan, Médecin de l'Hôpital Militaire de la même Ville, ci-devant <b>Médecin Botaniste du Roi dans l'Isle de Cayenne</b> (Paris: Pierre Piget, 1741)</td></tr><tr><td>Sieur Andrieux (n.d.)</td><td>Catalogue raisonné des plantes, arbres & arbustes don't on trouve des graines, des bulbes & du plant chez le sieur Andrieux, Marchand Grainier-Fleuriste & <b>Botaniste du Roi</b> (Paris: Andrieux, 1771)</td></tr><tr><td>Jean-Baptiste de Monet, chevalier de Lamarck (1744-1829)</td><td>Considérations en faveur du Chevalier de La Marck, ancient officier au regiment de Beaujolais, de l'Académie royale des Sciences, <b>botaniste du Roi</b>, attaché au cabinet d'histoire naturelle (Paris: n.p., 1798).</td></tr></tbody></table>

Jean had previously called himself “arboriste, simpliste et botaniste du Roi,” perhaps because he was in charge of the Paris Faculty of Medicine’s gardens and, later, of the royal gardens—prior to the 1635 foundation of the definitive *Jardin royal des plantes medicinales* in the faubourg Saint-Victor, of which his son Vespasian was named first *sous-demonstrateur* and, like his father, *arboriste du roi*.<fnref n="42" /> Examples of similar (and similarly flexible) denominations are to be found in two of the English authors Plumier knew well: John Parkinson (1567-1650) and Robert Morison (1620-1683). In his *Theatrum Botanicum* (1640), Parkinson appeared on the title page as “Apothecary of London, and the Kings Herbalist.” In Morison’s *Plantarum umbelliferarum distribution nova* (1672), the author was

<footnote n="42">⁴² Philippe Tamizey de Larroquet, *Deux jardiniers émérites: Peiresc et Vespasien Robin* (Aix: V.-J. Remondet, 1896).</footnote>
described as “medico & professore Botanico Regio.” Both Parkison and Morison were among the seventeenth-century botanists who influenced the work of Plumier enough for him to dedicate to each of them a genus of an American plant in his peculiar pantheon of botanists, his *Nova genera*: both the *Parkinsonia* and the *Morisonia* are still used in today’s nomenclature.<fnref n="43" />

In the French context, the title of royal botanist and the socioprofessional identity it implied was original to Plumier. It seems reasonable to think that he used it on his own initiative as a denomination of prestige, with the consent of his patrons and borrowing from previous and contemporary institutional codes and affiliations. As *botaniste du roi*, Plumier did not only accentuate the social and cultural credit received from the crown through a royal pension and economic support, but also allowed him to circumnavigate an essential tension of his trajectory: the one resulting from his social condition as a member of a Catholic regular order while his professional status depended on the networks of patronage of Louis XIV’s monarchy. Such a tension becomes clearer in an episode recounted by Martin Lister during his time among the cream of Parisian society in 1698. Then, Lister met the Marquis de l’Hôpital who, besides an aristocrat, was a renowned mathematician and member of the Academy of Sciences. After “a long Conversation with him about Philosophy and Learning,” as well as noting with dismay that “the Wars had made [the French] altogether Strangers to what was being done in *England*,” Lister and l’Hôpital engaged in a discussion about the London Royal Society, to which Lister pertained, and its French counterpart.

[L'Hôpital] told me, it was not possible for [the Paris Academy of Sciences] to continue the Monthly Memoirs, as they had done for two years only, because they were but very few in number of that Society, and had very little Correspondence. Indeed, I did inquire once of some of that Body, why they did not take in more, since there were very many deserving Men in the City, as I instanc'd in F. *Plumier*. They owned he would be an Honour to the body; but they avoided to make a Precedent for the Admission of any friar whatsoever.<fnref n="44" />

Indeed, Plumier was not a member of the Company, and neither was he affiliated to the Jardin du roi, the two Parisian hubs of natural historical research. This does not mean that the friar was alien to these spaces of intellectual sociability: we find him in both, as

<footnote n="43">⁴³ It may have become more common in the eighteenth century: Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, “La collecte du monde: voyage et histoire naturelle (fin XVIIᵉ siècle-début XIXᵉ siècle),” in *Le Muséum au premier siècle de son histoire*, ed. Claude Blanckaert *et al*. (Paris: Muséum nationale d’histoire naturelle, 1997), 166.</footnote>

<footnote n="44">⁴⁴ Martin Lister, *A Journey to Paris in the Year 1698* (London: printed for Jacob Tonson, 1699), 94-5.</footnote>
well as in the meetings that botanists, physicians, and chemists held regularly in the Bibliothèque du roi on rue Vivienne.<fnref n="45" /> The episode sheds light on the social and intellectual meanings of the curious epithet of *botaniste du roi*. Its use, as we have seen, was sporadic among other naturalists from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, employed sustainably only by Plumier (and perhaps also by Louis Feuillée, his purported disciple and also a Minim friar). In a context in which the monarchy constituted an important (yet not the only) source of legitimation for natural history by means of the social legitimation of its practitioners, the title of *botaniste du roi* offered an alternative to institutional affiliations that were banned to Plumier for his belonging to the clergy. It bedecked the friar’s pension with the socio-cognitive credit emanating from the royal power.

It is now time to explore more in depth the ways in which Plumier slipped into the web of state patronage. The explanation for his success in retaining the crown’s support for his research lies in two aspects largely unrelated to natural history’s purported utility for the state’s imperial ambitions overseas. First, Plumier successfully presented himself as a reliable go-between to both the colonial and metropolitan authorities; second, he took pains in stressing the potential of his corpus of drawings on the West Indian flora and fauna (the *recueil* to which ministers and officers referred in their correspondence) for celebrating the king’s glory.

## Traveling naturalists and the Atlantic flow of political information

Plumier’s first book appeared in 1693, one year before departing on the third journey to the West Indies. The *Description des plantes de l’Amérique* was printed at the Imprimerie royale, the royal printing house in the Louvre Palace. The costs of both printing and engraving were assumed by the crown; the Minim took care of acknowledging his debt in the preface:

> If [the public] finds any pleasure in this work, they are obligated to the late Monseigneur de Seignelay, Minister and Secretary of State, and to Monseigneur de Pontchartrain, who has succeeded him. The former obtained for me the liberality of the King for providing for the

<footnote n="45">⁴⁵ These meetings are recounted in a letter from David Krieg to James Petiver, Paris, March 20, 1702 and Paris, July 11, 1701/2, in BL MS Sloane 4063, fol. 139. On Krieg, see below chap. 4.</footnote>
expenses of my travels, and the latter had also the generosity of honoring me with the
protection of His Majesty for the engraving, and for the printing of this volume.<fnref n="46" />

In the case of Plumier, as well as in that of Surian or Tournefort, the patronage of
the state to traveling naturalists passed through the hands of the Secretary of State of the
Navy: Colbert de Seignelay and, after his early death in 1690, Louis Phélypeaux de
Pontchartrain. During the reign of Louis XIV, the minister of the navy was one of the
key figures of the French government, whose competences went far beyond the naval
military forces. He was one of the five Secretaries of State together with those of War,
Foreign Affairs, the King's House and Protestant Affairs, and one of the seven
"ministers" of State including also the Chancellor of France, in charge of the
administration and justice, and the Controller-General of Finances. In 1669, the political
reforms of the Great Colbert created the ministry of the navy almost ex nihilo by joining
the offices of the Navy of the East (Marine du Levant) and that of the West (Marine du
Ponant), which were hitherto under the control of the ministers of War and Foreign
Affairs, respectively.<fnref n="47" /> Colbert himself took up the newly created office and assumed
responsibility over naval warfare and all things related to non-European affairs by and
large, from the colonies and overseas dominions such as the Caribbean isles of Saint-
Domingue and Martinique to the trading échelles across the Levant. Consuls and
intendants were therefore under the orders of the Secretary of the Navy and were usually
members of the naval administration themselves. Besides the military forces at sea, the
navy was responsible for colonial civil aspects as well: intendants of the West Indies, like
Michel Bégon for instance, were also in charge of police, justice, and finances.

The navy, the civil life in the colonies, the commerce and, in general, the entire
projection of France outside Europe fell under the responsibility of Secretaries of State
like Colbert, his son Seignelay from 1683, and the two Pontchartrains (father and son)
after him. That included traveling naturalists financed by royal funds: indeed, nomadic
scholars like Plumier often corresponded with high officers to account for their activities
overseas. Michel Bégon was among such figures as naval intendant in Marseille and later
in Rochefort.

<footnote n="46">⁴⁶ Plumier, *Description*, sig. [a4r]: “Il me reste à avertir le public, que s’il tire quelque plaisir de ce travail, il en a l’obligation à feu Monseigneur de Seignelay, Ministre & Secretaire d’Estat, & à Monseigneur de Pontchartrain, qui luy a succédé. Le premier m’obtint de la liberalité du Roy, de fournir aux frais de mes voyages, & le second a eû la bonté de m’honorer aussi de sa protection auprès de Sa Majesté, pour la graveûre, & pour l’impression de ce premier volume.”</footnote>

<footnote n="47">⁴⁷ Thierry Sarmant and Mathieu Stoll, *Régner et gouverner: Louis XIV et ses ministres* (Paris: Perrin, 2010), 220–7.</footnote>
Another unavoidable figure grew stronger during the reign of Louis XIV in the overseeing of natural explorations overseas: the King's First Physician Guy-Crescent Fagon, who would become head of the Jardin du roi from the beginning of the eighteenth century. The correspondence of several French traveling naturalists reveals the central role that Fagon played in the circulation of natural information between the colonies and the metropolis. Take the case of the unfortunate Augustin Lippi, the Parisian physician who joined the calamitous diplomatic mission of Lenoir du Roule to the *Negus* of Abyssinia. Before their adventure was brought to a dramatic end, Lippi had maintained a frequent correspondence with Fagon: though the shipments were always addressed to Minister Pontchartrain, it was actually the First Physician to whom he regularly sent catalogs, dried specimens, and abundant notes and drawings. Though the correspondence of Plumier is not conserved, the fluidity of communication between traveling naturalists and officers of the state seems to have been one of the bases of royal support, as suggested by the submissive tone in which Lippi opened one of his letters to Fagon: "traveling at the Prince's expense and doing so under your celebrated auspices, not having kept you briefed of my progresses for such a long time is only worth of an ungrateful and negligent person."<fnref n="48" />

In his journey to the Levant, Tournefort also maintained a regular epistolary exchange with the *superintendant* of the Jardin du roi—collected afterwards under the name of “botanical diaries” (*journaux de botanique*)—and sent him catalogs of plants and dried specimens through the consuls and the royal officers at the different *échelles*.<fnref n="49" /> But the influential academician and professor at the Jardin du roi had, in contrast to the young and less influential Lippi, two correspondents: whereas he informed Fagon with a certain regularity about his botanical work, it was to Pontchartrain that he reported on general aspects of the countries he was visiting. The two volumes of his *Voyage au Levant*, published in 1717 after the death of the author, were in fact a selection of his correspondence with the secretary of State; this correspondence was aimed since the beginning at offering a *relation*, or travel account. As he noted in the preface to these two printed volumes, the task with which he had been charged by Pontchartrain was to “make observations not only on the Natural History, and on the Ancient & Modern

<footnote n="48">⁴⁸ BCMNHN MS 1299 “Description des plantes observées en Égypte par M. Lippi, depuis le 22ᵉ du moi d’avril jusqu’au 18ᵉ juillet de 1704, avant son départ du Caire pour l’Éthiopie,” fol. 4: “Monsieur, Voyager aux dépens du Prince, le faire sous vos illustres auspices, et tarder si longtemps a vous informer de ce qui se passe, c’est être ingrat ou negligent.”</footnote>

<footnote n="49">⁴⁹ BCMNHN MS 998 “Journal de botanique du Levant, par Tournefort.”</footnote>
Geography; but also on what regards the Commerce, the Religion & the Customs of the different peoples who live there."<fnref n="50" /> Whether sought or not by the "post-Colbertian" French state, information on overseas territories was duly circulated by traveling naturalists. The Secretary of State of the Navy was well-placed for collecting information through wandering scholars: since 1669, the responsibility of the navy had fallen on the same person who was in charge of the King's House (*Secretaire d'État de la Maison du Roi*), an office responsible for Paris and its region as well as those institutions surrounding the monarch. Among such institutions were the academies, the Jardin du roi and the Imprimerie royale. Colbert, Seignelay and Pontchartrain were at once in charge of the navy and the western colonies on the one hand, and the official learned societies and the royal press in Paris on the other.

Plumier profited from both a very delicate political situation in the Caribbean basin and his own status as traveler in the area in order to present himself as a useful messenger and intermediary to both the representatives of the crown in the West Indies and the high officers in the metropolis, who held in their hands the royal liberality for scholarly undertakings.<fnref n="51" /> In other words, the friar attempted to present himself not only as a scholar whose engaging iconographic work on “our Islands”’s nature could contribute to the king’s glory, but also as a valuable go-between. This appears more clearly in the exchanges between colonial officers on the subject of Plumier. On June 3, 1690, for instance, the governor of Tortuga Island and Saint-Domingue, Pierre-Paul Tarin de Cussy (g. 1684-1701) wrote to Seignelay about some delicate information he was sending to France for him:

> Though this report goes in the frigate *Seignelay* . . . I dread including in it some articles of consequence, fearing that the ship could meet enemies. . . . And since I entirely trust Reverend Father Plumier, who is taking this ship in order to inform Your Grace of the travel you ordered him to undertake on this coast [*en cette côte*], where he has applied himself with all the possible zeal and assiduity so as not to become unworthy of the choice that Your Grace made for the discovery of several most curious things of which I hope you will

<footnote n="50">⁵⁰ Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, *Relation d'un voyage au Levant, fait par ordre du Roy* (Paris: de l'Imprimerie royale, 1717), vol. 1, 1-2: "Monseigneur le Comte de Pontchartrain Secretaire d'Etat . . . proposa à Sa Majesté sur la fin de l'année 1699 d'envoyer dans les pays étrangers des personnes capables d'y faire des observations non seulement sur l'Histoire naturelle, & sur la Geographie ancienne & moderne; mais encore sur ce qui regarde le Commerce, la Religion & les Moeurs des differens peuples qui les habitent."</footnote>

<footnote n="51">⁵¹ Philippe Hrodej, "Saint-Domingue en 1690. Les observations du père Plumier, botaniste provençal," *Revue française d'histoire d'outre-mer* 84, no. 317 (1997), 93-117.</footnote>
be satisfied, I begged him to have the honor of informing you, Monseigneur, of what I refrained myself from writing down.<fnref n="52" />

The role of Plumier as messenger of the governor of Saint-Domingue to Seignelay has to be read in light of the very tense political situation of the French islands in the Caribbean basin at that time, as well as the critical isolation of the French position in that area. In September 1688, a few months after Plumier left Marseille for his first journey to the West Indies, Louis XIV launched an attack across the Rhine: what was meant to be a brief intervention unexpectedly became the Nine Years War, in which the French king eventually had to oppose a wide European coalition, the League of Augsburg, led by William III, king of England and Stadtholder of the United Provinces, and allied with Savoy and the Habsburgs rulers of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire. Mainly a European conflict, hostilities broke out nevertheless in the Caribbean, where the French positions had to struggle with an everyday hostility with the Dutch, the Spanish and, especially, the English. Though economically and territorially important, the French dominions in the West Indies were demographically weak: James Pritchard has pointed out that France had neither the strength nor the will to oppose its opponents overseas, hence their limited assistance to the American colonies during the first years of the war.<fnref n="53" />

It is at this point that Plumier came in: in that June 1690, when Governor de Cussy was writing to the minister, the friar was returning to France from his second journey to the West Indies. Together with the message of the governor, he was bringing to Seignelay a report written by himself on the “present state of the island of Saint-Domingue,” signed October 1690.<fnref n="54" /> The report went along the lines of the governor’s letters: to convince Seignelay and the metropolitan government by and large of the need to defend the Caribbean dominions against the Anglo-Dutch and Spanish forces. In part because of the economic exhaustion of France, military assistance from the metropolis was but hoped for during the first half of the conflict. In January 1691, few months after

<footnote n="52">⁵² ANOM C⁹A 2, Pierre-Paul Tarin Cussy to Seignelay, Le Cap, June 3, 1690, fol. 81r-82v, quoted in Krakovitch, “La vie intellectuelle,” 103: “Bien que ce mémoire passe dans la frégatte le *Seignelay* . . . j’ay cependant apprehendé d’y insérer quelqu’articles de consequences, de crainte que ce vaisseau ne fit rencontre de quelques vaisseaux ennemis; . . . et comme j’ay une entière confiance au R. Père Plumier qui passe dans ce vaisseau pour aller rendre compte à Votre Grandeur du voyage que vous lui avez ordonné de faire en cette coste où il s’est appliqué avec tout le zele et assiduité possible pour ne pas se rendre indinge du choix que Votre Grandeur en a fait pour la découverte de plusieurs choses des plus curieuses dont j’espère qu’elle sera satisfaite, je l’ay supplié de se donner l’honneur de vous informer, Monseigneur, de ce que je me suis abstenu de vous écrire.”</footnote>

<footnote n="53">⁵³ James Pritchard, *In Search of Empire: The French in the Americas, 1670-1730* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 301-57.</footnote>

<footnote n="54">⁵⁴ ANOM F³ 92, fol. 27r, quoted in Hrodej, “Saint-Domingue en 1690,” 106-14.</footnote>
his sending both a letter and the trustworthy father Plumier to Seignelay, Governor de Cussy, several of his officers, and around five thousand men were killed at the hands of a small Spanish naval force marching over Cap-François. Only from the middle of that year, with Pontchartrain as minister of the navy after Seignelay’s death, were the first significant defense forces sent to the islands, and a reversal of the situation in favor of the French began to take place from 1693 onwards.<fnref n="55" />

Besides his own report to Seignelay, Plumier addressed a similar letter to Intendant-General of the Navy François Usson de Bonrepaus, also dated October 8, 1690. Plumier continued to offer his services as a go-between between the colonial and the metropolitan governments during his third expedition, the longest one—the official order was issued in September 1694, and he probably did not return until 1697.<fnref n="56" /> Plumier shipped another report to the navy minister in August 1697, with the war almost finished: this time, the Minim chronicled the sacking of Cartagena by the French navy under the command of the French privateer Jean-Bernard Desjean, baron de Pointis.<fnref n="57" /> A few days later, Secretary of State Pontchartrain received this very same document through Bégon: with the report by Plumier in his hands, along with another one by François de Galifet, the king’s lieutenant on the island of Saint-Domingue, the minister took measures against corrupt officers who were involved in the raid and pocketed some of the profits that were supposed to go to the royal funds.<fnref n="58" />

The friar took good care to make himself relevant to high figures of the government, like the minister of the navy through a frequent, probably unsolicited, correspondence. His reports on the situation of the island, like that on the sacking of Cartagena, were not the only means to achieve this. He meant his very drawings on plants, insects, birds, and fishes of the West Indies to circulate among colonial administrators and metropolitan high officers of the crown. Take the case of one volume of manuscript drawings and descriptions by Plumier. Significantly enough, this document ended up in the Bibliothèque nationale de France and not, like his main corpus, in the Muséum national d'histoire

<footnote n="55">⁵⁵ Pritchard, *In Search of Empire*, 315.</footnote>

<footnote n="56">⁵⁶ As noted by Hrodej, “Saint-Domingue en 1690,” 105, this is suggested in some of his manuscripts, dating his work on the islands from 1689—the beginning of his second journey—to 1697: BCMNHN MS 1 “Flicetum americanum, seu historia filicum in insulis americanis nascentium . . . ab anno 1689 usque ad annum 1697,” and MS 2-7 “Botanicum americanum, seu historia plantarum in americanis insulis nascentium . . . ab anno 1689 usque ad annum 1697.”</footnote>

<footnote n="57">⁵⁷ ANOM C⁹ 3, fol. 404-408, quoted in Krakovitch, “La vie intellectuelle,” 116–17.</footnote>

<footnote n="58">⁵⁸ SHDR 1 E 40, fol. 171-6.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_31.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 2.4. Drawings from the collection “Plantes de la Martinique et de la Guadeloupe” by Plumier, dated 1688. Unlike most of Plumier’s folders, this volume is today not at the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, but at the Bibliothèque nationale de France; this may indicate that it was not part of the corpus left by the Minim friar in his cell after his death, and that its finely colored drawings had a different life than the rest of his papers—perhaps they were in one of his patron’s collections. (above) Map of the royal fort in Martinique. (opposite left) “Young black in a canoe made from a single tree trunk.” (opposite right) Plant and fruit of the pineapple. (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>

naturelle. It is composed of thirty to forty carefully finished and exquisitely colored manuscript images (fig. 2.4).<fnref n="59" /> Most of the drawings picture beautifully exotic plants with fruits: the pineapple, the manioc, the sugar-apple, the papaya, the passionflower or the cacao—no ferns this time. Another part is composed of maps of settlements in the West Indies, particularly ones of military interest: the fort and the Saint-Pierre port in Martinique, the eight districts of the Capesterre on the same island and a view of the topography of the island of Grenada from the sea. A third group consists of luxurious images depicting natives of the West Indies in a variety of exotic attitudes: a “reddened” (*rocoué*) Caribbean man with his arc, a Caribbean woman, also reddened, “magnificently arrayed and holding a parrot and a basket,” a “black boy in a canoe made of a single tree trunk,” and a “mulatto slave smoking tobacco.”

<footnote n="59">⁵⁹ BNF Est. JD-18-Fol “Plantes de la Martinique et de la Guadeloupe. Avec des plans et des figures de sauvages de ces pays dessinés, coloriés et décrits par le Père Plumier,” 1668.</footnote>
These pictures are not so much about what they represented as about the function
they fullfilled back in Europe. They had lives of their own. To start with, they exhibited
Plumier's artistic skills and stood as an act of discovery in itself: while producing the
exoticism of what was represented, these images constructed their author's persona as a
discoverer, and unequaled communicator, of that novelty.<fnref n="60" /> Furthermore, the naturalist-
turned-draftsman probably aimed at a very specific audience with these stunning
handmade depictions. In these exquisite handmade drawings, patrons like Seignelay or
Pontchartrain were presented the nature and peoples of the (or what they thought were
their) American islands, as well as monuments (such as the "Plan du fort royal de l'isle de
la Martinique), that both substantiated and nourished French imperial desire. But it was
also Plumier's own work in the West Indies that was showcased in these images, as well
as his capacity to represent the glory of the king through the virtually untapped islands'
nature. The drawings of this collection substantially differ from Plumier's working
images, not only because they are handsomely finished, but also because of their small
number. When compared to the hundreds of drawings of shells, fishes, and ferns, the
collection at the Bibliothèque nationale reveals itself as a selection of topics particularly
liable to attract the attention and interest of ministers and courtesans, something more
difficult to attain with the two hundred engravings on seven types of ferns composing his
*Traité des fougères*. It is meaningful also that they did not end up in the Muséum national
d'histoire naturelle as the large majority of his corpus: they might have been separated
from the entire corpus during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when
Plumier's archive was the object of several reorganizations; but this might also be a sign
that they became part of the king's collection at the Bibliothèque du roi during the friar's
lifetime. Be that as it may, their goal was clear: just as his reports and letters fashioned the
friar as a trustworthy informant of things overseas, these images presented their author
as an efficient crafter of pictorial commemorations of France's imagination and
ambitions overseas. The audiences of such two different sorts of documents were the
same: the metropolitan authorities responsible for the colonies who were, at the very
same time, a fundamental cog in the wheel of royal liberality.

<footnote n="60">⁶⁰ On the (visual) representation of the exotic “Other,” and especially the American “Other,” during the early modern period, the work of Peter Mason is indispensable: *Deconstructing America: Representations of the Other* (London: Routledge, 1990); “From Presentation to Representation: *Americana* in Europe,” *Journal of the History of Collections* 6, no. 1 (1994), 1-20; *Infelicities: Representations of the Exotic* (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, 1998), and *The Lives of Images* (New York: Reaktion Books, 2001).</footnote>
The “inexhaustible curiosity” of a patronage broker

Probably the best example of the important role that Plumier's *recueil* of drawings and prints on American plants and animals played in securing royal patronage for both his journeys and publications can be found in the figure of Michel Bégon. Bégon became without a doubt the most consequential of the friar's protectors. His role in relation to Plumier's work embodies the figure of the seventeenth-century collector, and announces that of the eighteenth-century *amateur*: a connoisseur coming from the royal administration who engaged occasionally in the production of various forms of artistic or scholarly production (the most common being the collection of curiosities, *naturalia* and *artificialia* alike) and engaged socially with artists and scholars, to whom he might serve as broker in the complex systems of preferment on which seventeenth-century cultural production largely rested. Bégon and his artistic, bibliophilic, and natural historical passions clearly highlight what has been hitherto implied here: first, that the boundaries between state and private patronage were delicate and unstable at the time; second, that the fact that Plumier's natural historical research in the West Indies took mostly the form of images played a fundamental part in securing royal patronage.

Intendant Bégon probably first met Plumier in 1687 or shortly before in Marseille, in the context of Surian's mission to the West Indies. One of the most influential naval officers during the reign of Louis XIV, Bégon was born in Blois, the scion of an ennobled family of finance and justice officers.<fnref n="61" /> Related to Colbert, who married his cousin, Bégon entered the naval administration relatively late, in 1677, with a rather secondary assignation in Toulon before being appointed *commissaire-général de la Marine* in Brest in 1680, and to the same position in Le Havre the following year. He was soon thereafter promoted to a more significant position as intendant of justice, finances, and police of the Isles of America. Having spent nearly two years and a half in the French West Indies, Bégon knew well where he was sending Plumier and Surian in 1687. Soon after the death of the Intendant, Father Théodore de Blois, the author of his eulogy, who had access to his private documents and correspondence, related the disgust of the intendant at being offered the West Indies assignment: “he felt an extreme disgust at the idea and tried to excuse himself . . . not believing himself able to resist the fatigues of a

<footnote n="61">⁶¹ Yvonne Bezard, *Fonctionnaires maritimes et coloniaux sous Louis XIV: les Bégons* (Paris: Albin Michel, 1932), 16–17.</footnote>
travel of 20,000 *lieu*[e]s, nor the air of a clime that was called at the period the cemetery of Frenchmen.”<fnref n="62" />

Once back in Europe in 1685, appointed to the intendancy of the Galleys in Marseille, his prestige grew: named honorary member of the Parliament of Provence, Bégon became Intendant of the Navy in Rochefort soon after the Minim departed for America. A few years later, he held this last office simultaneously with the civil administration of the circumscription or *généralité* of La Rochelle. Bégon lived in Rochefort for the remaining twenty-two years of his life and the destiny of this small city of the Atlantic coast would be closely linked to his years as its intendant. Hitherto Rochefort was but a colony that had emerged around the immense dockyard constructed at the will of the Grand Colbert: it was part of the Controller-General's ambitious policy of naval reforms aiming at creating a first-power fleet able compete against the Dutch and English navies.<fnref n="63" /> Upon his arrival, Bégon was determined to transform the colony into a proper city: he began by settling there and not in the more urbanized La Rochelle. He established his residency in the *Maison du roi*, a small palace in the very space of the arsenal, close to the magnificent building of the *Corderie royale*. Shortly after, he had his father's library brought from Blois and enlarged it with the obsession of a bibliophile: Father de Blois estimates Bégon's library at 6,800 items and an undated catalog—probably composed of an inventory drawn up after the intendant's death—suggests a collection of around six thousand volumes.<fnref n="64" /> Organized according to Gabriel Naudé's *Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque* (1627), the library contained about five hundred books on natural history, medicine, geography, and to a lesser extent mathematics, physics, astronomy, and hydrography. Moreover, Bégon was subscribed to the *Journal des scavans* and the *Mémoires de Trévoux*, but also to Bayle's trendsetting *Nouvelles de la République des Lettres*. Passionate about travel and missionary literature, he possessed several volumes of the *Lettres édifiantes et curieuses* and other Jesuit works on the Chinese missions. The books on geography included luxurious editions of the atlases by Ortelius, Mercator, and Blaeu; among those on botany, there were the works of Tournefort—offered to the intendant

<footnote n="62">⁶² Manuscript eulogy by the Capuchin Théodore de Blois, quoted in Andrée Freiche, “Michel Bégon, Intendant de Louis XIV à Rochefort ville nouvelle du XVIIᵉ siècle, 1688-1710” (PhD diss., École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2004), 29–30.</footnote>

<footnote n="63">⁶³ Freiche, “Michel Bégon”; Donald Pilgrim, “The Colbert-Seignelay Naval Reforms at the Beginning of the War of the League of Ausburg,” *French Historical Studies* 9, no. 2 (1975), 235–62.</footnote>

<footnote n="64">⁶⁴ Théodore de Blois, *Histoire de Rochefort, contenant l'établissement de cette ville, de son port et arsenal de marine, et les antiquitez de son château* (Paris: chez Briasson, 1733), 86; MMC MS 425 “Catalogus Bibliothecae Begonianae secundum scientias et artes digestus.”</footnote>
by the author himself, with whom he maintained a regular correspondence—and
obviously those of Plumier.

Intendant Bégon was not only a learned bibliophile, but also a refined collector of objects other than books: he installed, next to the library in his residence of Rochefort, what he recurrently called “my cabinet of curiosities” (*mon cabinet aux curiosités*).<fnref n="65" /> The intendant is a remarkable example of the often obsessive passion for curiosities that rose in seventeenth-century Europe. Without being particularly rich (he mostly owed his fortune to his income as a naval administrator), Bégon was probably among the most prominent collectors and amateurs of his time: “what is called curiosity is something inexhaustible,” he wrote to his friend Cabart de Villermont in 1694.<fnref n="66" /> In 1688, he acquired the cabinet of a certain Provençal officer for 2,000 *livres*, and in the 1690s, he got his hands on no less than two of the most coveted artifacts of the late seventeenth century: two of Vincenzo Maria Coronelli’s celestial globes, for which he paid 1,100 *livres*.<fnref n="67" /> In another letter to Cabart de Villermont concerning a certain investment in a mining company, the intendant complained about the costs of his passion: “I am very displeased that my affairs do not allow me to engage in the company that is being created for the Mines of the Pyrenees, but the passion, by which I have been swept away after some years, of books, medals, and curiosities . . . do not allow me to take part in any business at all.”<fnref n="68" />

An excerpt of an inventory drawn up in 1699 reveals a vast and varied cabinet indeed: apart from a large gathering of medals, it encompassed antiquities (“Egyptian, Greek, and Roman divinities, urns . . . and a big stone decorated with hieroglyphs”); religious objects; arms (“a very tidy gun rack in which there are . . . offensive and defensive arms of all the nations of the world made by good masters”); American exotica

<footnote n="65">⁶⁵ Bégon to Cabart de Villermont, Rochefort, January 9, 1689, in Bégon, “Lettres,” vol. 1, 40. He attached to the letter a “Mémoire de curiosités qui me sont venues de Canada,” including a “prodigious castor tooth,” diamonds, and a specimen of a longnose gar.</footnote>

<footnote n="66">⁶⁶ Bégon to Cabart de Villermont, Rochefort, January 31, 1694, in Bégon, “Lettres,” vol. 1, 218: “Je ne croyois pas qu’on pust me rien apporter de nouveau de ce pays-là [Canada], cependant comme ce qui s’apelle curiosité est inépuisable, on m’a aporté plusieurs choses très jolies et très curieuses que je n’avois point encore veües.”</footnote>

<footnote n="67">⁶⁷ Antoine Schnapper, *Le géant, la licorne, la tulipe. Collections françaises au XVIIᵉ siècle*, vol. 1: *Histoire et histoire naturelle* (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), 610-5. The quote of the globes is still conserved (BNF GE F, piece 13982: “Estimation des globes du Père Coronelli”). See Philippe Haudrère, “Esquisse de portrait intellectuel de Michel Bégon,” in *Le temps de Bégon* (Rochefort: CERMA, 2011), 15-26.</footnote>

<footnote n="68">⁶⁸ Bégon to Cabart de Villermont, Rochefort, February 5, 1693, in Bégon, “Lettres,” vol. 1, 179-80: “Je suis bien fasché que mes affaires ne me promettent pas d’entrer dans la compagnie qui se forme pour les Mines des Pyrénées, mais la passion à laquelle je me suis laissé emporter depuis quelques années, des livres, des médailles, et des curiosités, jointe aux autres dépenses indispensables dont je suis chargé ne me permettent pas d’entrer dans aucune affaire quelle puisse estre.”</footnote>
(“a large boat made of barks . . . used by the savages of Northern America, a boat of the Eskimos [and] a pirogue of the savages of Southern America”); scientific instruments (“the Globes of Father Coronelli and those of Mercator, spheres, burning mirrors, lamps, thermometers, barometers, watches, clocks, pendulums, and mathematical instruments”) and, in general, “several curiosities of different types, such as [a] Mummy, skeletons, hides of animals, shells, dried fishes, curious furniture of far-distant nations, tools and ornaments of the savages, pagodas, sepulchral lamps, porcelains and other works of China, Japan, and all the other nations of the world, of which there are exact inventories.”<fnref n="69" /> The exact inventories are nowadays lost, but the excerpt illustrates well a collector equally passionate about history and natural history, especially when related to far-distant cultures. Bégon represents the well-studied compulsion of the early modern collector for profusion and the strange. In a letter in 1689 to his correspondent Villermont, Bégon proudly admitted that, “by dint of putting every day something new in my cabinet, I realize it begins to fill and that I have very beautiful things.”<fnref n="70" />

His passion for exotica throws light on his support to traveling naturalists such as Surian and Plumier, but especially the latter: his collections reveal that the intendant was particularly fond of botany and the visual arts. His passion for plants, particularly those from far-distant places, led him to establish regular contact with a broad network of French naturalists of his time. He kept with Tournefort a lifelong correspondence—the eulogy for the botanist written by his Aixois friend P. J. B. Lauthier was published in the form of a letter to Bégon—and the botanist often sent to him books on natural history including his own. He had specimens of living plants shipped to him from the American dominions by sailors and administrators of the colonies; he attempted to acclimatize these plants, rather unsuccessfully, in a botanical garden he had installed next to his house in Rochefort and placed under the direction of the first physician of the arsenal hospital.<fnref n="71" /> The excerpt of the inventory of Bégon’s cabinet drawn up in 1699 reveals “6 volumes of dried plants from Europe and America”—Surian’s herbaria were likely among these—and a “droguier filled with all sorts of different stones, colors, salts, metals, gums, woods, roots, plants, fruits, and seeds, from the four parts of the world.”<fnref n="72" />

<footnote n="69">⁶⁹ The inventory is reproduced by Georges Duplessis, *Un curieux du XVIIᵉ siècle: Michel Bégon, intendant de La Rochelle* (Paris: Auguste Aubry, 1874), 7–11.</footnote>

<footnote n="70">⁷⁰ Bégon to Cabart de Villermont, Rochefort, April 3, 1689, in Bégon, “Lettres,” vol. 1, 63: “A force de mettre tous les jours quelque chose de nouveau dans mon cabinet, je m’aperçois qu’il commence fort à se remplir, et que j’ay bien des choses fort belles.”</footnote>

<footnote n="71">⁷¹ Freiche, “Michel Bégon,” 612.</footnote>

<footnote n="72">⁷² Duplessis, *Michel Bégon*, 9.</footnote>
The same inventory reflects how his passion for *naturalia* materialized in the accumulation not only of botanical and zoological specimens, but of books on natural history and images as well. Bégon was a fine, well-known connoisseur of visual arts: he owned "110 volumes of engravings on all sorts of subjects engraved by the best workers, and after the most excellent Painters," to which were added a hundred maps of different regions and cities of France and abroad, a dozen other engraved urban views, half a hundred images of ships and naval themes, twenty other volumes of geographical maps, a hundred paintings among which originals from Raphael, Tintoretto, Van Dyck, and Le Brun, and hundreds of portraits: the inventory lists "30 volumes of collections [*recueils*] of portraits of illustrious people of this century and the previous ones, engraved by the most skilled engravers of Europe"; "52 portraits of illustrious people, by excellent painters," and "32 family portraits," but historian of collections Antoine Schnapper went up to 160 volumes of engravings organized by topic in 1710, plus sixty volumes of engraved portraits, i.e. around eight thousand engraved portraits.<fnref n="73" /> It was the intendant who conceived and supported the project of the two folio volumes of *Les hommes illustres qui ont paru en France pendant ce siècle* (1696 and 1700) by the academician Charles Perrault (1628-1703), the author of famous tales like *Contes de ma mère l'Oye* and brother of the Claude who headed the enterprise on the natural history of animals at the Académie royale des sciences.<fnref n="74" /> It was Bégon who conceived of *Les hommes illustres*, and it was also he who collected the three hundred portraits included in it, and hired and paid the engravers. Apart from his vast collection of portraits, paintings, and engravings, the intendant's love for both the visual arts and the worlds of scholarship were manifested together in precious pieces of his collection, such as the manuscript by Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580-1637) on mathematics and with "figures of all the musical instruments that [Peiresc] found," as well as the "4 volumes of birds and fishes painted from the life [*au naturel*] on paper and vellum [*vélin*]" and the "2 volumes of plants painted by [Nicolas] Robert and other good painters and illuminators," very likely part of the collection of *vélins du Roi* of Gaston d'Orléans.<fnref n="75" />

<footnote n="73">⁷³ Schnapper, *Le géant, la licorne et la tulipe*, 284 and 612-3.</footnote>

<footnote n="74">⁷⁴ Charles Perrault, *Les hommes illustres qui ont paru en France pendant le XVII siècle*, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Paris: Antoine Dezallier, 1701), préface: "Cet ouvrage est dû principalement à l'amour qu'une personne [in a footnote: "M. Bégon, Intendant de Justice & de Marine"] d'un merite singulier a pour la memoire de tous les grands hommes.</footnote>

<footnote n="75">⁷⁵ On the illustrated manuscript by Peiresc, see the introduction by Louis Delavaud and Charles Dangibeaud to Bégon, "Lettres," vol. 1, 80. The vélins are listed in the inventory, reproduced in Duplessis, *Michel Bégon*, 7.</footnote>
Unsurprisingly, the intendant was an enthusiastic admirer of Plumier’s iconographic work on the nature of the West Indies. The very year when the *Description des plantes de l’Amérique* was published, he procured himself a copy printed on luxury paper and had it colored for him (fig. 2.5).<fnref n="76" /> In his correspondence with his friend Cabart de Villermont, the intendant regularly referred to the friar-botanist. In 1690, Bégon wrote that the Minim was himself engraving the plates of “his *Histoire naturelle des Antilles*,” the first title of the *Description*. Five years later, he informed his friend about his concern for the naturalist. (“I wait with impatience for the news about the health of Father Plumier, the last I had not being good.”) In 1701, he wrote to Cabart de Villermont about Plumier’s preparation of a work on fishes and insects, as well as about the friar’s translation of Perrault’s *Éloges* (the volumes of *Les hommes illustres*) into Latin. The involvement of Plumier in the project of Perrault’s *Éloges*—which was above all a project of Bégon— sustains the idea of his close attachment to the intendant, even though he would never finish the translation.<fnref n="77" />

Bégon’s relationship with Plumier was certainly that of a patron and a protégé, although it was also a kind of friendship that a scholar like the Minim could only establish with a connoisseur. Bégon sent Plumier books and articles that could interest him; the Minim, in turn, dispatched to him natural specimens.<fnref n="78" /> In a letter to a physician of La Rochelle—a certain Baulot passionate about travels and far-distant natural curiosities—on the nature of the hummingbird (“a real bird, or a hybrid species between bird and flying insect”), Plumier referred him to “*le Cabinet de M’ l’Intendant*”: “you will find there for sure [a specimen of hummingbird]. I remember having sent him from Martinique, on return from my first journey, a nest of this small but admirable birds, the eggs being inside, as well as the mother, but dead and stuffed.”<fnref n="79" /> Above all, Plumier kept the intendant carefully informed about the evolution of his own work: “I have finished my treatise on usual plants [*des usuelles*] *opus indictum ore alio*, and I am composing another

<footnote n="76">⁷⁶ Bégon to Cabart de Villermont, Rochefort, June 21, 1693, in Bégon, “Lettres,” vol. 1, 191–92. This illuminated copy ended up in the Bibliothèque nationale de France through the crown’s acquisition of Bégon’s “Cabinet of Imprints” in 1770. BNF Est. YE-25-4 “Catalogue du Cabinet de Michel Bégon”: the item is listed in the catalogue as M34.</footnote>

<footnote n="77">⁷⁷ Bégon to Cabart de Villermont, Rochefort, November 7, 1690, in Bégon, “Lettres,” vol. 1, 98. See also Bégon to Cabart de Villermont, Rochefort, June 12, 1695 and December 27, 1701, in Bégon, “Lettres,” vol. 1, 256 and vol. 2, 101.</footnote>

<footnote n="78">⁷⁸ E.g. Bégon to Cabart de Villermont, Rochefort, October 21, 1703, in Bégon, “Lettres,” vol. 3, 18.</footnote>

<footnote n="79">⁷⁹ MMC MS 867, fol. 149r: “Quant à la seconde question que vous me proposés, savoir si le *Colibri* est un véritable oiseau ou une espèce moyenne entre l’oiseau & l’insecte volant; vous avés bien de quoy vous en éclaircir dans le Cabinet de Mr l’Intendant. Vous y en trouverez assurement. Je me souviens de lui avoir apporté de la Martinique au retour de mon premier voyage, un nid de ces petits mais admirables oiseaux, les oefs y estoient dedans et la mere aussi, mais morte et embaumée.”</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_32.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 2.5. One of the copperplates in a copy of Plumier's *Description* that has been elegantly colored by hand. This may well be the copy of Michel Bégon, for he told one of his friends that he had the *Description* printed in fine paper and colored by hand. That this is Bégon's copy seems all the more plausible since it is currently kept at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (unlike most of Plumier's corpus) and we know that Bégon bequeathed a good part of his exceptionally rich collection of books and prints to the king. (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>

one, also very curious, which is a treatise of the *umbelliferae* like the fennel, the angelica, the masterwort, &c. . . . I have already more than a hundred drawn." He duly complained about how the printing of his works forced him to stay in Paris ("I could have made the travel [to America] with Mr du Casse," he writes in 1702, "I lose a very good opportunity"), or the fact that it was not proposed to him to make more travels ("I can hardly be upset because of that. I have a lot of work here [in Paris]"), and he kept the intendant informed about the news of the field ("You would be delighted to see the number and beauty of the drawings [Tournefort] has brought from his travel [to the Levant]. You will see all of them printed one day").<fnref n="80" /> Plumier dedicated to Bégon the

<footnote n="80">⁸⁰ MMC MS 656, fol. 110c: "J'ay fini mon traité des usuelles opus indictum ore alio, et j'en fais un autre aussi très curieux, c'est un traitté des umbelliferes comme le fenouil, l'angelique, l'imperatoir, &c.... je n'ay deia plus de cent dessinées.... J'aurois esté en état de faire le voyage avec Mr du Casse, je perds une très belle occasion, mais à la bonne heure"; MS 867, fol. 147v: "On ne me dit plus rien sur aucun voyage. Je n'en suis guère affligé. J'ay de la bonne besogne ici Dieu merci.", and 150s: "Vous seriés charmé de voir le nombre et la beauté des desseins qu'il a aportés, j'espère que vous verrez le tout un jour imprimé."</footnote>
only book he ever dedicated to anybody, his manual on turnery of 1701, and through the
dedicatory epistle we know that the friar spent some time at the intendant's place in
Rochefort, where he visited his "rich Cabinet of Medals" and his "rare Library," and they
discussed books.<fnref n="81" /> Over the years, they exchanged specimens and volumes, as well as
drawings. In 1702, the friar apologetically asked his protector

to have a sardine of Royan drawn for me, in its entire size and natural form [dans toute sa
grandeur et forme naturelle], by one of your draftsmen. . . . I am thinking about a treatise on
fishes . . . and would need for that to travel a little through the coasts of our seas in the West
as well as in Provence, and it is because of this reason that I wished to spend a little summer
with you in Rochefort and La Rochelle. As for the project I told you about of traveling for a
second volume of the *Tour* [L'art de tourner], I was thinking to make it in times of peace . . .
particularly to Nuremberg, in Germany, where I have been told that there are admirable
turners. I would also like to see the cabinet of canon [Manfredo] Settala in Milan. I hope the
Divine Providence will favor me of its Mercy. I still feel man enough, thank God. I will
work as long as it will please Him to favor me with his Grace.<fnref n="82" />

The fragment certainly points towards a patronage association: if we do not know
the concrete ways in which Bégon supported the activity of the naturalist, the latter
responded in any case like a protégé. Apart from the *Art de tourner*, the naturalist offered
to Bégon what would turn out to be a more perennial tribute: the name of a genus of
flowering plants discovered by him in the West Indies, and still known today as *Begonia*.<fnref n="83" />

The intendant acted as a broker between the friar and the ministers of the navy (it
was he, for instance, who sent to Versailles some of the reports of Plumier on the
political situation of the French West Indies), profiting from his mediating position as
administrator of the port through which the French ambitions in the Americas were

<footnote n="81">⁸¹ Charles Plumier, *L'art de tourner, ou de faire en perfection toutes sortes d'ouvrages au tour* (Lyon: chez Jean Certe, 1701), sig. [a2v].</footnote>

<footnote n="82">⁸² MMC MS 867, fol. 152r: “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. . . . Je vous demande bien pardon de ma liberté, j’ay cru que vous auriez plaisir de me faire cette grace. Je medite un traité des poissons, c’est un ouvrage competent à un minime. J’ay besoin pour ce sujet de voyager un peu les costes de nos mers tant du Ponant que de Provence, c’est pour cela que je souhaittois particulièrement d’aller passer un petit esté avec vous à Rochefort et à La Rochelle, comme aussi pour mon traité des Coquillages pour en dissequer quelques uns vivans. Pour le dessein que je vous avois fait savoir d’aller voyager pour un second volume du tour, je suposois de le faire en temps de paix. . . . Je me flatte que si je faisois ce voyage je découvrirois bien de belles choses sur cette matière particulièrement en Allemagne à Nuremberg où j’apprens qu’il y a des tourneurs admirables. Je voudrois bien voir aussi le Cabinet du Chanoine Settala à Milan, on m’a dit qu’il y a des pièces très ingénieuses. J’espère que la Divine Providence me favorisera de sa Misericorde. Je me sens encore bien homme Dieu mercy. Je travailleray tant qu’il luy plaira me favoriser de la grace.”</footnote>

<footnote n="83">⁸³ On Plumier’s dedication of botanical genera names, see below, chap. 4.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_33.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 2.6. Bégon's bookplate, composed of the family crest with the motto *Michaeli Begon et amicis*, "Michel Bégon and his friends." Intendant Bégon's "inexhaustible curiosity" led him to cultivate a polite "friendship" with naturalists and protégés like Tournefort or Plumier. The latter visited him and his exceptional collection of books, prints, medals, and paintings in Rochefort. (Hartfield House Library and Archives.)</figcaption></figure>

operated.<fnref n="84" /> Nonetheless, Bégon's protection of Plumier was of a different kind than that the naturalist established with a Seignelay or a Pontchartrain. The figure of the intendant predates that of the eighteenth-century French amateur studied by Charlotte Guichard: "defined by the notion of taste, which includes a whole series of social and cultural practices . . . far beyond the simple collection" of works of art and curiosities of nature, "the French amateur therefore combined, in a very specific way, the figures of the patron and of the amateur in the English sense."<fnref n="85" /> Bégon's "inexhaustible curiosity" sheds light on the mobile nature and plural lives of Plumier's drawings and prints on the West Indian nature. Take the friar's first book: the *Description* might well have been a substantive contribution to the field of natural history, but it was its iconographic materiality—the possibility for the volume and its images to work as a luxury commodity liable to enter the library and cabinet of a refined *curieux* like Bégon—that earned its author the sympathy of the intendant and its capacity to act for him as a broker of state patronage. It took Bégon but a few months to have a luxury and illuminated edition of the book printed exclusively for him. Through his work, both *utile et curieux*, Plumier

<footnote n="84">⁸⁴ On the role of brokers in patronage relationships in seventeenth-century France, see Sharon Kettering, *Patrons, Brokers, and Clients in Seventeenth-Century France* (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). See also her “Brokerage at the Court of Louis XIV,” *The Historical Journal* 36, no. 1 (1993), 69-87.</footnote>

<footnote n="85">⁸⁵ Charlotte Guichard, “Taste Communities: The Rise of the Amateur in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” *Eighteenth-Century Studies* 45, no. 4 (2012), 521-2. Guichard’s focus is on amateurs of art in mid- to late-eighteenth-century Paris. For a more thorough study of this question, see her *Les amateurs d’art à Paris au XVIIIᵉ siècle* (Seyssell: Champ Vallon, 2008).</footnote>
became for Bégon a “friend” not in the sense of a social equal, but within the ideals of the Republic of Letters: one of those naturalists with whom the intendant exchanged books, news, and specimens; who traveled to Rochefort to visit him, as well as his library and cabinet (fig. 2.6).

## Conclusion

We cannot know whether Plumier’s choice of rendering his first 1687 natural historical research in the West Indies into a largely iconographic corpus—his *recueil*—was a deliberate choice to attract royal patronage. What now seems clear is that, over the years, this did become a consequential instrument for negotiating royal patronage through the curious Bégon and ministers like Seignelay and Pontchartrain: it was in order to “continue the *recueil* that he began on seeds, plants, and trees of the abovementioned islands and to compose [a new] one on fishes, birds, and other animals of that country” that Plumier was, unlike Surian, sent back to the American islands. It was this iconographic *recueil* that Secretary of State Seignelay asked Fagon examine and evaluate for him, and that ensured Bégon’s “inexhaustible curiosity” for the friar’s work. It was this *recueil*, in other words, that caught the interests of those high officers of the crown who had in their hands the power to bestow or not royal patronage upon scholars, and that won Plumier preferment in his career under the aegis of the crown.

The story of how ministers and intendants delighted in those drawings and of how these appeared to their eyes as far more likely to serve the glorification of the monarchy than, say, Surian’s catalog and chemical analyses of West Indian plants, allows us to draw a composite picture of royal patronage of traveling naturalists in Louis XIV’s France. It reveals the reliance of the genre of natural history on a specific sort of sociability and local relations of patronage. The idea of “a new sort of agent loyal only to the state,” created by Colbert as part of his political reforms in the late 1660s and aimed at substituting the fluid patronage relationships by permanent employees of the central administration, is certainly a tempting one to be applied to traveling naturalists. What is more, this idea supports a narrative of modernity that historians of early modern science and the state have sometimes found appealing so as to account for what has sometimes been seen as a new period of the history of science, one in which the emergence of state-funded institutions across Europe created a new form of control of the production and
circulation of knowledge by the political powers.<fnref n="86" /> But a literal reading of the rhetoric
around such enterprises—the title of *botaniste du roi* or the pervasive motto “on the orders
of the king”—runs the risk of composing a portrait of Louis XIV’s state that is too close
to the ideal to which the monarchy itself aspired. Official titles presented flexible, ad hoc
personal rewards rather than fixed positions within a state-designed scientific
establishment. In this sense, the case of Plumier poses a major historiographical problem
concerning the absolutist state, namely how to combine satisfactorily the personal,
collaborative picture we draw from micro-cases, like the one treated here, with the
historical process of the building of the modern state in relation to science.

The part that Plumier’s drawings played in conferring a socioprofessional identity to their author substantiates the idea that institutional approaches block a fair understanding of the agency of traveling naturalists economically supported, in one way or another, by the French crown. The picture of an ever-growing state machinery, with respect to which scholars had but the choice between the service to it and disgrace, seems simplistic. As Margaret C. Jacob has noted, “it is not clear in 1700 what value, if any, the French crown put in overseas scientific explorations.”<fnref n="87" /> The story told here brings us to conclude with Safier that “an approach that privileges institutional frameworks, national allegiances, and an overly constricting nexus between botany, science, and the state fails to account for a range of actors, physical factors, and sociocultural issues that had an equal if not more significant impact on the ultimate fate” of the work of traveling naturalists on the other coast of the Atlantic.<fnref n="88" />

<footnote n="86">⁸⁶ Jacob Soll, “From Note-Taking to Data Banks: Personal and Institutional Information Management in Early Modern Europe,” *Intellectual History Review* 20, no. 3 (2010), 120–39.</footnote>

<footnote n="87">⁸⁷ Margaret C. Jacob, “Science, Global Capitalism, and the State,” in *Science and Empire in the Atlantic World*, ed. James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew (New York: Routledge, 2008), 336.</footnote>

<footnote n="88">⁸⁸ Neil Safier, “Fruitless Botany: Joseph Jussieu’s South American Odyssey,” in Delbourgo and Dew, *Science and Empire*, 206.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_34.png" /></figure>
### 3. Observing and Reading “Quill in Hand”

#### Note-Taking in the Field and Beyond

On January 15, 1697, Father Plumier found himself 4,800 miles away from his native France, bowing over the seven-foot-long dead body of an American crocodile. The animal was captured on the marshy banks of a freshwater lake nestling among foothills, probably by the young black slave whom the friar took the year before to help him with his work.<fnref n="1" /> French colonists knew that lake after the Gallicized version of the aboriginal Taíno name: Miragoâne. The place was a half-day walk from the coastal town of Petit-Goave, north of the Tiburon Peninsula, in the western part of the island of Hispaniola. Founded by English pirates about four decades earlier, Petit-Goave was a port settlement lying by a deep bay, about forty miles from Cap François, the capital of the French colony of Saint-Domingue. Several months afterwards, with the signing of the Treaty of Ryswick in the far distant Old World, all those territories, already under the control of the French, were officially acknowledged under their rule. The animal under the eyes of Plumier was “6 [French] feet [pieds] and 4 inches [pouces]” long (around two meters). The friar not only dissected it, but took detailed notes: “one foot from the end of the muzzle A to the end of the occiput B. From the end of the occiput B, 8 inches minus 3 lines [lignes] to the scapulae C. From the scapulae C to the beginning of the tail D, 1 foot 7 inches ½. From D to E, a bit more than 3 feet.”<fnref n="2" /> The capital letters connect notes like these with certain parts of the astonishingly detailed pen-and-ink drawing that occupies most of the same loose sheet (fig. 3.1). This was the first of a group of twenty unbound pages on which the naturalist dissected, through images and text, an American crocodile.

The creature drawn and described on those twenty pages was not, however, the one studied that January 15, 1697, but a much smaller young crocodile “of 22 feet ½ long and aged about 8 or 9 months.” Only the statement of the date and place in which Plumier

<footnote n="1">¹ In a letter to the Governor General of the Islands of America, the Count of Blénac, Plumier asked from him a written authorization to use the ships of the French navy “avec un jeune negre que j’ay pris pour m’ayder dans mon travail” (Charles Plumier to Charles de Courbon, Count of Blénac, Martinique, July 20, 1696, ANOM Colonies B8 2, fol. 32). Plumier’s young black slave is one of those fascinating, invisible figures who always had a hand (albeit a hidden one) in the making of knowledge. For two outstanding studies of these anonymous, invisible agents, see Steven Shapin, “The Invisible Technician,” *American Scientist* 77 (1989), 554-63, and Ann Blair, “Hidden Hands: Amanuenses and Authorship in Early Modern Europe,” A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography, University of Pennsylvania Libraries, Philadelphia, PA, March 17, 18, 20, 2014, podcasts on http://repository.upenn.edu/rosenbach/8/.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² BCMNHN MS 30 “Tetrapodes dessinés par le Père Plumier, Minime,” fol. 11.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_35.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3.1. (above) The first of a set of twenty drawings of a young American crocodile dissected and depicted by Plumier. Fig. 3.2. (opposite) Drawings of the crocodile reproducing different stages of its dissection: a “second appearance” of the animal after removing the pectoral muscles, a “third appearance” showing a first layer of organs, a heavily annotated study of its skull, and, lastly, the animal’s skeleton, feet in the floor and open-mouthed as it was when depicted alive. (Bibliothèque centrale du Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_36.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_37.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_38.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_39.png" /></figure>
anatomized the larger Miragoâne beast, along with some measurements, remains in the first of the pictures that accompanied the dissection of the other younger specimen. We do not know from where this one came from, or where its guts scrutinized were by the friar-turned-anatomist. Yet the set of handmade drawings accompanied its dissection: if not in actuality, at least on paper, for the pictures follow the anatomical process by which the crocodile was uncovered, part by part and layer by layer. The first image presents the whole animal life-like: the feet on the floor, jaws and eyes opened. On the second, the beast has already become an object of scientific observation: although still unopened, it seems to lie in dorsal decubitus, as it would under the eyes of the anatomist. The following five pictures go deeply into its body: they are all views of the entire animal, still lying down in the same position, but successive anatomical layers are progressively laid bare with each new page: the skin, the muscles, the rib cage, a first group of organs, and finally the lasting organs, presenting the empty trunk of the beast. Another drawing sports what remained after removing all the layers: the exposed skeleton of the animal back to its feet, in the same, life-like position in which it was in the first of the drawings, when it was still dressing its own skin. The lot is completed by twelve other sheets, each depicting specific anatomical parts: the vertebrae, the eye, the bones of the legs, the lungs, the stomach, the heart, the skull. Abundant written commentaries escort virtually every drawing, orbiting around the pictured body of the animal (fig. 3.2).

Plumier's ink drawings of the crocodile are a splendid example of the friar's artistic competence, but also illustrate the naturalist's very act of observation in the field. Their naturalism, coupled with the fact that they depict an anatomic exercise, transmit such an immediacy that one is prompted to think about them solely in terms of representation from life. But we do not know whether or not these drawings, and the annotations that accompany them, were made in front of the creature while it was being dismantled. We do not know whether they were made on the banks of lake Miragoâne, sketched (partly or entirely) in front of the creature while tearing it apart, or in one of the communities he stayed while on the islands, or simply in his cell in Paris, or still on the deck of a ship on his way back home. Perhaps they were crafted at different moments and in all of these places: sometimes close, sometimes far from the object represented. Some sketches were perhaps taken in front of the animal and completed elsewhere in ink with the addition of the marginal notations and references. But scarce are the allusions to the exact circumstances in which Plumier's making of his drawings occurred. Their representational style—naturalistic and realistic rather than, say, diagrammatic—tells us
equally little about them.<fnref n="3" /> The irreducible doubt that hangs over the question of *ad vivum*
production brings us to a dead end of historical discussion: simply acknowledging that
naturalistic depiction is not an indisputable sign of firsthand observation does not give a
sufficiently complex account of the role that depictions like these played in the making of
natural knowledge at the turn of the eighteenth century.

What follows is an attempt to displace the discussion about pictures like these from
the question of representation *ad vivum* to one about the logics of inscription. Wielding
the quill and the scalpel equated to a form of argumentation about the natural world, one
based on a *historia* of natural particulars that proceeded by means of fragmentation,
recording, and accumulation. Moreover, if we are to understand this sort of depiction in
terms of observational data, we need not only to consider verbal and graphic elements
side by side, but also to relocate the question to a broader analysis on the part that
manuscript practices of inscription at large played in the daily work of the early modern
naturalist. This chapter is first concerned with the naturalist’s very act of writing and
drawing as two combined modes of observation recording. The purpose, however, is not
to reconstruct the idyllic image of the naturalist in the field, patiently recording by skillful
strokes of his pen whatever fell under his eyes, but rather to consider manuscript
materials such as these for their own sake.<fnref n="4" />

Whereas chapter 4 looks at the copiousness of handmade visual materials as a form
of accumulation central to the cultural place and intellectual project of natural history in
seventeenth-century France, the present pages seek to understand the logics at play in the
production of handmade drawings that were meant to fix observational data and to
ensure their capacity to travel across the Atlantic Ocean. The romanticized idea of the
traveling scholar writing and drawing from life in an exuberant field obscures the
connections that existed between the practices that produced them and other forms of
graphic and verbal inscription that sought to elaborate and stockpile memory. This being
so, the specificity of field records, whether graphic or verbal, cannot be taken for
granted. This chapter proposes to place side by side two scholarly practices that were

<footnote n="3">³ On the intellectual foundations sustaining the emergence of naturalism during the Renaissance, see David Summers, *The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ My purpose in this chapter goes along the lines of Marie-Noëlle Bourguet’s work on Humboldt’s travel notebooks: “to look at travel notebooks for their own sake, as material objects, made of paper and cardboard, and meant to store observational data to insure their availability through time and space.” Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, “A Portable World: The Notebooks of European Travellers (Eighteenth to Nineteenth Centuries),” *Intellectual History Review* 20, no. 3 (2010), 377-400.</footnote>
largely mediated through paper and note-taking: observation and reading.<fnref n="5" /> Dissecting,
fragmenting, scribbling, sketching: the personal confrontation with the natural world
through the mediation of ink and paper was part of the intimate exercise of scientific
attention and of the construction of the naturalist's self as a patient observer and
meticulous note-taker. Like reading, observation was a physical activity. The practical
impact of observation cum note-taking in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can
be related, in this sense, to that of silent reading: both impose specific characteristics
upon intellectual work, which becomes, in this case, an “act of individual intimacy.”<fnref n="6" />

Both reading and observation are impalpable practices. But in the case of early
modern scholars at least, the two were largely carried out and mediated through textual
and (especially in the case of Plumier) graphic inscriptions. For just as learned reading,
natural historical observation was, after all, an inscriptional task. Note-taking stands at
the junction between the history of reading and the history of scientific practices, and the
former may indicate fertile paths for the latter. Ann Blair, for instance, has suggested
three complementary directions for a history of scientific reading grounded on extant
traces of note-taking: “the study of individual reading habits, of widely shared practices,
and of the reception of particular works.”<fnref n="7" /> In this chapter, I will attend to the second of
Blair’s points to explore how analogous problems arise in the history of field observation
as have been remarked upon by the history of reading. Robert Darnton, for instance, has
formulated some of these issues in a way that makes them easily applicable to scientific
observation: he notes that by studying a form of inscription as commonplace books,
“historians and literary scholars have come closer to understanding reading, both as a
specific cultural practice and as a general way of construing the world. But it is a tricky
business, especially when the researcher moves from questions about who readers were
and what they read to the problems of how they made sense of books.”<fnref n="8" /> Observing

<footnote n="5">⁵ For a sense of the practices of note-taking developed by scholars during the early modern period, see Ann Blair, “The Rise of Note-Taking in Early Modern Europe,” *Intellectual History Review* 20, no. 3 (2010), 303-16.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ Roger Chartier, “Les pratiques de l’écrit,” in *Histoire de la vie privée*, ed. Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, vol. 3, *De la Renaissance aux Lumières*, ed. Roger Chartier (Paris: Le Seuil, 1987), 126-7: “Pour ceux qui la peuvent pratiquer, la lecture en silence ouvre des horizons inédits. Tout d’abord, elle a radicalement transformé le travail intellectual, devenu pour l’essentiel un acte d’intimité individuelle, une confrontation personelle avec des textes toujours plus nombreux, une mise en mémoire et un croisement de références visuellement repérées dans les livres.”</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ Ann Blair, “An Early Modernist’s Perspective,” in “Scientific Readers”, special issue, *Isis* 95, no. 3 (2004), 421.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ Robert Darnton, “Extraordinary Commonplaces,” *The New York Review of Books*, December 21, 2000, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2000/12/21/extraordinary-commonplaces/. On commonplace books</footnote>
nature was not unlike reading in the sense that, as Roger Chartier also recalled apropos of the latter, both are a form of “appropriation that [are] not without rules or limits.”<fnref n="9" />

Through Plumier’s field records we can study how he made sense of the natural world that he encountered on the islands. The way in which he did so was deeply grounded in cultural practices of his time. I will first consider the anatomical method at the basis of drawings such as those of the crocodile (but not only): by looking at how dissection was carried out through paper reveals, I believe, how inscriptions worked as analytical tools in line with naturalist’s contemporary concerns for carrying out reliable and learned observations. I will then turn to consider some of Plumier’s manuscripts that were not fieldwork records but reading ones, and argue that naturalists’ observational practices of inscription need to be understood in a broader scribal culture.

## To describe the inner parts

The examples of an anatomical approach to the study of animals are numerous among Plumier’s papers.<fnref n="10" /> With the subsequent rearranging of the friar’s loose papers into bound volumes at some point during the nineteenth century, the drawings of the crocodile were compiled along with anatomical studies of other five West Indian animals—a snake, a lizard (perhaps an iguana), a sea turtle, a tortoise, and a frog—under the label “Tétrapodes.”<fnref n="11" /> Some red chalk and ink sketches suggest that he also dissected a porpoise (the one, Plumier wrote, one could find in Rondelet’s books: “Tursio Rondel. 474. Le Marsoin”), or was at least able to draw the skull and the bones of the fin.<fnref n="12" /> A

<footnote>in natural knowledge (and natural philosophy in particular), see Ann Blair, “Humanist Methods in Natural Philosophy: the Commonplace Book,” *Journal of the History of Ideas*, 53, no. 4 (1992), 541-55.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹ Roger Chartier, foreword to *Histoire de la lecture. Un bilan de recherche*, ed. Roger Chartier (Paris: Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine and Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1995), 16. In 2004, Lorraine Daston urged historians of science to pay attention to “the implications of the history of scientific reading for other, more familiar forms of scientific practice, such as observation, but also for what might be called cognitive practices: economies of attention, arts of memory, the solidification and erosion of belief.” To a certain extent, I will be exploring in this chapter an idea that she formulated as follows: “ways of reading, absorbed at a young age and constantly practiced, may supply the templates for other ways of making sense of objects quite distinct from the manuscript or printed page.” Lorraine Daston, “Taking Note(s),” in “Scientific Readers,” special issue, *Isis* 95 (2004), 444.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ Plumier’s corpus reflects well the interests of natural historians at the time, who tended to privilege the study of plants over that of animals. On the natural history of animals, see Laurent Pinon, *Livres de zoologie de la Renaissance: Une anthologie (1450-1700)* (Paris: Klincksieck, 2000) and, on exotic animals in particular, see Wilma George, “Sources and Background to Discoveries of New Animals in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” *History of Science* 18 (1980), 79-104; Peter Mason, *Before Disenchantment: Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World* (New York: Reaktion Books, 2009).</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹ BCMNHN MS 30 “Tétrapodes dessinés par le Père Plumier Minime.” The term “tétrapodes,” designating four-legged animals and used to name the volumen with the drawings of the crocodilea, other four reptiles and a frog, did not appear in either French or English until the early nineteenth century.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹² BCMNHN MS 31 “Poissons et coquilles dessinés par le père Plumier Minime,” fol. 10.</footnote>
series of anatomical drawings of a pelican, too, illustrate this sort of “dissection through
paper” (fig. 3.3).<fnref n="13" /> Probably an American Brown Pelican, for which the Caribbean basin
is still today one of the main habitats, the animal was identified by Plumier as a “Grand
Gosier à teste blanche et a col chastain”—in Latin *Onocrotalus Leucophaeus capite albo collo
baetico* (Great pelican with white head and brown neck). In a neat, careful handwriting,
running over a folio-sized page, the extant textual description narrates the morphology of
the bird. Some lines give an idea of the size of the best: “more or less as big as a goose,”
“its wings have around six feet of extension from one extreme to the other.” Several
paragraphs describe its general features: “the eyes are quite large, slightly oblong, of a
dark blue that is verging on slate-gray,” and “what makes this bird most significant is its
large beak and a large membranous pouch [*falle*] from the end of the inner part of the
beak to the middle of the neck, near to the chest.” Three further paragraphs describe in
detail the beak and the pouch: their exact size, their colors and tonalities, their
articulation to other anatomical parts, and so forth. Another nine sheets of drawings
dismembered the animal. The pictures were made in ink, although the original lines in
pencil can still be distinguished beneath: the position of one of the digits or “fingers” of
the bird was corrected, and some pencil strokes highlighting the shadows and giving
contrast to the plumage were never finally polished up with ink. The drawings may have
been copies of original sketches never finished.

The series of drawings, however, reproduce the anatomical act, as in the case of the
crocodile and the other “tétrapodes.” Two of the pages show the animal untouched by
the scalpel, as if it were alive: one depicts its head and characteristically large beak, with a
detail of its palmate foot, and the other presents a profile view of the entire bird. The rest
of the folios focus, in contrast, on the anatomized beast: four pages were devoted to the
skeleton and some selected bones; the other two to different views of organs like the
larynx and the esophagus, the heart and the surrounding circulatory system, or the
kidneys and the urethra. As with the drawings of the crocodile, letter references connect
different parts of the drawings of the pelican with explanatory legends in the margins. In
addition, pencil annotations specify the color of certain parts—the neck of the animal is
labeled “white,” and its belly “dark gray.” Not only was the pelican dissected and drawn
in a “fragmented” manner, but on occasion several views of the same object are
depicted: the skull with the beak, for instance, is shown in a profile view (*cranium cum*

<footnote n="13">¹³ BCMNHN MS 27 “Zoographia [corrected as “Ornitographia”] americana, quadrupedia et volatilia continens.” The unpaginated set of images on the pelican are bound following fol. 91.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_40.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3.3. Anatomical drawings of the pelican ("Onocrotalus Leucophaus capile albo collo baetico") by Plumier. (top) Depiction of the pelican's head, larynx, and palmate foot. (bottom) Three representations of the pelican's skull from profile, above, and below. Plumier's anatomical drawings follow the process of dissection as it was taught in the late seventeenth century, from the entire beast to the skeleton, proceeding first by layers, and then by parts. Plumier's drawings reflect well an understanding of the history of animals as a chiefly anatomical enterprise, a conception prevalent at the time—as Cuvier would recall more than a century later. (Bibliothèque centrale du Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_41.png" /><figcaption>Fig 3.4. Anatomical fugitive sheet from Juan Valverde de Amusco's *Vivae imageines partium corporis humani aeris formis expressae* (1566). The different anatomical layers are reproduced in print through superposed engravings. (Wellcome Library, London.)</figcaption></figure>

rostri parte superiori), a view from above (cranii superior superficies et rostri), and one from below (cranii pars interior et rostri). The same visual strategy that consists of “turning” the object on its own axis is used for other unspecified bones or organs—the two sides and a cross-sectional perspective of lungs, for instance.

There is a striking symmetry between these examples of fragmentation through
paperwork and devices such as anatomical fugitive sheets—a visual genre of considerable
success during the Renaissance and well in to the seventeenth century in which layered,
hinged flaps could be open to reveal successive layers of the human body (fig. 3.4).<fnref n="14" /> As
suggested by Plumier’s studies on the pelican, the crocodile, and the other “tetrapod”
creatures, the anatomical method permeated the late-seventeenth-century natural history
of animals. Dissecting a beast before (and perhaps during) its registering on paper might
have been seen as a preparation of the specimen prior to its observation and description.
This was not limited to the study of animals. Rare plants, for instance, were not always
found in the ideal conditions for their observation, as it happened to Plumier with a
species of *Hemionitis*: the friar only encountered specimens of this plant in a very precise
location of Tortuga Island, and their leaves, “all hooked towards the inside as the claws
of a bird of prey, due to the drought, . . . [only] took back their natural greenness and size
after I plunged them into water.”<fnref n="15" />

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ Andrea Carlino, *Paper Bodies: A Catalogue of Anatomical Fugitive Sheets, 1538-1687*, trans. Noga Arikha (London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 1999).</footnote>

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ This is the species he calls “Hemionitis profundè lacinata, ad oras pulverulentao” or, in French, the “Hemionite fort découpé, bordée de poussiere”: “Je n’ay trouvé cette plante que dans un seul endroit de l’Isle de Tortüe. . . . Quand je la trouvay, ses feüilles étoient toutes recourbées en dedans comme les serres d’un oiseau de proye, à cause de la secheresse, mais elles reprurent bien-tost leur verdure & leur étenduë naturelle, dès que je les eù mises tremper dans de l’eau.” Plumier, *Description des plantes de l’Amérique avec leurs figures* (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1693), 24.</footnote>
Anatomy, however, was far from a simple preparatory step of observation during
the decades around 1700. It rather occupied a central position in the study of animals,
not only from an intellectual, but also from a social point of view. Anatomy was
something of a rage at the time, a fashionable public spectacle well-extended among
Parisian elites during the last third of the seventeenth century and well into the
eighteenth century. One should remember *Le malade imaginaire*, first played in 1673, where
Molière ridiculed the fashion of public dissections in a scene where the pedantic Thomas
Diafoirus invites Angélique to an anatomical dissection—a “much more gallant”
entertainment than, say, a theater play.<fnref n="16" /> Anatomy’s remarkable popularity was even more
conspicuous when exotic animals (in the original sense of “foreign”) were involved.<fnref n="17" /> In
1681, Joseph-Guichard Duverney, one of the most brilliant anatomists of the century,
performed the famous dissection of an elephant in Versailles with the noble assistance of
courtiers and the monarch himself. This same Duverney was a member of the Paris
Academy of Sciences and one of the anatomists in the circle of Claude Perrault. The
work of Perrault’s group probably offers the best example of how animal dissections
became a form of scientific display. Along with chemists and botanists, the anatomists
were part of the section of “physiciens” or natural philosophers at the Academy (as
opposed to the mathematicians).<fnref n="18" /> In 1671 and 1676 respectively, the Imprimerie royale
issued the first two volumes of an ambitious editorial project that aimed at putting into
print part of their work, the *Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire naturelle des animaux*.<fnref n="19" /> In line
with the nature of the Academy and the Imprimerie royale, the purpose of these two

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ Molière, *Le malade imaginaire*, 2.5: “Thomas Diafoirus: Avec la permission aussi de Monsieur, je vous invite à venir voir l’un de ces jours, pour vous divertir, la dissection d’une femme, sur quoi je dois reaisoner. / Toinette: Le divertissement sera agréable. Il y en a qui donnent la comédie à leur maîtresses; mais donner une dissection est quelque chose de plus galant.” On the range of anatomy outside the dissection room, see the beautiful pages in Rafael Mandressi, *Le regard de l’anatomiste. Dissections et invention du corps en Occident* (Paris: Le Seuil, 2003), 217-68.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ Among all the French language dictionaries of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, only the Furetière, from its first 1690 edition onwards, included the adjective “exotique”: “Il ne se dit que dans le dogmatique, & signifie, Estranger” (Antoine Furetière, *Dictionnaire universel, contenant generalement tous les mots français tant vieux que modernes, & les Termes de toutes les sciences et des arts* [The Hague: chez Arnout & Reinier Leers, 1690], sig. Hhhhh3⁶). On the fashion of anatomical public spectacle in Louis XIV’s time, see Anita Guerrini, *The Courtiers’ Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV’s Paris* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015),</footnote>

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ Alice Stroup, *A Company of Scientists: Botany, Patronage, and Community at the Seventeenth-Century Parisian Royal Academy of Sciences* (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).</footnote>

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ These two volumes, however, reemployed descriptions and engravings already published in two shorter publications that preceded them: *Extrait d'une lettre écrite à Monsieur de La Chambre, qui contient les observations qui ont été faites sur un grand poisson dissequé dans la bibliothèque du roy, le vingt-quatrième juin 1667* [with *Observations qui ont été faites sur un lion dissequé dans la bibliothèque du roy, le vingt-huitième juin 1667*. Tirées d'une lettre à Monsieur de La Chambre] (Paris: chez Frédéric Léonard, 1667), and *Description anatomique d'un cameleon, d'un castor, d'un dromadaire, d'un ours, et d'une Gazelle* (Paris: chez Frédéric Léonard, 1669).</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_42.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3.5. Engravings of a chameleon and its anatomy in the first volume of the *Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire naturelle des animaux*, 1671. (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>

sumptuous *recueils d'images* (collections of engravings) closely related to the propagandistic agenda of the monarchy, as orchestrated by Colbert. These two volumes were first of all a very fine editorial achievement, objects to be seen by the refined and curious eyes of courtiers: richly bound in scarlet morocco, the 1671 volume alone included fourteen full-page intaglio engravings of animals like the lion or the chameleon (fig. 3.5), plus several exquisite vignettes, tailpieces, and Sebastian Leclerc's well-known frontispiece on Louis XIV's imaginary visit to the Academy.<fnref n="20" />

Public performance, elite culture, and the exaltation of the monarchy were among the main reasons for the crown's support for the work of Perrault's group and to its consecration into print. Nevertheless, it is still a compelling example of the central role that anatomy, understood as a mode of inquiry, occupied in the natural history of animals. In the unsigned preface to the 1671 volume of the *Histoire des animaux*, Perrault (its actual author) assured his readers that

> In this Collection we have focused specifically on the structure of Animals' parts, rather than on what regards their habits, their nourishment, the manner in which they are captured, their properties for Medicine, & for other usages that are attributed to them . . . our main

<footnote n="20">²⁰ Guerrini, *Courtiers’ Anatomists*, Peter Sahlins, “The Royal Menageries of Louis XIV and the Civilizing Process Revisited,” *French Historical Studies* 35, no. 2 (2012), 237-67.</footnote>
purpose being to detail, & gather together all the remarks that we have made on the different particularities of the Animals’ insides. . . . But we have not dwelt very much upon things that do not directly belong to this Anatomical knowledge, because there is but this exact Description of the Inner parts that is missing in Natural history.<fnref n="21" />

One hundred years later, Georges Cuvier (1769-1832)—not only one of the greatest experts in animal anatomy of all times, but also a knowledgeable historian of his own discipline—looked back at Perrault’s and Plumier’s time and described it as one in which “it was believed that only its anatomy [that of the crocodile] would provide some new evidence.”<fnref n="22" /> Cuvier was writing about the crocodile in particular, but the remark could well serve to describe the natural history of animals by and large, as it was mostly practiced in Europe at Plumier’s time.

Plumier knew the work of Perrault’s circle well: he referred to it in a letter (eventually published in the *Journal de Trévoux*) to a Rochelais scholar on sea turtles’ inner ear, but protested about the relative rarity of the volumes of the *Histoire des animaux*. Being too large and too lavish to circulate widely among scholars, the Academy’s publications were distributed more as a form of royal presentation than as a commercial product—a complaint already made by Leibniz some years before.<fnref n="23" /> Just as in Plumier’s loose sheets on the anatomy of the crocodile, the pelican, and a number of other West Indian beasts, the *Histoire des animaux* presented the dissected bodies of different, largely unrelated, but equally exotic animals side by side.

The Academy’s anatomists were not, however, the first to juxtapose in a single volume the anatomy of such a diverse fauna: a peculiar and poorly known work deserves to be mentioned here in this regard, even if Plumier never alluded to it or its author in his

<footnote n="21">²¹ [Claude Perrault, ed.,], *Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire naturelle des animaux* (Paris: de l'Imprimerie royale, 1671), sig. [ev]: “Dans ce Recueil on s'est particulièrement attaché à ce qui appartient à la structure des parties des Animaux, plutost qu'à ce qui regarde leurs mœurs, leur nourriture, la manière dont onl es prend, leurs propriétez pour la Medecine, & pour les autres usages qu'on leur attribuë. . . . En effet, nostre principal dessein estant de rapporter, & d'amasser toutes les remarques que nous avans faites sur les différentes particularitez du dedans des Animaux. . . . Mais nous ne nous sommes pas beaucoup arrestez aux choses qui n'appartiennent pas directement à cette connoissance Anatomique, parce qu'il n'y a gueres que cete exacte Description des parties Internes, qui manque à l'Histoire naturelle.” My emphasis.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">²² Georges Cuvier, “Sur les différentes espèces de crocodiles vivans et sur leurs caractères distinctifs,” *Annales du Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, par les professurs de cet établissement* 10 (1807), 79: “On crut que son anatomie pourroit seule offrir quelques faits nouveaux.”</footnote>

<footnote n="23">²³ “Réponse du P. C. Plumier Minime, à une lettre de Mr Baulot écrite de la Rochelle,” in *Mémoires pour l’Histoire des Sciences & des beaux Arts* (Trévoux: de l’Imprimerie de S. A. S. à Trévoux, et se vendent à Paris, chez Jean Boudot, 1704), 112-128; Leibniz to Paul Pellison, Hanover, July 27, 1692, in *Oeuvres de Leibniz, publiées pour la première fois d’après les manuscripts originaux*, ed. Louis-Alexandre Foucher de Careil, vol. 1 (Paris: Librarie de Firmin Didot Frères, Fils et Cie., 1859), 309, and Alice Stroup, *Royal Funding of the Parisian Académie Royale des Sciences during the 1690s* (Philadelphia, PA: The American Philosophical Society, 1987), 4n16.</footnote>
manuscript or printed texts. But the 1625 treatise on animal anatomy by the Frenchman Jean Germain (fl. 1620-1630) is remarkable in many respects, not the least of which is the author's belonging to the Order of Minims. We know very little about Germain.<fnref n="24" /> He hailed from Provence, too, and a rare work on the properties of an Occitan town's mineral waters mentioned him as a distiller; he may have spent, however, a good part of his life in Italy—he even translated into Italian one of André Du Laurens's medical treatises.<fnref n="25" /> In 1630, Germain published a bulky octavo manual on surgery, *La quint-essence de la chirurgie* (The quintessence of surgery), reprinted twice in the following decade and translated into Italian about forty years later.<fnref n="26" /> With no images, the book was composed of two parts: the first described surgical treatments, from purges to the cure of ulcers and fractures; the second was an *antidotaire*, a collection of medical receipts. He dedicated the book to a Provençal nobleman (said to be a patron of the author and his family) and signed the dedication as pharmacist of the Minim convent in Avignon. Five years earlier, in the treatise on animal anatomy, Germain appeared as “surgeon-physician and, at the present time, Minim monk of the order of St. Francis of Paola” at the convent of Santa Maria della Stella in Naples.

Printed five years earlier than the surgery manual, Germain's treatise on the anatomy of animals was a much more original work, even if it was the object of only one edition. It had a significant title: “Brief and substantial treatise on the anatomical figures of the most principal terrestrial, aquatic, and flying animals, with the sympathy and correspondence that they have, in part or totally, with the human body, with the most curious and weighty mature and succinct discourses on their natural properties as hieroglyphs, and on their moralities.”<fnref n="27" /> Like the title, the frontispiece summarized remarkably well the scope of the book: under the coat of arms of the order of Minims

<footnote n="24">²⁴ See P. J. S. Whitmore, *The Order of Minims in Seventeenth-Century France* (The Hage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967), 228-9 for some few lines on Germain, almost the only to my knowledge.</footnote>

<footnote n="25">²⁵ Discorsi della conservatione della vista, delle malattie melanconiche, delli catarri, e della vecchiaia, composti in lingua francese dal sig. Andrea Lorenzo, medico fisico . . . Tradotti in lingua italiana, e commentati, da Fr. Gio. Germano (Naples: per Lazzaro Scorigio, 1626 [1594]); Esprit Defournier, Discours des admirables qualitez et vertus des eaux minérales retrouvées dans le terroir de la ville de Baignolz. Faict par Noble Esprit Defournier, conseiller & medecin du Roy, de la ville de Valréas. Et messieurs maistres Guillaume Beaussain, & Jean Pellisier, docteurs en medecine de la Ville de Baignolz. Distillées par le Ministere de F. Jean Germain, religieux de l'ordre des Minimes* (Lyon: Louys Odin, 1636).</footnote>

<footnote n="26">²⁶ Jean Germain, *La parfaite quint-essence de la chirurgie reduite en cinq parties. Avec un antidotaire ou description de plusieurs excellents remedes pour la guerison de diverses maladies* (Lyon: chez Simon Rigaud, 1630); reprinted in Paris by Pierre Billaine in 1638, and by Antoine de Sommaville in 1640. It was translated into Italian as *La quintessenza della chirurgia ridotta in cinque parti. Con un antidotario di varii rimedi, per diverse malattie*, trans. Giovanni Chamround (Rome: per il Bernabo, 1674).</footnote>

<footnote n="27">²⁷ 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).</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_43.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3.6 Title page of Germain’s *Breve e sostantiale trattato*, 1625. We do not know if Plumier read this little, but richly illustrated volume on the anatomy of different animals, yet it is an interesting work for us not only due to the fact that it was authored by a fellow Minim friar, but also because it brought together anatomical depictions of different animals. (Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de Santé, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>

bearing the motto “Charitas,” the skeletons of two terrestrial and two flying animals, together with those of a man and a woman (perhaps Adam and Eve), guarded the title (fig. 3.6). The work was dedicated to a member of the powerful Neapolitan family of the Pignatelli and was said to have been done at the request of a canon from the same city who also signed a praise to the author at the beginning of the work. Germain announced it to be a foretaste of a larger work on the art of the apothecaries, although this never saw the light.<fnref n="28" />

The *Breve trattato*—indeed a short, small folio volume—included thirteen full-page copperplate engravings representing the skeletons of a man (two plates), ape, dog, cat, mouse (*sorge*), turtle (*testudine*), rooster, pigeon, starling, spoonbill, sparrowhawk, and owl (*ascio*). Germain signed three of them as the author (“F. Gio. Germano francese invent.”) and one bore the name of the carver—a certain Nicolas Perrey (“NPerrej fec.”), a

<footnote n="28">²⁸ Germain, *Breve trattato*, sig. **2s: “Caparra di un'altro maggiore à venire da intitularsi, ARCHIVIO DE SPETIALI con un vero modo de cavar ogni Quinta Essenza & far ogni sorte estratti, nella cui sine aggionti vi faranno due trattati, l'uno della peste, & l'atro del modo di conoscere ogni specie di veleno, con gl'antidoti sicuri.”*</footnote>
renowned French engraver in seventeenth-century Naples. Despite the claims to originality, the plates (some at least) imitated famous images of the history of anatomical iconography: the first two plates of the *Breve trattato* mirrored two of the three famous representations of the human skeleton in Vesalius’s *De humanis corporis fabrica libri septem* (1543), those showing a frontal and a rear view.<fnref n="29" /> The origin of the rest of the images is less clear, although they probably were made by the same draftsman and carver as the those on the human skeleton. It can be said, however, that the engraving of the ape (*simia*) anticipated the well known work of Edward Tyson on the anatomy of apes: the *Orang-Outang, sive Homo Sylvestris: or, the Anatomy of a Pygmie compared with that of a Monkey, an Ape, and a Man* (1699).<fnref n="30" /> Just as Germain did as early as 1625, Tyson famously compared the anatomy of his “Orang-Outang” (i.e. chimpanzee) with that of man, and the image in *Breve trattato* is not entirely unlike some in the Englishman’s book.

Equally remarkable in Germain’s *Breve trattato* is the interaction between text and image. Unlike Plumier’s and most of the seventeenth-century’s illustrated books, the engravings were intercalated between the pages of written text: the two plates on the human skeleton preceded the long preface, and those of each animal, their respective written descriptions. Almost a half of the engravings (the two of a man, and those of an ape, dog, mouse, and pigeon) included texts within the pictures identifying specific osteological parts by name. It was not by chance that most of the bones signaled were the same across those engravings (calcaneus, ribs, ulna, fingers, femur, etc.), therefore correlating the anatomies of man and those of different animals and reinforcing the comparative character of work.<fnref n="31" />

The question of comparison between vegetable and animal specimens is to be encountered again in chapter 4. But it is worth stressing here that by picturing different animals through the very same iconographic strategies, as Plumier did with, say, the crocodile and the sea turtle—layer by layer, and part by part—a visual correlation was

<footnote n="29">²⁹ Andreas Vesalius, *De humani corpori fabrica libri septem* (Basel: [ex officina Ioannis Oporini, 1543]), 163 and 165.</footnote>

<footnote n="30">³⁰ *Orang-Outang, sive Homo Sylvestris: or, the Anatomy of a Pygmie Compared with that of a Monkey, an Ape, and a Man. To Which is Added, A Philological Essay concerning the Pygmies, the Cynocephali, the Satyrs, and Sphinges of the Ancients. Wherein it Will Appear that They Are All either Apes or Monkeys, and not Men, as Formerly Pretended* (London: printed for Thomas Bennet and Daniel Brown, 1699). On the context of Tyson’s book and its repercussions, see Silvia Sebastiani, “L’orang-outang, l’esclave et l’humain: une querelle des crops en régime colonial,” *L’Atelier du Centre de recherches historiques* 11 (2013), http://acrh.revues.org/5265</footnote>

<footnote n="31">³¹ Sixteen bones were equally identified across the six engravings with written inscriptions in them: the calcaneus, the ribs, the ulna, the finger bones, the femur, the fibula, the zygomatic bone, the humerus, the ilium, the maxilla and the mandible, the metatarsus, the radius, the tarsus, the tibia, and the vertebrae. Six others (coccyx, sacrum or tailbones, metacarpus, nasal or beak bones, occiput, scapula, parietal bone) were identified in three or four of the engravings.</footnote>
made. The same can be said of the *Histoire des animaux* and of Germain’s illustrated book. As we will see in chapter 4, it is not entirely anachronistic to refer to this as comparative anatomy. This might well not be what Cuvier, for instance, would understand by the term a century later. Yet “comparative anatomy” was an expression used already by Nehemiah Grew in the 1670s in reference precisely to the act of correlating graphically the visible structures of natural specimens—in Grew’s case, tree trunks.<fnref n="32" />

Like Plumier’s manuscripts, Germain’s printed work brought together, through images, the anatomy of very different beasts. In the twenty-page long essay serving as a preface for the book and sonorously entitled “Dell’eccellenza del microcosmo col suo discorso anatomico” (On the excellence of the microcosm with its anatomical discourse), Germain claimed similitude, or sympathy, to be an infallible sign for studying natural causes (as in, for instance, the physical similarity between parents and children or between siblings) and went into convoluted considerations on the resemblance between God and men. Interestingly, Germain quoted anatomists like Du Laurens, who in his *Historia anatomica* (1602) compared the anatomy of a man to different animals like apes, dogs, and birds.<fnref n="33" /> The friar referred in general to a large array of ancient and modern authors (from St. Gregory the Great to the Prophet Jeremiah), but did not give any allusion to his own anatomical practice or the origin of his pictures.

Books like Germain’s *Breve trattato* or the Academy’s *Histoire naturelle des animaux* illustrate well the visual culture prevailing in the seventeenth-century natural history of animals: despite their formal differences, both were collections of engravings of various and often unrelated animals whose visible bodily structures were put side by side by means of visual representation. But it is worth mentioning one last work to which Plumier’s anatomical research on the West Indies’ animals can also be linked, this time a brief, specialized treatise dealing with the anatomy of one single type of animal, tortoises and freshwater and sea turtles, by his Italian contemporary Giovanni Caldesi (1650-ca. 1732). Caldesi was a naturalist and anatomist at the court of Florence: he studied with the leading Francesco Redi (1626-1697) and was in correspondence with Marcello Malpighi (1628-1694), an anatomist and professor at the University of Bologna known for his microscopic anatomical research. Caldesi’s 1687 *Osservazioni anatomiche . . . intorno alle*

<footnote n="32">³² See below, chapter 4.</footnote>

<footnote n="33">³³ André Du Laurens, *Historia anatomica humani corporis et singularum eius partium multis controversy & observationibus novis illustrate* (Frankfurt: apud Matthaeum Bekerum impensis Theodorici de Bry viduae et duorum filiorum, [1599?]). Germain refers in particular to the fourth chapter of the first book, “Quid hominis corpus à caeteris animalibus dister, & quid habeat peculiare in sui structura.”</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_44.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3.7. One of the plates in Caldessi’s *Osservazioni anatomiche*. The copy reproduced here belonged to Plumier. It is sparingly annotated by him: only a few comments appear here and there in the margins to note some of the specificities of American turtles (which were not studied by Caldessi in his treatise). But the fact that none of the nine elegant plates in Caldessi’s book gave any figure of the entire animal is a good clue of the preeminence that the anatomical method had in the study of animals by Plumier’ time. (Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de Santé, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>

*tartarughe marittime, d'acqua dolce, e terrestri* (Anatomical observations on the sea and freshwater turtles and tortoises) was the only book he ever published.<fnref n="34" /> A quarto volume of almost a hundred pages, it concluded with nine full-page intaglio engravings. The text originally was announced as a letter to Redi and was followed in the volume by a dozen pages of explanations of the figures, which were gathered at the end. The engravings, significantly, depicted various and very specific anatomical parts of the animals: sections of the carapace and the skeleton, the flippers' bones, the heart, vessels, and lungs, as well as some microscopic details of the tongue—and a polyp the author found inside one of the creatures' heart (fig. 3.7).

In Caldessi’s book, not a single figure of the entire animal was given. Apart from the first plate depicting the carapace, the images alone, as a matter of fact, gave little idea to the non-expert eye of the animal they were dealing with. One could speculate that his most direct visual reference in this respect were Malpighi’s famous illustrations of the

<footnote n="34">³⁴ *Osservazioni anatomiche di Giovanni Caldessi Aretino intorno alle tartarughe marittime, d'acqua dolce, e terrestre.* Scritte in una lettera all'illustriss. sig. Francesco Redi (Florence: per Piero Matini, 1687).</footnote>
silkworm, in which guts and nerves monopolized the space of the plate. But the engravings in the *Osservazioni anatomiche*, like Plumier’s records on the American fauna, illustrate something else: a mode of approaching the natural world that was well embedded in seventeenth-century natural history—one that, rather than anatomizing, aimed at understanding nature by putting it into pieces.

## “Faire voir les parties séparées”

Caldesi’s obscure treatise on Testudinata embodies the intellectual context in which Plumier’s drawings and notes on American reptiles, amphibians, birds, and fishes must be placed. Caldesi’s volume was quoted by Plumier in his 1702 article on the inner ear of the turtle and an extant copy of the treatise was originally owned and sparingly annotated by the Minim friar.<fnref n="35" /> The copy was bound with the arms of the Minims of Paris and marked on the title page with the ex libris of the convent’s library, as well as a shelf number of its location among medical books.<fnref n="36" /> Plumier’s own name can also be recognized, almost cut off, at the bottom of the first page, probably an indication that the Minim friar owned the volume in loose folds, before the sheets were cut and bound to integrate them into the community’s library. The few annotations in the book seem from Plumier’s hand, and they referred the observations of the Italian naturalist to his own on the American islands. He notes, for example, that the upper shell of the green sea turtle (“la tortue franche”) is composed of 39 scutes (each of the bone plates in which is the shell), in lieu of the 42 counted by Caldesi in his own specimen of a Testudinata, and other anatomical comments on the heart of its Martiniquais relative, the green sea turtle.<fnref n="37" />

From his Enlightened point of view, the Swiss anatomist Albrecht von Haller (1708-1777) praised Caldesi’s work as an excellent one and worth Redi’s friendship, for it entirely resulted from experience.<fnref n="38" /> For Cuvier, however, Haller’s remarks were a bit of an exaggeration. In one of his lessons at the Collège de France, Cuvier discussed the work of Caldesi in terms that could easily be extended to European natural history of animals at large, as it was conceived and practiced around the turn of the century:

> Caldesi gave the skeleton of all the known parts [of the turtle]: it was the custom of the time.

> Anatomical authors used to give the skeletons separate from arteries, veins, nerves, each

<footnote n="35">³⁵ Plumier, “Réponse à Baulot.” Plumier’s copy of the *Osservazioni* is in BIUM 5547.</footnote>

<footnote n="36">³⁶ The shelf number was D (red)/19. Red D indicated the books by “Medici,” or physicians.</footnote>

<footnote n="37">³⁷ BIUM 5547, pp. 5, 59, 60.</footnote>

<footnote n="38">³⁸ Albrecht von Haller, *Bibliotheca anatomica*, vol. 1 (Tiguri: apud Orell, Gessner, Fuessli, et Socc., 1774), 723: “Bonum opus, dignum amicum Francisci Redi, & totum per experimenta natum.”</footnote>
group of organs, to isolate these parts, and to detach them from those to which they were connected. . . . Caldesi, however, showed a remarkable exactitude.<fnref n="39" />

Caldesis’s little book on turtles brings us to two questions that arise from Plumier’s anatomical drawings. The first is the one treated in chapter 1: the crucial mediating role that bookish culture played in the observation of nature, be it the anatomy of animals or the less invasive depiction of flora and fauna from afar. The second has to do with the epistemic foundations of anatomy as a form of historical (i.e. descriptive) inquiry of nature.

Despite Haller’s commonplace praise of experience alone, books were a crucial resource in anatomical learning during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and this was by no means opposed to the claims of firsthand observation.<fnref n="40" /> The eminent French physician André Du Laurens (1558-1609) sustained this position in his textbook on anatomy, the *Historia anatomica*: in a chapter on the “method to teach & demonstrate Anatomy,” he argued that “we can also teach Anatomy without dissection, either by word of mouth [*de vive voix*], or by means of writing [*par écrit*]: for there are many things that cannot be known from their sight alone, and they need to be described. . . . We therefore must read the writings of both the ancients and moderns who excelled in this sort of teaching.”<fnref n="41" /> The idea that anatomy could be learned in books is worth stressing, because Plumier, unlike most of his contemporary fellow naturalists, had no medical training. The Minim friar surely acquired his anatomical knowledge and competences—at least part of them—through books: not only did he own Caldesi’s *Osservazioni anatomiche*, but there are, among his extant papers, abundant reading notes on an anatomical textbook widely diffused at the time, Amé Bourdon’s 1678 *Nouvelle description anatomique de toutes les parties du corps humain*.<fnref n="42" />

<footnote n="39">³⁹ Georges Cuvier, *Histoire des sciences naturelles, depuis leur origine jusqu’à nos jours, chez tous les peuples connus, proféssée au Collège de France*, ed. Magdeleine de Saint-Agy, vol. 2 (Paris: chez Fortin, Mason, et Cie. Libraires, 1841), 245.</footnote>

<footnote n="40">⁴⁰ On anatomical textbooks in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France, see Guerrini, *Courtiers’ Anatomists*, 33-9. On the relation between reading and dissection, see Mandressi, *Le regard de l’anatomiste*, 111-8.</footnote>

<footnote n="41">⁴¹ Du Laurens, *Historia anatomica*. I used a French edition: *Histoire anatomique, en laquelle toutes les parties du corps humain sont amplement declarées: enrichie de controverses & observations nouvelles*, trad. François Sizé (Lyon: de l’imprimerie de Simon Rigaud, [1631], 38-9: “On peut aussi enseigner l’Anatomie sans la dissection, ou de vive voix, ou par écrit: car il y a beaucoup de choses qui ne se peuvent pas s’avoir par la seule veuë, lesquelles il faut describe. . . . Il faut donc lire les escrits tant des anciens que modernes, qui ont excellé en ceste sorte d’enseigner.”</footnote>

<footnote n="42">⁴² For Bourdon’s book and the reading notes Plumier took on it, see below.</footnote>
Texts on the practice of human dissection were not sufficient at the time. As a matter of fact, they were part of the literary tradition in which European botanists found themselves submerged at around 1700, for the traditions of botany and anatomy had then been running in parallel for a long time. Among the anatomical textbooks available to Plumier in the library of the Parisian convent of Minims at Place Royale was that by the Swiss Protestant Gaspard Bauhin. Better known for his hugely influential botanical work, the *Pinax theatric botanici* (1623), Bauhin taught not only botany in Basel, but also anatomy, and published an exceptionally detailed (more than 1,300-page) and generously illustrated (with more than 140 full-page woodcuts) anatomical textbook.<fnref n="43" />

Anatomy was taught and learned at very different levels in late seventeenth-century Paris, precisely because it played a crucial role in several non-medical fields of knowledge. This was the case not only of natural history, but also of the visual arts: conferences on anatomy and the arts were pronounced at the Paris Academy of Painting and Sculpture during the 1690s, and a surgeon was accepted there as soon as 1651 as an honorary member with the charge of teaching anatomy.<fnref n="44" /> Whether or not Plumier was an habitué of public (or closed-door) dissections and anatomical lessons strays into the field of speculation, but there is not doubt that the opportunities to learn anatomy *de vive voix* were numerous in Paris in those days. Free public anatomical lessons and dissections were dispensed at the Jardin du roi and, from the 1690s onwards, these took place in a new purpose-built theater (fig. 3.8). In charge of the instruction there was the *démonstreur d'anatomie*, Pierre Dionis (1643-1718) from 1673 and, from 1680, Joseph-Guichard Duverney.<fnref n="45" /> Many ephemeral publications and indeed whole little treatises informed

<footnote n="43">⁴³ Gaspard Bauhin, *Theatrum anatomicum novis figuris aeneis illustratum et in lucem emissum opera & suptibus Theodori de Bry p. m. relicta vidua & filiorum Ioannis Theodori & Ioannis Israelis de Brj* (Frankfurt: typis Matthaei Beckeri, 1605). Bauhin's *Theatrum anatominum* was therefore printed in the same workshop as Du Laurens's *Historia anatomica*. Up to ten books by Bauhin were listed in the 1722 catalog of the library of the convent of Place Royale (Maz. MS 4147). For the relations between medical botany and anatomy in Renaissance Europe, see Sachiko Kusukawa, *Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text, and Argument in Human Anatomy and Medical Botany* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 1-22.</footnote>

<footnote n="44">⁴⁴ Alain Mérot, ed., *Conférences de l'Académie de peinture et de sculpture au XVIIᵉ siècle* (Paris: École supérieure des beaux-arts, 1996), 252-4. The surgeon, one Quéroux or Qualtroux, was accepted at the same time as the printmaker Abraham Bosse, both on an honorary basis (as artisans, they could not join the Academy with full rights) so as to teach anatomy and perspective respectively. See Sheila McTighe, “Abraham Bosse and the Language of Artisans: Genre and Perspective in the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, 1648-1670,” *Oxford Art Journal* 21, no. 1 (1998), 3-26.</footnote>

<footnote n="45">⁴⁵ On the anatomical instruction at the Jardin du roi, see Guerrini, *Courtiers’ Anatomists*, esp. chap. 6, and Matthew Senior, “Pierre Dionis and Joseph-Guichard Duverney: Teaching Anatomy at the Jardin du roi, 1673-1730,” *Seventeenth-Century French Studies* 26 (2004), 153-69. It seems there was an amphitheater for anatomy lessons before the one built in the 1690s, for Dionis writes, in his *L’anatomie de l’homme suivant la circulation du sang, & les dernières découvertes* (Paris: chez Laurent d’Houry, 1690), sig. [A8v], that “Sa Majesté presente, dans les mois de Mars de l’année 1673, ordonna que les Demonstrations de l’Anatomie & des</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_45.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3.8. Anatomical instruction at the Jardin du Roi by Pierre Dionis, in his *Cours d'opération de chirurgie*, 1708. The Jardin du roi offered public lessons in anatomy during the winter and of botany during the spring and summer. (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>

Parisians of where to find public anatomical lectures: the famous guide *Livre commode des adresses de Paris* (1692) referred its readers to the Royal Society of Medicine, where public conferences where held every Sunday afternoon by the author himself (the surgeon Nicolas Blegny, who signed the book with a pseudonym). The same publication also indicated that “Surgery, Anatomy, Chemistry and Botany are taught publicly and freely, on the orders and at the expenses of the King, at the Royal Garden of Plants,” and that lessons were announced on posters for “Anatomical Dissection and Surgical Operations at the beginning Winter, and for Demonstrations on Plants and Chemical Preparations at the beginning of the Summer.”<fnref n="46" /> In his *Description nouvelle de la ville de Paris* (1698), Germain Brice also reported on Duverney’s anatomical *démonstrations* at the Jardin, in “a large Room, the interior of which is furnished with benches disposed in amphitheater,” as well as on his “curious Cabinet, in which he keeps rarities in relation to the science he practices.”<fnref n="47" />

<footnote>Operations de Chirurgie se feroient au Jardin Royal à portes ouvertes, & grauitement, dans un Amphitheatre qu'elle y avoit fiat construire à cet effet.”</footnote>

<footnote n="46">⁴⁶ Pradel, Abraham du [Nicolas du Blegny], *Livre commode des adresses de Paris pour 1692* (Paris: Paul Daffis, 1878 [1692]), 123 and 145.</footnote>

<footnote n="47">⁴⁷ Germain Brice, *Description de la ville de Paris, ou recherche des choses les plus singulieres & les plus remarquables qui se trouvent à present dans cette Ville*, 2 vols. (Paris: chez Nicolas Le Gras, Nicolas Le Clerc, and Barthelemy Girin, 1698), vol. 2, 17-8: "La Dissection Anatomique a aussi un endroit pour ses Démonstrations dans</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_46.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3.9. Detail of Plumier’s drawing of the *Castanea racemosa* (chestnut) in his manuscript “Solum, Salum, Coelum Americanum,” with anatomical depictions of the fruit. (Bibliothèque centrale du Muséum national d’histoire naturelle.)</figcaption></figure>

As a mode of inquiry, anatomy was profoundly embedded in the way in which the intelligibility of nature was constructed at the time: its objects were far from being limited to human and animal corpses.<fnref n="48" /> A good example of the weight that the anatomical method carried at the time in the study of the natural world is to be found in botany. As Alice Stroup has remarked, a shift took place around the mid-seventeenth century in the study of vegetables towards regional flora, classification, and anatomy.<fnref n="49" /> The Paris Academy of Sciences carried forth this project: in the 1660s and 1670s, Denis Dodart led the botanical counterpart of Perrault’s project, one of the purposes of which was to “describe the Interior of some of their [plants] parts, as much as we will be able to know it by means of dissection.”<fnref n="50" /> This “description of the internal structure” of plants consisted in the anatomy of seeds, roots, and fibers, often with the assistance of a

<footnote>une grande Sale, dont l'interieur est garni de Bancs, disposez en amphitheatre, à la faveur desquels un grand nombre de personnes peuvent voir tres-aisement les Operations que l'on fait. Joseph du Vernay Medecin, de l'Académie Roïale des Sciences, y donne souvent des Leçons qui lui ont acquis une tres-grande reputation. Les découvertes qu'il a fait & les nombreux Traitez qu'il a mis au jour maquent son profond scavoir & la grande experience qu'il a dans la Dissection. Il a un Cabinet curieux, dans lequel il conserve des raretz qui ont du raport à la science qu'il pratique, où l'on remarquera bien des singularitez que l'on ne trouvera point ailleurs sans doute.”</footnote>

<footnote n="48">⁴⁸ Mandressi, *Le regard de l'anatomiste*, esp. 217-68.</footnote>

<footnote n="49">⁴⁹ Stroup, *Company of Scientist*, 65-88, 117.</footnote>

<footnote n="50">⁵⁰ Denis Dodart, “Projet de l’histoire des plantes,” in *Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des plantes, dressez par M. Dodart, de l’Académie Royale des Sciences. Docteur en Medecine de la Faculté de Paris* (Paris: de l’Imprimerie Royal, 1676), 3: “Nous avons aussi resolu . . . de descrire l’Interieur de quelques-unes de leurs parties, autant que nos serons capables de le connoistre par la dissection. Cela comprend la Description de la structure interieure de quelques semences, de quelques Germes, & de quelques Racines naissances; la Description des Fibres, & de leurs Intervales, tant de la racine adulte que du tronc, des Pedicules, & de leurs enveloppes.”</footnote>
microscope. Both the manuscript and printed images by Plumier reflected this contemporary concern with the internal forms of some specific parts of plants (fig. 3.9), and the Minim friar knew and referred to the work of two naturalists who perhaps did the most at that time in scrutinizing the interior of flowers and seeds: the abovementioned Marcello Malpighi of Bologna and the Englishman Nehemiah Grew.<fnref n="51" /> Of “the learned and curious Anatomist Malpighi,” Plumier quoted the first tome of his *Anatome plantarum* (1675), a treatise on the structure of plants in which the Italian systematically compared the vegetable and animal anatomical parts.<fnref n="52" /> The first volume of the *Anatome plantarum* counted just over eighty pages of text, but more than fifty full-page engravings, each of them gathering several pictures on real-size and microscopic observations of plants’ parts. In the preface to the second part (1679), Malpighi specifically discussed the use of images in his work: “I had offered a series of observations together with figures, so that anyone at all may philosophize relying on any system at will. In like manner, I drew the figures myself, even when they represent the object enlarged by means of the microscope; however, they do not represent distinctly all the parts of the object that are truly there. . . . Rather, retaining a certain method analogous to that used by Nature, I delineated only those parts that serve to instruct the reader.”<fnref n="53" /> The passage by the Italian anatomist, when compared to Plumier’s ways of doing, evidences common proceedings in representing nature. Malpighi’s drawings, as Plumier’s, were made by himself: the images were crafted by the observer and were part of the observation itself. In both cases, visual representation worked selectively, as the anatomical eye did: only the pertinent parts were retained. Malpighi’s look, however, was much more radically anatomical than the Minim’s in that his figures were exceptionally fragmented: in the Italian’s book, organisms (not only plants) were never shown in their entirety, but always broken into pieces—and these pieces were themselves usually dissected. In both cases, too, bridges were continuously built between the visual

<footnote n="51">⁵¹ He mentioned them in the preface to the *Traité des fougères de l’Amérique* (Paris: de l’Imprimerie royale, 1705), iii and xiii. For a comparative study of their contributions to plant anatomy in the second half of the seventeenth century, see Agnes Arber, “Nehemiah Grew (1641-1672) and Marcello Malpighi (1628-1694): An Essay in Comparison,” *Isis* 34, no. 1 (1942), 7-16.</footnote>

<footnote n="52">⁵² Marcello Malpighi, *Anatome plantarum*, 2 vols. (London: impensis Johannis Martyn, 1675 and 1679). On Malpighi’s anatomy, see Domenico Bertoloni Meli, *Mechanism, Experiment, Disease: Marcello Malpighi and Seventeenth-Century Anatomy* (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), esp. chap. 9 (234-70) for his work on the anatomy of plants.</footnote>

<footnote n="53">⁵³ Malpighi, *Anatome plantarum*, x-xi: “In reliquis observationum seriem exhibui iconibus sociatam, ut quilibet pro arbitrio cuicumque systemati innixus philosophari valeat. Icones pariter meâ manu expressi, licèt microscopii microscopii ope ad auctuni repraesentent objectum: non tamen omnes ejusdem partes signatim exprimunt. . . . Sed servatâ aliquali & analoga Naturae methodo, eas tantùm delineavi partes, quae Lectorem erudire valent.” Quoted and translated in Bertoloni Meli, *Mechanism, Experiment, Disease*, 239-40.</footnote>
representations and the textual observations by means of lettering systems of references. More important, Malpighi explicitly stated his belief that written descriptions and visual depictions could translate their observations as raw material, perfectly distinguishable from their own interpretation. This conviction seems to be applicable to Plumier’s pictures, too.<fnref n="54" />

As regards Nehemiah Grew, Plumier might have read his work through that of John Ray, in particular the latter’s *Historia generalis plantarum* (1686-1704), in which he reported Grew’s microscopic observations on the seed vessels of the “Phyllitide.”<fnref n="55" /> Another good reason to think that the friar might not have been directly familiar with Grew’s work is that both Malpighi and Ray, but not Grew, found a place in Plumier’s pantheon of illustrious naturalists: the *Malpighia* and the *Ian-Raia* were two of the genera of West Indian plants described in the *Nova genera*.<fnref n="56" /> However, Grew’s best-known work, *The Anatomy of Plants* (1682), had been available since 1675 in a French translation printed in Paris.<fnref n="57" /> Be that as it may, Grew’s iconography in *The Anatomy of Plants* goes along the two lines of anatomical picturing highlighted here: references between text and images, and visual fragmentation. The anatomical fragmentation affected Grew’s images no less than his text: the figures focused, as in Malpighi’s work, on parts of plants (mostly dissected themselves) and microscopic observations and, besides some pictures of a flower or a root, few of them showed parts identifiable in the specimens seen with the naked eye. But also the text proceeded by parts, from the roots to the pith to the flower, with references to the engravings and specific parts of them by means of lettering.

This glimpse into Malpighi’s and Grew’s work shows convincingly that anatomy should be understood as a mode of inquiry—one proper to natural historical research at large—rather than a discipline constructed around a specific object of study (i.e. the human body). To dissect (*disséquer*) was to “open the body of an animal, to make the

<footnote n="54">⁵⁴ For a comparative example of Malpighi’s use of images, see Bertoloni Meli, *Mechanism, Experiment, Disease*, chap. 8 and 9, and Matthew Cobb, “Malpighi, Swammerdam and the Colourful Silkworm: Replication and Visual Representation in Early Modern Science,” *Annals of Science* 59, no. 2 (2002), 111-47.</footnote>

<footnote n="55">⁵⁵ Plumier, *Traité des fougères*, iii: “L’observation que le sçavant & curieux Anglois M. Grew en a faite, comme on peut voir dans l’Histoire generale de Ray 134.” He referred in particular to the first edition and volume of Ray’s *Historia plantarum generalis* (London: impensis Samuelis Smith & Benjamini Walford, 1693), in which the author reported Grew’s researches on the anatomy of plants.</footnote>

<footnote n="56">⁵⁶ Charles Plumier, *Nova plantarum Americanarum genera* (Paris: apud Joannem Boudot, 1703), 46 and pl. 36 for the *Malpighia*, 33 and pl. 29 for the *Ian-Raia*.</footnote>

<footnote n="57">⁵⁷ *Anatomie des plantes qui contiennent une description exacte de leurs parties & de leurs usages, & qui fait voir comment elles se forment, & comment elles croissent*, trad. Louis Le Vasseur (Paris: chez Lambert Roulland, 1675). I have not found Grew’s books in the catalogs of the Minim convent at Place Royale, but it was in the library of the Minim convent of Marseille according to a 1776 catalog: BMM MS 1485 “Catalogus librorum bibliothecae massiliensis minimorum,” fol. 324.</footnote>
anatomy of it, to make its disconnected parts visible” (*faire voir les parties séparées*), as Furetière defined the word in his dictionary.<fnref n="58" /> All over the early modern period, anatomy as a mode of inquiry involved these two crucial ideas: fragmentation and visualization. As regards the first, it entailed a logic of fragmentation as the basis for comprehension. In its restricted meaning limited to medical disciplines, the anatomical method went hand in hand with the early modern conception of the human body as a composite of parts: it consisted precisely in the operation of separating those parts and describing them independently.<fnref n="59" /> But as a way of knowing in general, it was grounded in the belief that knowledge could be acquired by means of this patient exercise of dividing and describing—as a matter of fact, dividing to better describe. To anatomize was to make the history of bodies (be they human, animal, or vegetable) by splitting them into parts. The premise was therefore to consider its objects as composite entities, which comprehension entailed discomposing. André Du Laurens famously formulated this idea: anatomy, for him, “does not deal with the entire & continuous body, but with it divided into parts & into members.”<fnref n="60" /> The rhetoric of the parts imbued modes of knowledge that, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, exceeded even the boundaries of the study of nature and referred to another contemporary notion: that of “analysis.” “Analysis” was used as a synonym of anatomy when it came to this logic of fragmentation.<fnref n="61" /> The same Claude Perrault who led the project on the natural history of animals at the Academy of Sciences published in 1680 a four-volume work entitled *Essais de physique, ou recueil de plusieurs traitez, touchant les choses naturelles* (Physical essays, or collection of treatises on natural things). It incorporated a dictionary of “scientific terms”

<footnote n="58">⁵⁸ Furetière, *Dictionnaire* (1690), sig. [Llll4v]: “DISSEQUER. v. act. Terme de Chirurgie. Ouvrir le corps d’un animal, en faire l’anatomie, en faire voir les parties séparées.” The same definition is reemployed in the 1701 edition.</footnote>

<footnote n="59">⁵⁹ On the proliferation of the social and symbolic practices of “piecing out” the body in the early modern period, see the introduction to *The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe*, ed. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York: Routledge, 2009), xi-xxix. On fragmentation as an anatomical method, see Mandressi, *Le regard de l'anatomiste*, 137-47 (incidentally, Mandressi's book is indispensable for the epistemic power of the anatomical method to conceptualize and elaborate its objects of research themselves), and Mandressi, “Dividere per conoscere: la ‘parte’ come concetto nel pensiero anatomico in età moderna,” in *Anatome: Sezione, scomposizione, raffigurazione del corpo fra medioevo e età moderna*, ed. Giuseppe Olmi and Claudia Pancivino (Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2012), 117-35. A compelling interpretation of anatomical fragmentation in Spanish Baroque culture is in Nuria Valverde, “Small Parts: Crisóstomo Martínez (1638-1694), Bone Histiology, and the Visual Making of Body Wholeness,” *Isis* 100, no. 3 (2009), 505-36.</footnote>

<footnote n="60">⁶⁰ “Car l’Anatomie ne traicte pas du corps entier & continu, mais divisé en parties & membres,” quoted in Mandressi, *Le regard de l'anatomiste*, 271.</footnote>

<footnote n="61">⁶¹ Mandressi, *Le regard de l'anatomiste*, 144-7, 237-9.</footnote>
(termes de science), and the author described in it the word “analysis” (analysie) as a
“dissolution,” or

the development that is made of a thing that, not being known but roughly [en gros], needs to
be separated into parts so as to consider them independently, and to grasp more precisely by
this means the nature of the whole. Therefore, when we disassemble a timepiece, or dissect
an animal, or distill something, we say that we do an analysis of it.<fnref n="62" />

This logic of fragmentation went beyond the limits of the epistemically rational into
the realm of the wondrous: Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park have noted that objects
resulting from an excellent workmanship were labeled as “curious” precisely because
their nature was perceived as complex or composite: for a scholar like Thomas Hobbes,
they remark, “the dissection of an object into its minute parts, be it by the eye of the
body or the eye of the mind, prolongs the pleasurable state of curiosity, by disassembling
a single object into many.”<fnref n="63" /> The logics of fragmentation thus conceived constituted
curiosity at its best, the scholarly passion duly conducted. This was not always the case,
especially regarding the long-distance transit of natural knowledge. Once more, the
*Histoire des animaux* offer a good example of this. In the preface to the volume of 1671,
Perrault conveyed the commonplace suspicion about accounts on overseas flora and
fauna done by observers who were not naturalists.<fnref n="64" /> Most of these authors lacked
adequate training and this “made their work not much significant, & their evidence
suspect.” For the academician, it was “not likely that Merchants & Soldiers are endowed
with the spirit of Philosophers & patience, which are necessary for observing all the
particularities of so many different Animals.” First, their curiosity was exclusively
concerned with the “extraordinary figure” of these overseas marvels: these sorts of
observers limited their accounts to the wondrous aspects of far-flung natures, and did
not consider “a more exact research necessary.” But there was an even more important
aspect for Perrault:

<footnote n="62">⁶² Claude Perrault, “Table pour l’explication des termes de science,” in *Essais de physique, ou recueil de plusieurs traitez touchant les choses naturelles*, 4 vols. (Paris: Jean Baptiste Coignard, 1680), vol. 3, 333: “ANALYSIE. m. g. Dissolution. Le developement qui se fait d’une chose, qui n’estant connuë qu’en gros, a besoin qu’on en separe les parties pour les considerer à part, & sçavoir par ce moyen plus precisement la nature du tout. Ainsi lorsque l’on demonte une montre, que l’on fait la dissection d’un animal, que l’on distille quelque chose, on dit que l’on fait l’Analysie.”</footnote>

<footnote n="63">⁶³ Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, *Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750* (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 314. They paraphrase Thomas Hobbes, *Thomas White’s De Mundo Examined*, 38.5.</footnote>

<footnote n="64">⁶⁴ On evidence and credit in naturalists’ travel narratives during the eighteenth century, see Juan Pimentel, *Testigos del mundo ciencia, literatura y viajes en la Ilustración* (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2003), esp. 29-70.</footnote>
what must decrease even more our esteem for this kind of descriptions is the little fidelity
that Travelers ordinarily use in their accounts, in which to what they have seen they add
most of the time what they could have seen; and in order not to leave the stories of their
journeys incomplete, they report what they have read from the Authors, by whom they are
misled, as they mislead in turn their own Readers.<fnref n="65" />

The observation of flora and fauna—especially when far afield—was not without
rules and limits. Bernard Le Bouvier de Fontenelle formulated a similar view some years
afterwards apropos of Joseph Pitton de Tournefort: “an excellent Traveller” is not
someone “who simply travels, but [one of] those in whom can be found a very extended
curiosity, which is rather rare, & a certain gift for seeing well (un certain don de bien voir),
even rarer.”<fnref n="66" /> To “see well” was a pressing problem at the time, one that preoccupied in
particular the members of the Academy of Sciences and partially accounts for their
collective empiricism. Denis Dodart, for instance, opened the foreword to the *Histoire des
plantes* with a force statement on the collective grounds of the work: “This Book is the
Work of the whole Academy. There is not one of those who composed it that has not
Judged, & who has not contributed at least with some advice.”<fnref n="67" /> Collective empiricism
was the mainstay of the Academy’s functioning, and it might well be read as a form of
conjuring the anxieties around “exact observation.” But fieldwork—like the one in which
Plumier was engaged while dissecting a crocodile—was inevitably more solitary; to “see
well” was to a large extent a matter of opinion. In this regard, the logics of fragmentation
at play in Plumier’s drawings—the anatomical approach to animals and plants in his
notes and depictions—can be interpreted in terms of what Simon Schaffer has come to
call the “imaginary systems of control over record keeping.” There is for him, in the

<footnote n="65">⁶⁵ [Perrault, *Histoire animaux*, sig. [aV-eF]: “Le défaut de ces qualitez dans la pluspart de ceux qui ont fait des relations particulières & des memoires, rend leur travail peu considerable, & leur témoignage fort suspect : n’y aiant gueres d’apparence que des Marchands & des Soldats soient pourvus de l’esprit de Philosophie & de la patience, qui sont necessaires pour observer toutes les particularitez de tant de differens Animaux, dont la figure extraordinaire remplissoit d’abord toute leur curiosité, comme estant capable d’enrichir suffisamment leurs relations; sans qu’ils jugeassent necessaire de passer à une recherche plus exacte. Mais ce qui doit davantage diminuer l’estime qu’on peut faire de ces sortes de Memoires, c’est le peu de fidélité dont les Voiageurs usent d’ordinaire en leurs Relations; qui ajoutent presque toujours aux choses qu’ils ont vuës, celles qu’ils pouvoient voir; & qui pour ne pas laisser le recit de leurs voiages imparfait, rapportent ce qu’ils ont leu dans des Auteurs, par qui ils sont premièrement trompez, de mesme qu’ils trompent leurs Lecteurs en suite.”</footnote>

<footnote n="66">⁶⁶ 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), 152: “Avec toutes les qualitez qu’il [Tournefort] avoit, on peut juger aisement combine il étoit propre à être un excellent Voyageur, car j’entends ici par ce terme, non ceux qui voyagent simplement, mais ceux en qui se trouve & une curiosité fort étenduë, qui est assez rare, & un certain don de bien voir, plus rare encore.”</footnote>

<footnote n="67">⁶⁷ Dodart, *Histoire des plantes*, sig. eF: “Ce Livre est l’Ouvrage de toute l’Academie. Il n’y a personne de ceux dont elle est composée qui n’en ait esté le Juge, & qui n’y ait au moins contribué quelques avis.”</footnote>
stories of exploration and inscription, “a puzzle much more important than the one that asks how knowledgeable persons make reliable inscriptions”: for him, this has to do with the concern of those people with “how [certain] ways of seeing and inscribing made someone into a reliable agent of knowledge.”<fnref n="68" />

Analysis, dissolution, anatomy: these were instruments of precision, ways of knowing that made the observation of wondrous animals far afield—from the cruel crocodile to the pouched pelican—“exact” in the terms of Perrault: they turned *voir* into *bien voir*. And material inscriptions, verbal and visual alike, mediated that experience in fundamental ways. Around 1700, the preoccupation of natural historians for this *bien voir* accounts not only for Plumier’s anatomical approach to the nature of the West Indies, but also for the specific forms of note-taking and inscribing in which he tried to capture it on paper.

## Travel and note-taking

Plumier’s papers were mostly loose sheets of very different sorts, sizes, and contents when they arrived at the Bibliothèque du roi in the 1760s. The Enlightened rationality, however, could not find a place for all that heterogeneous mass of papers and those few with no clear adscription were gathered in the same folder under the hackneyed label “Notes diverses.” Among these assorted notes, some few extant pages of an otherwise lost quarto booklet are filled with written observations in an untidy handwriting, among which some “observations on the vipers of Martinique” or an incomplete piece of writing identified as “*mémoires* for a natural history of the crocodile, commonly known as caiman on the island of St Domingo.” This sheet in particular is numbered 178, a trace of the length that his observational notebooks may have reached. The pages on the crocodile are ceremoniously introduced by a brief contextual paragraph:

> I, brother Charles Plumier, friar of the Order of Minims in the province of France, and Botanist of the King Most Christian, Louis the Great, on the Isles of America, began dissecting a crocodile that I took in the lake Miragoâne, located near the Petite Goine of the island of St Domingo, otherwise isle Espagnole.<fnref n="69" />

<footnote n="68">⁶⁸ Simon Schaffer, “‘On Seeing Me Write’: Inscription Devices in the South Seas,” *Representations* 97, no. 1 (2007), 105.</footnote>

<footnote n="69">⁶⁹ BCMNHN MS 33 “Notes diverses du P. Plumier,” 178 (although most of the pages in the folder are not numbered): “Je frere Charles Plumier Religieux de l’ordre des minims de la province de France et Botaniste du Roy tres chrestien Louis le grand, and les isles de l’Amérique, commencois a dissequer un</footnote>
It follows an numbered list of measurements taken by the friar of the dead beast—it was these measurements that were afterwards copied on the same loose sheet displaying the first picture of another crocodile, the smaller one whose dissection was recorded in drawing. Incomplete as the text of the “mémoires” itself, the list finishes unexpectedly with the entry no. 11 on the nostrils of the creature, “located above the muzzle” and “closing by means of a cartilage similar to an eyelid.” There are several elements in this fragmentary journal of observations that are interesting for our purposes. First, the title “*mémoires* for the natural history of the crocodile” echoes titles such as Perrault’s *Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire naturelle des animaux* and Dodart’s *Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des plantes*. The meaning attributed to the word *mémoires* at the time is revealing of the historical method of inquiry on which the study of nature was grounded: a *mémoire* was, for instance, “a summary piece of writing that is given to somebody as a reminder of something”; but in the plural, “it is said of the Books of Historians, written by those who took part in the affairs or were eyewitnesses.”<fnref n="70" /> Memory and eyewitness descriptions are recurring themes in this story. The *mémoires* on the crocodile are also a good example of the previously discussed central role of the enumeration of parts in this anatomically-inspired natural history of animals. The connotations of “description” were imbued by the idea of inventory, *dénombrement*, or “written enumeration”: that is, “the detailed count of several bodies” (*le compte par le ménu de plusieurs corps*). Within the field of rhetoric, *dénombrement* had a meaning along the same lines: “division of the parts of a discourse, & above all of a narrative, where the things that serve to the subject are mentioned in detail.”<fnref n="71" /> Inventory, enumeration, and measurement of parts were a common inscriptive strategy in the natural history of animals at the time; they are frequent in the written reports of the Academy’s dissections—in a display of exactness, the elephant anatomized in Versailles in 1681 was also carefully measured under the eyes of its aristocratic audience.<fnref n="72" />

The Paris Academy of Sciences also offers one of the most famous iconographic materializations of the central role that inscription played in seventeenth-century natural

<footnote>crocodile que j'avais pris dans le lac de miragoane situé proche le petit goine de l'isle St Domingue autrement l'isle Espagnole."</footnote>

<footnote n="70">⁷⁰ Furetière, *Dictionnaire* (1690), 593: “Mémoire . . . est une écrit sommaire qu’on donne à quelqu’un pour le faire souvenir de quelque chose. . . . Mémoires, au pluriel, se dit des Lires des Historiens, écrits par ceux qui ont eu part aux affaires ou qui ont esté témoins oculaires.”</footnote>

<footnote n="71">⁷¹ Furetière, *Dictionnaire* (1690), 791: “en termes de Rhetorique, se dit de la division des parties d’un discours, & sur tout dans une narration, où on fait mention en detail des choses qui servent au sujet.”</footnote>

<footnote n="72">⁷² *Histoire de l'Académie. 1666-1686*, 322-28. Similar descriptions involving measurements are spread across the volume (i.e. the description of an ibis and a lizard, p. 236-37).</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_47.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3.10. Intaglio vignette by Sébastien Leclerc in the *Histoire des animaux*. It depicts an (almost certainly idyllic) moment of collaborative work by anatomists of the Paris Academy of Sciences. Note particularly the secretary at the edge of the table taking notes of the dissection. (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>

historical observation. In order to observe well, one had to take good notes. A good case in point is the intaglio vignette authored by the celebrated engraver Sébastien Leclerc, the one placed at the head of the preface of Perrault's *Histoire des animaux* (fig. 3.10): it presents an idyllic scene of corporate collaboration between the anatomists of the Academy during a dissection. It portrays a room filled with gentlemanly scholars assembled in groups: Perrault sits theatrically holding a volume (in all probability the very *Histoire des animaux*), another presents one of the engravings of the project, a couple of them observe through microscopes, human and animal skeletons from the Academy's collection are displayed in the shady background, and the gardens and buildings of the Jardin du roi can be perceived through the windows. The figures to retain here are those of the dissector, skillfully stabbing his scalpel into the opened thorax of a dead fox, and especially that of the secretary sitting at the edge of the table and taking notes, quill in hand, of the whole process.<fnref n="73" /> The concomitance of anatomical observation and its recording was also emphasized by some of the academicians' written reports. An even more famous anatomical scene than that of the fox gathered the anatomists of the Academy in Versailles in January 1681, on the occasion of the death of an African elephant from the royal menagerie. The creature was originally from Congo and a gift of the king of Portugal to Louis XIV. It also became the object of a collective dissection

<footnote n="73">⁷³ [Perrault, *Histoire des animaux*, sig. ãs.]</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_48.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3.11. Some of Plumier’s paper materials seem likely to have been produced in the field. These are quite diverse, and range from calculations and sketches to imprints of leaves. They all are good examples of the mediating role that inscriptions of all sorts and the practices of drawing and writing played in the exercise of natural historical observation. (Bibliothèque centrale du Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>

performed in the presence of the court and the monarch. It involved more than severing and slicing, for it required the minute registration of what was observed and what became increasingly visible thanks to the scalpel: “Mr Du Verney made the dissection [of the elephant], Mr Perrault the description of its main parts, & Mr De la Hire, the drawings.”<fnref n="74" />

The mediating role of note-taking in the naturalist's act of observation goes well beyond the study of nature, as seen in some of Plumier's papers in the abovementioned folder "Notes diverses." This portfolio compiles loose, miscellaneous sheets of very different format and content: field annotations, sketches, and more elaborated descriptions (such as the *mémoires* for the natural history of the crocodile and the viper), drafts of his preface to the *Traité des fougères* (with some sections crossed out, some others highlighted in a box, and numerous additions between lines), and a plan for a new book.

<footnote n="74">⁷⁴ Histoire de l'Académie royale des sciences, vol. 1, *Depuis son établissement en 1666 jusqu'à 1699* (Paris: Gabriel Martin, Jean-Baptiste Coignard fils, and Hippolyte-Louis Guerin, 1733), 322-28.</footnote>