But Plumier sought Tournefort’s support the most for his new genera research: he had been compiling descriptions and drawings of the new botanical genera he discovered in the West Indies during his three journeys, and he classified them according to his friend’s system. In August 1702 the friar was expecting these genera to be included in the catalogs that Tournefort was supposed to publish upon his return from the Levant, since “it would be a consolation to see my works at least quoted, and I would be happy even though.” Yet at the end of that year he tersely informed Bégon that the publication of Tournefort’s *Corollarium* (a supplement on the new typologies of plants he had found during his Levant peregrinations) was imminent, and no mention was made of Plumier’s own genera in it. Some months after the friar acknowledged that he had indeed asked the professor to include the American genera in his catalogs on the Eastern flora, but that he had refused and delayed the question for another catalog, allegedly to be printed in two or three years’ time.<fnref n="46" /> Yet, “fugaces labuntur annis,” the fleeting years glide on, wrote the Minim in that same letter quoting Horace: the manuscript of the *Nova genera*, he told Bégon, was finished and in the hands of the censors, and its publication agreed on with a Paris printer, Jean Boudot (1651-1706), to whom Plumier accorded the rights of publication. Although established in the capital, Boudot was at the time the director of the printing house of Trévoux, next to Lyon and one of the major book businesses in Europe: in its presses appeared the *Mémoires de Trévoux*, the well-known Jesuit scientific journal. More importantly, Boudot had become by 1701 *imprimeur ordinaire du Roi* (ordinary printer to the king), a royal office dependent on the secretary of the King’s House, and the official printer and bookseller of the Paris Academy of Sciences.<fnref n="47" />

<footnote n="46">⁴⁶ Plumier to Bégon, Paris, August 10, 1702, in MMC mS 867, fol. 151r: “[Tournefort] va pourtant donner pour preliminaire un Catalogue de toutes les plantes nouvelles qu’il a découvert et il va Établir mesme plusieurs nouveaux genres et à cette occasion je l’ay prié de vouloir bien ajouter plusieurs nouveaux que j’ay aussi établis sur plusieurs de mes plantes de l’Amérique, et j’espère que vous les verrez dans le mesme ouvrage,” and Plumier to Bégon, Paris, March 6, 1703, in MMC MS 867, fol. 147r: “J’ay voulu premièrement finir un petit ouvrage qui à ce que je me flatte vous fera plaisir. C’est un *Nova Plantarum americanaraum genera*. Vous savez que Mr de Tournefort a fait nouvellement le Catalogue de toutes les plantes qu’il a trouvées dans son voyage du Levant, et qu’il y a joint aussi plusieurs nouveaux genres. Je l’avois prié de joindre à cet ouvrage les nouveaux genres que j’ay fait de mes plantes de l’Amérique, mais il n’a pas jugé à propos. Il me dit d’attendre un autre ouvrage qu’il prétend donner au jour dans deux ou trois ans.” The supplement in question is Tournefort’s *Corollarium institutionum rei herbariae, in quo plantae 1356 munificiencia Ludovici Magni in orientalibus regionibus observatae recensentur, & ad genera sua revocantur* (Paris: de l’Imprimerie royale, 1693).</footnote>

<footnote n="47">⁴⁷ Charlène Beziat, “L’imprimeur du roi à Lyon au XVIIIᵉ siècle” (master diss., Université Lyon 2 and École national supérieure des sciences de l’information et des bibliothèques, 2011), 15-37; Frédéric Barbier, Sabine Juratic, and Annick Mellerio, *Dictionnaire des imprimeurs, libraires et gens du livre à Paris, 1701-1789* (Geneva: Droz, 2007), 281–84.</footnote>
It is unclear whether Tournefort, a prominent member of the Academy since 1691, had any role in the publication of Plumier’s *Nova genera* by Boudot. The figure and work of the professor at the Jardin du roi profoundly shaped, in any case, the contents and materiality of the book. This differed substantially from the rest of Plumier’s publications in its formal characteristics: in contrast to the folio volumes of the *Description*, the *Art de tourner*, and the *Traité des fougères*, the *Nova genera* was a brief quarto book with about eighty pages of text and only forty plates. Integrally in Latin, the work consisted of the written and graphic description of 106 genera of plants, as well as a catalog of American plants, according to “the genera established in the *Institutiones rei herbariae*, and described and drawn by Father Charles Plumier Minim, Royal Botanist in the American Islands.”<fnref n="48" /> The *Nova genera* were thus conceived by Plumier as a part of Tournefort’s intellectual project for the classification of the vegetable world, and the materiality of the book significantly accommodated to that of the *Élémens* and the *Institutiones* not only in its format (a quarto volume), but also in the graphic mode of representation of the genera Plumier employed in this particular publication—a mode that substantially differed from the one used in his other works. Since the *Description* in 1693, the friar preferably represented plants in a way very similar to Dodart’s *Histoire des plantes*. Like in the plates that the acclaimed engravers Nicolas Robert and Abraham Bosse made for Dodart’s volume, most of the plates in the *Description* presented the plants in their entire size, from the leaves to the roots (fig. 5.2). Dodart devoted an entire section of the introduction to his book to explain the principles he had followed for the visual depiction of plants. He had made, for instance, “the Plates as large as possible for a comfortable Volume, so that there are several Pictures that represent the Plants . . . in their natural size.” When the specimen was about twice the size of the volume’s folio pages, it was cut in two halves, and both were represented on the same plate. If bigger, the plant was reduced, but some of its parts were still presented in their natural size so that they could serve as “a reference (*qui servist comme de pied*) to estimate the real size of the Plant.”<fnref n="49" />

<footnote n="48">⁴⁸ “Catalogus plantarum Americanarum, quarum genera in Institutionibus rei herbariae jam nota sunt, quasque P. Carolus Plumier Minimus, Botanicus Regius, descripsit & delineavit in Insulis Americanis,” printed in the *Nova genera* with a new pagination.</footnote>

<footnote n="49">⁴⁹ Denis Dodart, *Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire des plantes* (Paris: de l'Imprimerie royale, 1676), 6: “Nous avons fait les Planches les plus grandes qu'il a esté possible dans un Volume commode; en sorte qu'il y a plusieurs Figures qui representent des Plantes d'une grandeur mediocre, aussi grandes que nature. Quant il s'est rencontré qu'une Plante n'avoit que deux fois la hauteur de la Planche ou peu plus, & qu'on la peut couper en deux sans la rendre meconnoissable, on en represente ordinairement les deux moitiez dans la mesme Planche. . . . Mais parce qu'il y a beaucoup de Plantes qui sont de beaucoup plus grandes que le Volume . . . nous avons trouvé à propos d'adjouster à la Figure de la Plante quelqu'une de ses parties de la</footnote>
Similar principles of representation were followed by Plumier in his first book—
allowed, as in Dodart’s case, by the size of the volume. For the Minim, it was “very
difficult to know well a plant by means of small figures,” as he claimed to have learned
by first-hand experience: the choice made in the *Description* to draw the plants “in their
natural size, if not entirely, at least in part” was therefore fully justified.<fnref n="50" /> Indeed, a great
numbers of the plates of his first book showed the specimens in their entirety, usually
with the roots and, less frequently, in their natural landscape. Despite their professed
convictions regarding visual representation, the large, full-page figures in both Dodart’s
and Plumier’s books were far from a mere intellectual choice. The size of their volumes
was extremely rare in the general book trade in Paris during the period and it was equally
exceptional in the market of botanical literature. It has been calculated that the
proportion of folio volumes regarding the vegetal world was only one to ten, whereas
that of quarto, octavo, and duodecimo was about nine to ten.<fnref n="51" />

By contrast, the *Nova Genera* followed a different mode of botanical visualization: each plate sported one to six genera of plants, but only the flowers, fruits, and seeds were represented, most of the time anatomized into its constituent parts. Of the 106 botanical genera depicted in the treatise, only one (the *Palma*) was fully depicted—albeit here, too, the accent was placed on the dissected seed and fruit of the plant. The same principles of representation were at work for the rest: seeds and pods were pictured both complete and dissected, flowers were presented on different sides so as to show the inside and the outside of the receptacle (sometimes divided into calyx, membranes, stamen, and so forth), and no leaves or stems were shown (with the exception, again, of the *Palma*). In this last point, too, the *Nova genera* differs from Plumier’s previous publications: not only in the *Traité des fougères*, but also in the *Descriptions*, the friar’s predilection was mostly for ferns and related genera characterized by lacking both flowers and fruits. Hence a great number of the plates in these two volumes showed mainly fronds: the large, divided leaves of ferns and similar non-flowering plants.

<footnote>grandeur naturelle, qui servist comme de pied par lequel on pust juger de la veritable grandeur de toute la
Plante.”</footnote>

<footnote n="50">⁵⁰ Plumier, *Description*, sig. [a3v]: “[C]omme je sçavois par ma propre experience, qu’il est tres-difficile de bien connoistre une plante par des figures en petit, j’a voulu les dessiner dans leur grandeurs naturelle; si non en tout, au moins en partie.” A similar argument was used by Bernard de Montfaucon in his *L’antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures*, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (Paris: Florentin Delaulne et. al., 1722), xi: “j’ai compris combine il étoit important de les faire de belle grandeur, afin qu’on en puisse mieux remarquer toutes les parties, & qu’elles frappent davantage l’imagination.”</footnote>

<footnote n="51">⁵¹ Martin, *Livre, pouvoir et société*, vol. 2, 597-8; Alice Lemaire, “Le livre des plantes au dix-septième siècle” (Archivist-paleographer diss., École normale de chartres, 1995), 195. I thank Alice Lemaire for kindly sharing with me the unpublished manuscript of her thesis.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_90.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 5.7. (left) Plate from the *Nova plantarum Americanarum genera*. Compare the mode of visual representation used by Plumier here with the one used by Tournefort (right) in the plates of his *Élémens de botanique* (1694). Tournefort's botanical method, whose rules he set down in the *Élémens*, was based on the flowers and fruits of the plants. (Smithsonian Libraries, Washington DC, and Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>

The representational style adopted by Plumier in the *Nova genera* was actually not his own, but mirrored the one adopted by Tournefort in 1694 and 1700 for the *Élémens* and the *Institutiones*, respectively. As in these two volumes, the *Nova genera* embraced a representational style conforming to Tournefort’s scheme for the classification of the vegetable world. According to the professor at the Jardin du roi, the knowledge of plants could be improved by means of establishing principles to reduce the nearly infinite number of botanical species to a handful of genera, as we have seen in the previous chapter. To do so, the “essential character” of each genre (the most basic qualities allowing to clearly distinguish one genre from another) had to be distinctly identified. For him, “nothing is more important in Botany than to disengage entirely the [essential] character from all that could mask or obscure it.” In this line, he limited the scope of his *Élémens* to “describe, & engrave, only the parts that determine the character of each
genus,” leaving therefore aside “any other part however significant it was” (fig. 5.7).<fnref n="52" /> To his point of view, those crucial parts were essentially the fruits and flowers: the examination of each species of plant should therefore “begin by the structure of the flower to discover the character, & herborize thoroughly.” Any other method, Tournefort brazenly claimed, was faulty: the naturalist would “always proceed blindly if pretending to determine the character of a genre of plant by means of the leaves, as it is usually done,” since “we find out everyday species of the same genre that have disparate leaves.” Accordingly, only flowers, fruits, and seeds were engraved: otherwise, he pointed out, it would have been impossible to give the picture of so many genera in two quarto volumes of engravings.<fnref n="53" />

The *Nova genera* by Plumier faithfully adopted this principle not only from an intellectual point of view, but also in the visual representation of the genera. While the *Description* and the *Traité des fougères* were folio volumes with lavish plates in line with Dodart’s *Histoire des plantes* and other costly books manufactured by the Imprimerie royale, the quarto format of the *Nova genera* aimed at the same readership as Tournefort’s taxonomic work. This formal imitation is adopted, first at all, in the interaction between the textual and the graphic parts of the book and the visual dimension of text itself. In the *Description* and the *Traité des fougères*, the structure of the books turned around the plates: the text consisted of descriptions of each engraving or of the plants included in them, as well as the locations in which the author found them on the American islands. The *Nova genera*, in contrast, adopted the technical interplay between text and image used by Tournefort, more suitable for a catalog of genera and not, like in the other two cases, of species of plants—take as an example the Madrid copy of the *Nova genera*, discussed in chapter 3, in which the plates were printed in larger leaves so as to allow the reader to keep both text and images under the eyes at the same time (fig. 3.19). The structure of the book turned around the list of written descriptions of each genre: after the name, a

<footnote n="52">⁵² Tournefort, *Élémens de botanique ou méthode pour connoître les plantes*, 3 vols. (Paris: de l’Imprimerie royale, 1694), vol. 1, sig. e2r: “Le dessein qu’on s’est proposé dans ce Livre est de faciliter la connaissance des plantes en établissant des principes pour réduire chaque espece sous son veritable genre. On a pour ce sujet tâché de décrire, & de faire graver les parties qui font précisement le caractère de chaque genre; & l’on a affecté, pour ainsi dire, de n’y faire mention d’aucune autre partie quelque considerable qu’elle soit. Il ne s’agit ici que du caractère essential qui distingue un genre de plante de toute autre genre, & rien n’est de si grande importance dans la Botanique que de dégager entièrement ce caractere [essentiel] de tout ce qui pourroit le déguiser ou l’obscurcir.”</footnote>

<footnote n="53">⁵³ Tournefort, *Élémens*, vol. 1, sig. [e2v-e4r]: “[C]ar c’est par la structure de la fleur qu’il faut commencer l’examen de chaque espece de plante si l’on veut en découvrir le caractère, & herboriser avec connaissance de cause. . . . Il n’est guere possible d’y parvenir autrement, & l’on marchera toûjours à l’aveugle si l’on veut juger du caractère d’un genre de plante par l’inspection de ses feuilles comme l’on fait ordinairement . . . puisque tous les jours on découvre des especes du même genre qui ont les feuilles de diferentes façons.”</footnote>
short account was given that focused in the essential parts of the flowers, fruits, and seeds of the vegetable typology in question, and each of these parts were indicated with letters that functioned as keys by which the reader was directed to concrete details of the plates. Unlike those in the *Description* and the *Traité des fougères*, the descriptions did not follow the order of the engravings: like in Tournefort’s volumes, notes were included in the margins indicating the plates to which the text was referring. Like in the *Élémens* and the *Institutiones*, each of the descriptions in the *Nova genera* was also followed by a list of the species of each genre that Plumier had established in his peregrinations through the West Indies.

The *Nova genera* was, not only in content but also in its material characteristics, conceived as a sort of addendum on the American flora to Tournefort’s *Élémens* or to his *Institutiones*, which were limited to the European and Eastern Mediterranean vegetable world. The format, layout, typography, modes of visual representation, and references between images and text affected not only the sociologically unequal readership of the books, but also the gestures themselves by which such books were appropriated—if at all. Lavish books like the *Description* and the *Traité des fougères* were characterized by a certain extravagance in their general formal characteristics and in the plates in particular. To a large extent, they aimed at an “aesthetic” reception—one revolving around the beauty not only of the visual elements, but also of the exotic and curious side of the natural knowledge exposed. In other words, they imposed gestures of “reading” (both textual and visual) that enabled them to function as objects of both knowledge and elite consumerism.<fnref n="54" /> Whereas these two books could function as expensive commodities, the *Nova genera* imposed more technical gestures of reading. The web of cross-references connected not only the descriptions with their respective plates, but also specific parts of the former with concrete details of the latter, thus demanding a constant to-ing and fro-ing between the two parts of the book facilitated by the manageable format of the volume. Moreover, while the *Description* and the *Traité des fougères* were composed of two main parts (textual descriptions and plates, plus a brief addendum on the virtues of plants in the case of the latter), the book on new genera had a slightly more complex structure: the descriptions were mostly explanations of the parts of the flowers, seeds, and fruits depicted, and each of them were complemented with specific lists of the

<footnote n="54">⁵⁴ A classic study on the plural audiences of natural knowledge is Simon Schaffer’s analysis of eighteenth-century natural philosophy as “a practice of public display,” in Schaffer, “Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century,” *History of science* 21 (1983), 1-43.</footnote>
different species established by Plumier for each genre. To the whole was added a complementary catalog of plants already classified by Tournefort and found by the friar on the American islands.

The gestures of reading of the quarto-sized volume in Latin of the *Nova genera* were, therefore, quicker, more specialized, and less linear than those demanded by the two folio volumes in French of the *Description* and the *Traité des fougères*. In other words, the taxonomical works of Tournefort paved the way, to a certain extent, for the *Nova genera* to get into print, just as the royal project of the *Cabinet du Roi* did for the *Description*. The multiple agents involved in the production of those books were far from unaware of the consequences that their materiality had on the ways in which they were appropriated: the formal imitation of previous works in particular illustrates the detailed, intentional, and reflexive attention that authors paid to the *mise en page* as a means for shaping communication and channeling the reception of knowledge. Both the contents and the materiality of the books followed previous publications and attempted to ensure by this means a market or, at least, the conditions of possibility for them to get printed.<fnref n="55" />

## The tortuous printing history of the *Traité des fougères*

Getting illustrated books on natural history printed in late-seventeenth-century Paris was not an easy business, and it became even less so by the 1700s. The study of the *Description* and the *Nova genera* above shows that strategies for negotiating audiences—and thus making those books more likely to find their way into print—were deployed at the material level of the books and at that of the images in particular. These strategies became particularly explicit in the last book that Plumier authored during his lifetime, the *Traité des fougères*, because its publication turned out to be, as hinted above, the most troublesome for the friar. The book on ferns was conceived by its author as a specialized continuation of the *Description*. The result was a rather uncommon sort of book: from a material point of view, it was also a folio volume compiling 172 full-page intaglio plates; from an intellectual point of view, it restricted its object to the very specific (although surprisingly multitudinous) group of West Indian non-flowering plants. “It is a treatise,” the friar wrote to Bégon in 1702, “of all the ferns, spleenworts, maidenhairs, &c. that I

<footnote n="55">⁵⁵ On the *mise en page* and the “visual spaces” of the book, see Roger Laufer, “L’espace visuel du livre ancien,” in Martin and Chartier, *Histoire de l’édition française*, vol. 1 ([Paris]: Promodis, 1982), 479-97, and Laufer, “Les espaces du livre,” in Martin and Chartier, *Histoire de l’édition française*, vol. 2, 128-39.</footnote>
have discovered during my three voyages.”<fnref n="56" /> Both characteristics made the book difficult for getting printed: Plumier meant it to be published by the Imprimerie royale under the same conditions as the *Description*—namely, as a *recueil d’images* likely to be received as both a contribution to botany and a beautiful object to delight amateurs and connoisseurs.

Yet the times were not as favorable by 1700 as they had been ten years earlier for printing such a book, let alone one as specialized as the *Traité des fougères*. It was the book on ferns that Plumier most probably had in mind in his early laments to Lister in 1698.<fnref n="57" /> His letter to Bégon in August 1702 was mostly about the delays by which this project was hampered: “They promised me so much to print that [work] on ferns, but *Dies mali sunt* for this kind of books; yet *non est abreviata manus Dei*, and I hope He will favor me with his Divine Providency.”<fnref n="58" /> The tone of the exchange suggests that the book was in the hands of Anisson; it was plausibly on the subject of the *Traité des fougères* in particular that Secretary Jérôme Phélypeaux rebuked Anisson for the delays in printing Plumier’s material. As the friar was writing to Bégon already in June 1702, “I am asking the favor of printing it, since the plates are already made, and all my manuscripts in order. Then I will go wherever I am asked to.”<fnref n="59" /> Even with the copperplates and the draft text ready, the friar still had to wait several years to see his coveted book printed as he originally conceived it. A short print run of the plates alone was issued by the Imprimerie royale in 1703 with 222 intaglio engravings and no other text than the title page.<fnref n="60" /> It was not until 1705, some moths after Plumier’s death in southern Spain, that the definitive edition of the *Traité des fougères* appeared. It had fifty plates less than in 1703, but this time included almost two hundred pages of text both in Latin and French: the descriptions of each species (encompassing notes on their ecology, reproduction, growing, as well as on those dimensions that could not be captured on the plates, such as smells and textures) and a

<footnote n="56">⁵⁶ MMC MS 656, fol. 110r: “[C]’est un traité de toutes les fougères, capillaires, langues de cerf, &c. que j’ay découvert dans mes trois voyages.”</footnote>

<footnote n="57">⁵⁷ Lister, *Journey to Paris*, 74-5.</footnote>

<footnote n="58">⁵⁸ MMC MS 867, fol. 151r: “On m’avoit tant promis de faire imprimer celuy des fougeres mais *Dies mali sunt*, pour ces sortes d’ouvrages, pourtant *non est abreviata manus Dei*, et j’espère qu’il me favorisera un jour de sa Divine Providence.”</footnote>

<footnote n="59">⁵⁹ MMC MS 656, fol. 151r: “Je demande par grace qu’on le fasse imprimer puisque les planches sont toutes faites et touts mes manuscrits en ordre. Ensuite j’iray là où on voudra.”</footnote>

<footnote n="60">⁶⁰ *Filicetum americanum, seu filicum, polypodiorum, adiantorum, &c. in America nascentium, icones* (Paris: e Typographia regia, 1703). I have only found and consulted a handful of copies of this edition: MNHN Fol Res 200 (2), BIF Fol DM 196 A, and BL General Reference Collection 452.h.1.</footnote>
long preface that the friar had been compulsively writing and rewriting over the years, as
his papers demonstrate.<fnref n="61" />

In the nearly a decade in which the *Traité des fougères* was inching its way into publication, several crucial modifications were introduced in both the text and the plates so as to attempt to ensure its appeal to a broad audience, and thus its publication by the official press of a monarchy suffocated by deficit and in an almost uninterrupted state of war. This remodeling can help us explore further the contours of what the publication of natural history works (and illustrated books in particular) might have looked like in the Paris of the 1680s through the 1710s. One of them concerned the text and the nature of the volume in general at a time in which the literary genres dealing with plants were not entirely separate. Plumier understood this in terms of both “utility” and “pleasantness”:

> I made it as useful as possible by adding all the virtues of each genus; for instance, I deal in general with the virtue of ferns, with the virtue of spleenworts, &c. that we know in Europe and I relate them to the ferns and spleenworts &c. of America so as to enable the people of that country to take advantage of them, and so we know better all that, I include a plate of the most common fern in Europe, a plate of the most known spleenwort, and the same for the others. I hope all those curious people will find this work pleasant.<fnref n="62" />

Plumier’s attempt to render his treatise “as useful as possible” by referring to the
medical properties of ferns materialized in the fourteen pages included in the 1705
edition and covering the “virtues and usages of some species of fern, mosses, and
spleenworts.” He thus sought to “join utility and delectation (*pour joindre l’utile avec le delectable*), for if these plants were “prodigies that God placed on earth to have us admire
His greatness,” it was not only because of the “pleasure that our sight can receive” from
them, but also due to the “great virtues that they treasure for the alleviation of life.”<fnref n="63" />
However, his conclusions on the medical properties of ferns were not the result of his
own experiences, but a bookish compilation from “all the Physicians Botanists.” And

<footnote n="61">⁶¹ MNHN MS 32 “Notes et rédaction préparatoire du *Filicetum* du P. Plumier.”</footnote>

<footnote n="62">⁶² MMC MS 656 “Collection manuscrite A. Boyer,” fol. 110r: “Je l’ay rendu le plus utile que j’a pu ; en y aioutant toutes les vertus de chaque genre, par exemple je traitte en général de la vertu des fougères, de la vertu des capilaires, &c. qui nous sont connus en Europe et je les raporte aux fougères et aux capillaires &c. de l’Amérique affin que les habitans de ce pais en puissent profiter, et affin qu’on connoisse mieux la chose je mes une planche de la fougère d’Europe la plus commune, une planche du capilaire le plus connu aunsi des autres. J’espère que touts ces curieux auront plaisir de voir cet ouvrage.”</footnote>

<footnote n="63">⁶³ Plumier, *Traité des fougères*, xiii: “ne sommes nous pas obligez de regarder toutes ces plantes comme autant de prodiges que Dieu a mis sur la terre pour nous faire admirer sa grandeur; sur tout si après le plaisir que nostre veuë en peut recevoir, nous considerons les grandes vertus qu’elles renferment pour le soulagement de la vie.”</footnote>
this despite the fact that the friar proved to be an active experimenter during his journeys
in the West Indies where, among other things, he poisoned several unfortunate vipers to
determine the toxic nature of a Caribbean plant.<fnref n="64" /> Medicinal properties, however, were
not among his main preoccupations as a botanist due to the increasing separation of
natural history from *materia medica* since the Renaissance.<fnref n="65" /> In his *Élemens de botanique*, for
instance, Tournefort refused altogether to discuss the virtues of plants by arguing that
these did not depend on “the structure of their observable parts” (*parties sensibles*), to
which the descriptive endeavor of natural history ought to pay exclusive attention, but on
their “immaterial parts” (*parties insensibles*). Actually, he remarked, “experience shows us
every day that the species of the same genus have very opposed virtues.”<fnref n="66" />

Plumier was of a similar opinion in this specific point: “I do not pretend it to be an
infallible & general law, that all the Plants of a same genus have as well the same virtues
& qualities.” This was crucial, because his opuscule on the “virtues & uses” of ferns
actually had nothing to do with American ferns: those pages dealt exclusively with the
properties that some authors had attributed to European species similar to those
described by Plumier. The friar, however, was crystal clear on this: “what I say [regarding
the virtues of American ferns] is not based on my examining them by means of chemical
analysis in their principles, or my experimenting through the exercise of Medicine: in
general, I only attribute to them the same virtues & the same properties our best
Botanists Authors attribute to our European Ferns, Polypodies, Maidenhairs &c. I
thought I could do so with assurance, since I have known, on several occasions during
my three journeys, that several American plants of the same genus as those of Europe
have indeed the same virtues & the same qualities.” Yet he needed “to avoid, as it were,
the reproach of making an incomplete Work [*un Ouvrage à demi*] because of not having
offered but the simple descriptions & figures without commenting anything on their
virtue.”

<footnote n="64">⁶⁴ BCMNHN MS 33 “Notes diverses,” fol. 176-77: “Observations sur les viperes de la Martinique.” On Plumier’s natural historical experimentation, see José Beltrán, “Regard, dessin, histoire naturelle: Charles Plumier et l’iconographie naturaliste au XVIIᵉ siècle,” (master diss., EHESS, 2012), 27-32. On the culture of experimentation in natural history, see Peter Dear, “The Meanings of Experience,” in *The Cambridge History of Science*, vol. 3, *Early Modern Science*, ed. Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 106-31, esp. 115-9 on “Experience and Natural History.”</footnote>

<footnote n="65">⁶⁵ Brian Ogilvie, *The Science of Describing: Natural History in the Renaissance* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 182, 197, and 226.</footnote>

<footnote n="66">⁶⁶ Tournefort, *Élémens*, vol. 1, sig. e4r-v: “On n’a pas cru que ce fust ici l’endroit de parler des vertus des plantes; puisqu’il n’y a aucun rapport du caractere d’un genre, & des vertus des especes de ce même gnere. Le caractere dépend de la structure des parties sensibles des plantes, & la vertu est attachée à la configuration de leurs parties insensibles. L’experience fait voir tous les jours que les especes du même genre ont des vertus fort opposées.”</footnote>
The choice of not dealing with the problematic medical properties of plants in works of natural history such as Plumier’s and Tournefort’s affected the prospective readers of their books. The audiences of these were dramatically reduced at the time, even more than other kinds of botanical publications. The book of plants was not a clear category by then: as Alice Lemaire has suggested, an array of genres on the vegetable world coexisted by the end of the seventeenth century: gardening books, medical catalogs of simples, traveling accounts describing distant floras, collections of engravings, or the more technical works on vegetable taxonomy, anatomy, and physiology.<fnref n="67" /> The differences between those genres were certainly vague and they usually intermingled in the very same works, but their presence in the market was by and large very marginal. During the second half of the seventeenth century, the books related to the study of nature occupied a negligible place within the body of literature that we might call scientific, whereas the main mass corresponded to medical books.<fnref n="68" /> Things become even tougher for books such as Plumier’s when one looks at their materiality: Lemaire has correlated the multiplication of medical books during the seventeenth century, particularly intense during the period 1680 to 1700, to a reduction of the formats and number of pages. At the time, one of the most diffused typologies of medical book was the pharmacopeia, in which simples—that is, “medicinal herbs & plants”—and their curative virtues were listed. Pharmacopeias usually enjoyed a large success; not necessarily written by apothecaries or physicians, some became very popular outside learned groups: the *Remèdes charitables de Mme Fouquet* (The Charitable Remedies of Madame Fouquet), by Marie de Maupéou, enjoyed no less than fifteen editions between 1676 and 1696.<fnref n="69" />

Plumier’s and Tournefort’s treatment of the virtues of plants hinges on the increasing separation of two conceptions of the vegetable world in Western Europe by then: one understood the flora as a repository of medicinal remedies; the other, as an object worthy of study in itself. This was a contested distinction, and numerous were the popular authors who blamed botanists for spending too much time counting plants and not enough delving into their healing properties. (Remember how Furetière, the author of a famous dictionary, put clearly that the one “who contents himself with knowing the

<footnote n="67">⁶⁷ Lemaire, “Le livre de plantes,” 3-103.</footnote>

<footnote n="68">⁶⁸ Martin, *Livre, pouvoir et société*, vol. 2, 864-5.</footnote>

<footnote n="69">⁶⁹ Lemaire, “Le livre de plantes,” 25.</footnote>
name of plants is just half a *Botanist*," for he or she cannot be exclusively "devoted to
[their] knowledge," but also to that of their uses "for the healing of illness.")<fnref n="70" />

Plumier overtly acknowledges that the reason to include a discussion on this subject
in his *Traité des fougères* was an editorial strategy: "I hope this Work is more useful
[because of this], & that it will enjoy a better reception among the Public, when they will
see utility mixed with delightfulness." Indeed, the inclusion of a section on the virtues of
ferns might be read—as the author suggests—as a way of negotiating with the ambiguity
of genres and styles that coexisted in the market of plant books, as an attempt to enlarge
the audiences of a work whose reception was extremely limited because of its topic and
format. As a monumental book, its circulation was greatly restrained to prestige milieus.
But the question might also be put the other way around: an illustrated book of plants
had few possibilities to be printed in Paris outside the networks of royal patronage, and
these networks deeply influenced the content and form of the volumes. The circuits
through which the friar's drawings got into print—those passing through the Imprimerie
royale, Pontchartrain, Jean Anisson, and the abbé Bignon—turned them into luxury
editions. It is not that the *Traité des fougères* needed to appeal to a broader public because
its expensive format restrained the already marginal circulation that any botanical work
could have expected. It is not, as Plumier tells us in the preface of his *Description*, that
botanical catalogs like his needed large figures so as to make their identification
possible—something especially important in the case of relatively unfamiliar specimens
from the other side of the Atlantic. Rather, the book of ferns was an object of royal
prestige through and through.

This was the fundamental contradiction inherent in any of the books on natural
history and natural philosophy published at the Imprimerie royale between the 1680s and
the 1710s: their circulation was a priori not that of commercial exchange, and only over
time did they inch their way into the market. In 1692 Leibniz stressed the problems of
such editorial enterprises in a letter to the abbé Paul Pellison, historiographer of the king:

> Seemingly the resolution that MM. of the Academy have recently taken of opening their treasures and giving something every month is to be attributed to M. abbé Bignon. The public will be grateful also for the advancement of some of the great publications in which

<footnote n="70">⁷⁰ Antoine Furetière, *Dictionnaire universel, contenant generalement tous les mots François, tant vieux que modernes, & les termes de toutes les sciences et des arts*, 2nd ed. (The Hague: chez Arnoud & Reinier Leers, 1701), vol. 1, 256-7: "Botanist. s. m. Celui qui s'applique à la connaissance des plantes, & qui s'en sert pour la guerison des maladies: car une personne qui se contente de s'avoir le nom des plants, n'est *Botaniste* qu'à demi."</footnote>
the Academy is involved. They have been printing several pieces for a long time already but, I don't know why, one finds them rarely in the bookshops and, apart from the volumes on animals and the measurement of the earth, I have seen almost nothing. Otherwise, if the booksellers had brought them, I would have bought them longtime ago. Generally, however, so many beautiful things printed in the Louvre are only for France, and it is a marvel when we see them elsewhere.<fnref n="71" />

Similar remarks were voiced by Alexander Pitfeild (1658-1728), Fellow of the London Royal Society and the anonymous translator of Perrault's *Histoire des animaux* into English in 1701. Pitfeild made the problem of these crown-sponsored publications very clear from the second sentence of his foreword: Perrault's 1671 and 1676 volumes on the history of animals

were by them some time since so Magnificently, as well as Curiously set forth in two Volumes, that (as they seemed not to be designed for common Sale, so) they became Presents only from the King, or Academy, to Persons of the greatest Quality, and were hereby rendered unattainable by the ordinary Methods for other Books. And altho' by some few, who (through this means) had the opportunity of perusing them, they were found full fraught with very Pertinent, as well as Curious Observations; yet so great was the difficulty in procuring the favours of such a perusal (not only here in *England*, but even at *Paris* itself) that the Ingenious Labors of that Illustrious Society were hereby made less Useful and Ineffectual to their great Design; most of the Learned being totally deprived of the singular Advantages that might be obtained therefrom.<fnref n="72" />

The paradox was an important one. On the one hand, the books printed at the Louvre, learned or not, were meant to function as luxury commodities within a symbolic

<footnote n="71">⁷¹ Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz to Paul Pellison, June 27, 1692, in *Oeuvres de Leibniz, publiées pour la première fois d'après les manuscrits originaux avec notes et introduction*, ed. Louis-Alexandre Foucher de Careil, vol. 1 (Paris: Librairie de Firmin Didot Frères, Fils et. Cie., 1859): "Apparemment la résolution que MM. de l'Académie ont prise depuis peu d'ouvrir leurs trésors et de donner quelque chose tous les mois aura esté un effet des soins de M. l'abbé Bignon. Le public luy en sera redevable aussi bien que de l'avancement des grands ouvrages dont l'Académie s'est chargée. Ils ont fait imprimer plusieurs pièces depuis longtemps, mais je ne sçay pourquoi, on n'en voit presque rien chez les libraires, et, hors mis les mémoires touchant les animaux et la mesure de la terre, je n'en ay presque rien vù. Cependant, si les libraires les portoient, je les aurois achetés il y a longtemps. On peut dire généralement que tant de belles choses qui s'impriment au Louvre ne sont presque que pour la France, et c'est une merveille quand on en voit ailleurs."</footnote>

<footnote n="72">⁷² [Alexander Pitfeild] "The Publisher to the Reader," *Memoir's for a Natural History of Animals, containing the Anatomical Description of several Creatures dissected by The Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris. . . . Done into English by a Fellow of the R. S.* (London: printed for John Clarke, 1701), unpaginated. On the English version of the *Histoire des animaux*, see Sachiko Kusukawa, "Picturing Knowledge in the Early Royal Society: The Examples of Richard Waller and Henry Hunt," *Notes and Records of the Royal Society* 65 (2011), 273-94, esp. 275-80.</footnote>
economy of gift exchange. They were, after all, the *propriety* of the king. (It is important here to highlight the distinction, essential to the early modern world of the book, between “property,” or authorial rights over an artistic or literary creation, and “propriety,” or the economic right over an alienable commodity.)<sup>73</sup> There was a certain naiveté in Plumier’s claimed attempt to enlarge the audience for his *Traité des fougères* by means such as the inclusion of a text on the virtues of plants, for the first environment in which Plumier’s engravings (and knowledge by and large) got legitimized was not that of naturalists, not that of “curious people,” but that of royal patronage. Hence the extravagance of volumes like the *Description* and the *Traité des fougères* in contrast to others like the *Nova genera*: their format, *mise en page*, textual contents, and plates were the result of their being part of the monarchy’s manifold project to make itself visible. This contrasted sharply with some contemporary trends: in Britain, for instance, the size of some books was reduced, and their format and layout simplified, not only as a way to enlarge their diffusion (or, at the very least, make their publication more likely to be undertaken by printers and booksellers), but also in order to convey modesty, a virtue increasingly valued in the scholarly persona.<sup>74</sup>

On the other hand, natural historical iconography could hardly be printed in Paris by 1700 if it was not in the Imprimerie royale, at least in the quantity and quality of the copperplates included in the *Description* and the *Traité des fougères*. In actual fact, scholars upon whom the king’s liberality had been bestowed were expected to publish their findings in the Louvre workshop. This was also the contradiction of royal patronage over scholarship in Louis XIV’s France: it was supposed (at least to the eyes of the government) to function in the service of the monarch’s glory. This is also what lay behind the honest expectation of patrons that a state-sponsored botanist like Plumier worked at the publication of his books rather than pursuing more field research: it was mainly in the form of luxury books that the investment of the crown in learned pursuits was put into value.

Such a paradox underpinned the publication of any book at the Imprimerie royale, but it certainly reached its peak with the *Traité des fougères* because of both its topic and the timing of its intended publication. Its subject matter was far too specialized for a

<footnote n="73"><sup>73</sup> The distinction was made by Mark Rose in *Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright* (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), cited by Roger Chartier, “Foucault’s Chiasmus: Authorship between Science and Literature in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Biagioli and Galison, *Scientific Authorship*, 21.</footnote>

<footnote n="74"><sup>74</sup> Johns, “The Ambivalence of Authorship,” 81.</footnote>
presentation volume, despite Plumier’s ardent exaltations of ferns’ beauty (“Everything in them flatters the eyes in such a way that I can assure you that of all the plants I have discovered in the Islands of America there is almost none that has pleased me as much as Ferns & other genera of this same class.”)<fnref n="75" /> But at the turn of the century, times were bad for seeking royal support: the difficulties the friar encountered for nearly a decade to get this volume into print reflect the growing uncertainties of the role that natural history editorial enterprises played in the symbolic apparatus of the monarchy, if not the contradictions of such propaganda in a time of deep economic crisis.

## Crafting nature as commodity

The contradictions that plagued the royal patronage over scholars at the time of Louis XIV, as well as the Imprimerie royale’s part in it, became blatant during the years in which Plumier was struggling to publish *Traité des fougères*. When it became clear that the book on ferns would not make its way into print as smoothly as the *Description*, Plumier decided to wield the burin and to accelerate the publication and mitigate its potential expenses: he himself carved about half of the two hundred intaglio figures that he originally aimed to include in the volume. By 1702, the plates were ready, as well as the text, as the friar informed Bégon. In the 1705 edition, about thirty engravings were reemployed from the *Description des plantes de l’Amérique* and 141 were new; of those, no less than 112 were engraved by Plumier himself. The skillful friar attempted to counterbalance the arid scene of the book world in Paris around 1700 by making good use of his abilities as a turner to economize in what was probably the most expensive part of the production of illustrated books. And yet, by 1702, he felt far from seeing his book through the press. Plumier was in despair. Rather than undertaking any further voyage, he was supposed—perhaps even required—to work on the publication of his images, but this seemed altogether impossible at the time.<fnref n="76" /> The carving of about a hundred large copperplates might have been a pretty good deal of work, perhaps the reason he decided to make this clear in the plates themselves and carved his name in all those plates he had crafted: Fr. C. Plumier *Minimus B.R.D. et Sc.*, “Father Charles Plumier, Minim and Royal Botanist, Drew It and Carved It” (fig. 5.8).

<footnote n="75">⁷⁵ Plumier, *Traité des fougères*, iv: “Tout y flatte la vûë de telle manière que je puis assurer que de toutes les plantes que j’ay découvertes dans les Isles de l’Amérique il n’y en a guere qui m’ait fait tant de plaisir que les seules Fougeres & les autres genres de cette même classe.”</footnote>

<footnote n="76">⁷⁶ Plumier to Bégon, Paris, June 11, 1702, in MMC MS 656, fol. 110r.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_91.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 5.8. Plumier’s signature in one of the plates of the *Traité des fougères* as both the draftsman and the carver. “Fr.[ater] C.[arolus] Plumier Minimus B.[otanicus] R.[egius] D.[elineavit] et Sc.[ulpsit].” (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>

In all probability, this was the first time he had manufactured any plate for one of his books, but not the first time he affixed his signature to the figures. Remember that a good number of his manuscripts bore his name (“Fr. C. Plumier minimus”); his signature was even more common in his printed books: in the *Description*, for instance, the naturalist signed no less than a hundred plates as the draftsman (“Fr.C.P.m.B.r.d.” or “Fr. Carolus Plumier Minimus Botanicus Regius delin.[eavit]”). Just like the Latin or French polynomial identifying the plant represented, the name of Plumier (and occasionally that of a carver other than him) became an integral part of the graphic space: they not only offer some insight into the plates’ (sometimes convoluted) process of production, but also injected new meanings into the representation. By following the various signatures carved in Plumier’s copperplates, we cannot only trace some of the agents involved in their production, but also clarify the function of the botanist’s name inscribed on his images (fig. 5.9).

## *The engravers of Plumier’s plates*

In that specific book, the *Description*, the friar’s name pervaded the large majority of the plates, identifying him as the draftsman. Little reference was made to printmakers: only four of the figures were signed by Jean-Louis Roullet (1645-1699), a copper engraver trained in Paris with renowned mentors like François Poilli.<fnref n="77" /> It was within the norm, however, that engravers put their name on only few, if any at all, of the plates they made for a volume. Apart from two of these plates, which found their way into the *Traité des fougères*, the name of Roullet does not appear in any of Plumier’s other books.

<footnote n="77">⁷⁷ Pierre-Jean Mariette, *Abecédario de P. J. Mariette et autres notes inédites de et auteur sur les arts et les artistes*, 2nd ed., vol. 5 (Paris: J. B. Dumoulin, 1858-1859), 41-42; Dictionnaire de la Provence et du Comté-Venaissin . . . par une société de gens de lettres, vol. 4 (Marseille: de l'imprimerie de Jean Mossy, Pere & Fils, 1787), 172.</footnote>
<table><caption>Fig. 5.9. Plates and signatures in Plumier's books</caption><thead><tr><th>Title</th><th>Number of plates</th><th>Signature in the plates</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Description des plantes de l'Amérique (1693)</td><td>108</td><td><ul><li>Frater Carolus Plumier minimus et botanicus regius delineavit: 102.</li><li>F. C. P. m. b. r. d. et Ioannes Ludovicus Rollet [Jean-Louis Rollet] sculpsit: 4.</li><li>No signature: 2.<sup>a</sup></li></ul></td></tr><tr><td>L'art de tourner (1701)</td><td>70<br>[numerated 1 to 69 + *]</td><td><ul><li>Frater Carolus Plumier minimus: 4.</li><li>F. C. P. m. delineavit: 8.</li><li>F. C. P. m. del. 1699 [et] J. Buys sc.: 1.</li><li>F. C. P. m. del. [et] Bouchet sculpsit: 2.</li><li>F. C. P. m. invenit et del.: 1.</li><li>F. C. P. m. masiliensis del. Lugduni 1700: 1.</li><li>F. C. P. m. inv. et del. [et] M. Demasso fec.: 2.</li><li>Bouchet sculp.: 2.</li><li>[Symbol] fec.: 2.</li><li>Rousseau inv. Lugd.: 1.</li><li>No signature: 46.<sup>b</sup></li></ul></td></tr><tr><td>L'art de tourner (1749)</td><td>80<br>[numerated 1 to 14, and 14 n°2 to 79]</td><td><ul><li>Frater Carolus Plumier minimus: 3.</li><li>F. C. P. m. delineavit: 9.</li><li>F. C. P. masiliensis del. Lugduni 1700: 1.</li><li>F. C. P. m. invenit et del. [et] M. Demasso fecit: 1.</li><li>F. [François] Bailleul sculp.: 1.</li><li>No signature: 65.<sup>c</sup></li></ul></td></tr><tr><td>Traité des fongères de l'Amérique (1705 bilingual edition)</td><td>172<br>[numerated 1 to 170 + A, B]</td><td><ul><li>Frater Carolus Plumier minimus et botanicus regius delineavit: 50.</li><li>F. C. P. m. b. r. del. et sculpsit: 112.</li><li>F. C. P. m. b. r. del. [et] I. Lud. Rollet sculpsit: 2.</li><li>No signature: 8.<sup>d</sup></li></ul></td></tr><tr><td>Nova plantarum americanarum genera (1703)</td><td>40</td><td><ul><li>Pierre Giffart fecit: 22.</li><li>No signature: 18.<sup>e</sup></li></ul></td></tr><tr><td>Plantarum americanarum fasciculus primus [-decimus] (1755-1760)</td><td>263<br>[fasciculus 1: 1-25+25*; f. 2: 26-50; f. 3: 51-75; f. 4: 76-100; f. 5: 101-125; f. 6: 126-150; f. 7: 151-175; f. 8: 176-201; f. 9: 202-226; f. 10: 227-262]</td><td>No signature in any of the plates.</td></tr></tbody></table>

a. Drawing by Plumier and carving by Rollet: plates V, XXXIX, LX, and XCIX. Not signed: plates XIV and LI.

b. F. C. Plumier minimus: plates 7, 29-30 and 33; F. C. P. m. delineavit: plates 13-4, 18-9, 25, 37, 62 and 64; F. C. P. m. del. 1699 [et] J. Buys. sc.: 6; F. C. P. m. del.: [et] Bouchet sculp.: plates 11 and 16; Fr. C. P. m. invenit. & delin.: plate 48; Fr. C. P. m. masiliensis del. Lugduni 1700: plate 65; F. C. P. m. inv. et delin. [et] M. Demasso fec.: plates 22 and 69; Bouchet sc.: plates 17 and 38; [symbol] fec.: plate 23 and 32; Rousseau inv. Lugd.: plate 52. Moreover, the signature of Sebastien Leclerc is in the title page and in the vignette of the dedication page ("Leclerc sculpsit" and "Leclerc fecit" respectively).

c. Frater Carolus Plumier Minimus: plates 7, 8 and 32; F. C. P. m. delineavit: plates 11, 14-5, 17, 19-20, 27, 61 and 63; F. C. P. Masiliensis del. Lugduni 1700: plate 64; F. C. P. m. invenit et deli. [et] M. Demasso fecit: plate 22; F. Bailleul sculp.: plate 77.

d. Drawing by Plumier (and unknown carver): plates 1, 8, 11-13, 21, 27-29, 31, 35, 40, 43, 48, 51, 53, 55, 60, 62-63, 69-70, 73, 76-77, 83, 91, 97, 100-1, 104-5, 108, 110-11, 113, 117, 119, 122, 130, 132, 143, 146, 148, 151-52, 157-58, 165 and 167. Drawing by Plumier and carving by Rollet: 9 and 124. No signature: 2, 15, 166, 168-70, A and B.

e. No signature: plates 4-10, 16, 19, 24, 29, 32, 34, 36-40.
Up to seven other artisans, however, are mentioned among the whole of his printed images. Six of these took part in the project of the *Art de tourner* alone, of whom two, a certain Rousseau (whose first name went unsaid) and Nicolas Grollier de Servières (1596-1689), had nothing to do with the crafting of the plates, but with the objects depicted. (Rousseau was referred to by Plumier as “a very skillful clockmaker from the city of Lyon” and the *inventor* of the pieces of a turn for the making of clocks portrayed in one of the figures; Servières was quoted in three images of vases made by him and coming from his collection, “Ex manu et musaeo illus. Dni. de Servières.”)<fnref n="78" /> The other four names mentioned on the plates of the book on turnery were those of the engravers. All of them were from Lyon or spent some time working there, and three of them signed a few plates of the first edition: Michel-François Demasso (1654-ca. 1725), a Lyonnais printmaker and engraver who worked on other natural history books and travel accounts; a certain Bouchet, probably Jean-Baptiste Bouchet (n.d.), a painter and burin engraver also related to Lyon and specialized in the making of maps; Jacques Buys (b. 1644), working in the same city around the last third of the seventeenth century, and finally an unknown artisan who signed two plates with a symbol.<fnref n="79" /> The connection of these cutters with the Lyon community of book producers acknowledges for the first publication of the *Art de tourner* in that city in Jean Certe's workshop: two plates were signed by Demasso, three others by Bouchet, and two by the anonymous craftsman who signed with a symbol.<fnref n="80" />

When half a century later the publisher Charles-Antoine Jombert almost entirely recast the book, he used the original copperplates (inherited probably from his grandfather, who sold the first edition in Paris), but introduced several modifications in them. While in Certe's original 1701 edition the engravings were patiently inserted in between the pages of text, Jombert's 1749 version gathered them together at the end of

<footnote n="78">⁷⁸ For Rousseau, see Plumier, *Art de tourner*, 143; the plate in question is pl. 52 of the 1701 edition. For Servières, see pl. 62-4 of the 1701 edition (no. 61-3 of the 1749 edition).</footnote>

<footnote n="79">⁷⁹ The Leipzig antiquarian Johann Friedrich Christ included it in his dictionary of artist's signatures and monograms originally published in German in 1747. He identified it as a mark of one or several engravers, but could not determine their identities: *Dictionnaire des monogrammes chiffrés, lettres initiales, logogryphes, rébus, &c. sous lesquels les plus célèbres peintres, graveurs & dessinateurs ont dessiné leurs noms* (Paris: chez Sébastian Jorry, 1750, 54).</footnote>

<footnote n="80">⁸⁰ *Dictionnaire des graveurs-éditeurs et marchands d'estampes à Lyon aux XVIIᵉ et XVIIIᵉ siècles: Catalogue de pièces retrouvées* (Lyon: Presses Universitaries de Lyon, 2002), 59-60; Roger-Armand Weigert [and Maxime Préaud], *Inventaire du fonds français: Graveurs du XVIIᵉ siècle*, 17 vols. (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1939-). Michel-François Demasso carved some of the plates in Philippe Sylvestre Dufour's *Traitéz nouveaux & curieux du café, du thé et du chocolat* (Lyon: chez Jean Girin and B. Rivière, 1685), Jacob Spon's *Miscellanea eruditae antiquitatis* (Paris: sumptibus Fratrum Huguetan & Soc., 1685), and Robert Knox's *Relation ou voyage de l'isle de Ceylan* (Amsterdam: chez Paul Marret, 1693).</footnote>
the volume. (This was the most common way in which engravings and etchings were included into books, for they had to be printed in a different press than the text and were virtually always produced in a different workshop and at a different moment.) Jombert employed exactly the very same plates that had been used fifty years before, but the numeration of the pictures was modified in most of the cases and nearly all the signatures of the cutters erased. (All those from the 1701 edition were erased with the exception of a plate by Delamasso, one of the few of which the numeration was not modified.) Out of the seventy plates of the first edition, sixty-nine were reemployed in that of 1749. Ten others were also included, among which one was signed by a new cutter: a certain Bailleul, most likely François Bailleul (b. ca. 1690), royal engraver and geographer, also a Lyonnais, who contributed to Jean-Baptiste Duhalde's 1735 *Description géographique, historique, chronologique, politique et physique de l'empire de la Chine* and other works published also at Charles-Antoine Jombert's workshop. Few other names appear in smaller pictures of the book, like that of the renowned Sébastian Leclerc in the vignette embellishing Plumier's dedication to Bégon and illustrating the intendant's coat of arms in the 1701 edition.<fnref n="81" />

All that being said, a very reduced number of plates were actually signed by an engraver in the *Art de tourner*, either in the 1701 or the 1749 editions. The fact is not necessarily revealing, since, as said, the common situation in the hand-press period was one in which engravers signed only some of the plates they actually manufactured. This was also true for the *Nova genera*, even if half of the plates were signed by a carver (although he probably carved all of them). The engraver was Pierre Giffart (1638-1723), a seller and printer of engravings (*éditeur et marchand d'estampes*) established in rue Saint-Jacques in Paris and the scion of an old dynasty of book traders and makers. Giffart was a well-known name in the printmaking milieu: Royal engraver and member of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture since 1691, of which he would later become the official engraver, he had a solid reputation as both merchant of engravings and cutter on copper. His signature, often confused with that of his son Pierre-François, can be found in substantial editorial enterprises of the period, such as the *Estat present de la Chine en figures* by the Jesuit Joachim Bouvet (printed in 1697 in Giffart's own workshop), the

<footnote n="81">⁸¹ François Bailleul also contributed to some of the engravings of Guillaume Le Blond's *Elemens de fortification à l'usage des jeunes officiers*, printed in Jombert's house in 1742. The plates of the first edition of the *Art de tourner* are pl. 16, 17, 22, 23, 38, 32, and 69; the plate with the signature of Delamasso in the two editions is, for both, pl. 22; the plate from the 1701 edition not included in the 1749 is the 82; the ten new plates of the 1749 edition are pl. 40, 58, and 71 to 79.</footnote>
seven volumes of Pierre Helyot's *Histoire des ordres monastiques* (1714-19), and Jean Mabillon's *De re diplomatica libri VI* (1681)—of which he crafted the exquisite frontispiece illustrating an allegory of Critical Science as the advocate of Justice and Truth and the vignette of the dedication to Jean-Baptiste Colbert. Giffart was also involved in the publication and the making of the engravings of Louis Feuillée's *Journal des observations physiques, mathématiques, et botaniques* (1714), and appears as the cutter of more than a dozen of the maps and landscapes of South and Central American locations.

Roullet, Demasso, Bouchet, Buys, Bailleul, Giffart—all of the cutters whose name appears at some point or another on the plates of the *Art de Tourner* or the *Nova genera* are related to the editorial milieu in which Plumier's books were printed rather than to the author himself. The fact is unsurprising, for it was usually the undertaker, whether printer or bookseller, who commissioned the engraving of the plates rather than the author. Furthermore, Plumier accorded the privilege of publication of his *Art de Tourner* to a certain abbé Perichon, who took care of the edition according to its frontispiece. The privileges passed to Charles-Antoine Jombert most likely through his grandfather Jean, who enjoyed the right to selling the book in Paris. The same frontispiece was modified in the 1749 edition so as to erase any reference to the abbé, and no mention was made on the publication privileges of the book. In the case of the *Nova genera*, Plumier also assigned his publication privileges to another person, this time to the publisher himself, Jean Boudot, who most probably commissioned Giffart with the engravings of the plates.

This was the prevailing situation during the entire hand-press period. However, notable exceptions (particularly in the English-speaking world) have been adduced as evidence of the tensions that surrounded the production of images in natural history and natural philosophy books in terms of scientific credit. Take a couple of examples. Robert Hook, curator of experiments at the Royal Society, famously supervised the production of the engravings of his *Micrographia* (1665), and is held to have drawn (and controlled the engraving of) the illustrations of one of Robert Boyle's books. The divine Newton, too, commissioned the engraved single plate of the second edition of his *Principia mathematica* in London (perhaps just because in Cambridge, where the book was printed, there was no rolling press back then).<fnref n="82" /> The case of Johannes Hevelius, around the same period, is

<footnote n="82">⁸² Robert Hooke, *Micrographia: or some physiological descriptions of minute bodies made by magnifying glasses* (London: Printed by Jo. Martyn and Ja. Allestry, 1665), [sig. G2r-v]; Robert Boyle, *The correspondence of Robert Boyle*, ed. Michael Hunter, Antonio Clericuzio, and Lawrence M. Principe (London: Pickering & Chatto,</footnote>
even more famous: the Polish astronomer attempted to imbue authority into his engravings of the stars and the moon by closely controlling their production and, more importantly, by making his readership become “virtual witnesses” of this control. In that way, he created a visual language for astronomy by translating to his printed images his own credit as observer: the reliability of this language was based in the “freshness” of the engravings as materializations of his own observations. In other words, “he represented what he saw on paper as faithfully as possible, without intermediaries, distortion or embellishment, and then to make sure that what he had drawn was passed on to the reader as faithfully as possible through the engraving and printing process.”<fnref n="83" />

Should we understand Plumier's *sculpsit* in most of the plates of the *Traité des fougères* in this sense? Adrian Johns argued that, “as with texts, the credibility of pictorial reproductions could be best secured by manifesting clear control over every aspect of the reproductive process.”<fnref n="84" /> The premise is that learned authors at the time, with few exceptions, regarded engravers—when not printers themselves—as potential or even assured corrupters of the exact meanings they pretended to convey. Yet Plumier's reasons to get involved in the crafting of his fern copperplates were far more pedestrian: that is, to navigate the highly mutable conditions of possibility for illustrated natural history books to make their way into print in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Paris.

This brings us to two further questions. The first concerns intaglio printmaking, its techniques and difficulty for a draftsman, as well as the social place of prints in late seventeenth-century Paris.<fnref n="85" /> The second goes back to the problem of signature: what was the meaning, if any at all, of Plumier's signature as the draftsman and, occasionally, the carver? If not an attempt to publicly state control over the production of his printed images so as to reinforce their credibility, and keeping in mind that his name was equally

<footnote n="2001">2001), vol. 2, 412; D. F. McKenzie, *The Cambridge University Press, 1696-1712: A Bibliographical Study* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), vol. 1, 336; Roger Gaskell, “Printing House and Engraving Shop: A Mysterious Collaboration,” *The Book Collector*, 53 (2004), 16–17; Michael Aaron Dennis, “Graphic Understanding: Instruments and Interpretation in Robert Hooke’s Micrographia,” *Science in Context* 3, no. 2 (1989), 309–64. The book by Robert Boyle whose images’ production Hooke was purportedly involved with is *New experiments and observations touching cold* (London: printed for John Crook, 1665). Newton’s copies of the first two volumes of Feuillée’s *Journal*, printed in 1714, are nowadays still conserved in the Wren Library of Trinity College, University of Cambridge.</footnote>

<footnote n="83">⁸³ Mary G. Winkler and Albert Van Helden, “Johannes Hevelius and the Visual Language of Astronomy,” in *Renaissance and Revolution: Humanists, Scholars, Craftsmen and Natural Philosophers in Early Modern Europe* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 97–116.</footnote>

<footnote n="84">⁸⁴ Johns, *Nature of the Book*, 434-43.</footnote>

<footnote n="85">⁸⁵ For an account on techniques of images making in natural historical books in the Renaissance, see Kusukawa, *Picturing the Book of Nature*, 29-47.</footnote>
affixed to a good number of his manuscript drawings, how can we understand the name
within the images?

*Learning to etch: A technical interlude*

Printmaking in eighteenth-century France was practiced by two sorts of people: trained professionals who earned their living with a burin or a needle in their hands, and amateurs who practiced the art on an occasional manner.<fnref n="86" /> Somehow like turnery, printmaking became a nonprofessional and pleasurable occupation at the time.

Unsurprisingly, printmaking manuals mushroomed at the time. Probably one of the
most famous at the time was also among the first descriptions of the process, from the
carving of the plates to their printing. The author was Abraham Bosse (ca. 1602-1676), a
Huguenot printmaker, book illustrator, and publisher based in Paris. A prolific and
accomplished artist, Bosse was involved in the making of a number of engravings in the
books of the *Cabinet du Roi* and had worked at some point with Nicolas Robert, the
painter at the origins of the *vélins du Roi*. Bosse was also the author of well-known
etchings like some of those in Dodart’s *Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des plantes* (1676) or
Perrault’s anatomical descriptions of animals, as well as the famous frontispiece of
Thomas Hobbes’s *Leviathan* (1651). The nearly twenty pages of his “La Manière
d’Imprimer les Planches en Taille Douce. Ensemble du Moyen d’en Construire la Presse”
(On the Method of Printing Copperplates, with the Way of Building the Press)
constituted the first manual on the construction and manipulation of the rolling-press
used in the printing of intaglio images. The booklet was one of the two appendixes to
Bosse’s treatise on etching, the *Traicté des manières de graver en taille douce sur l’airin* (Treatise
on Printmaking on Bronze), a work published in 1645. It had a stupendous success: it
was translated into English, Italian, Dutch, German, and Portuguese, and two further
augmented editions were printed in France during the following century alone—one of
them by Charles-Antoine Jombert, the Parisian undertaker responsible for the 1749
edition of Plumier’s *Art de tourner*, who, interestingly, turned it into a manual for both
etching and engraving with burin.<fnref n="87" /> In his *Traicté* Bosse proclaimed the dignity of

<footnote n="86">⁸⁶ Perrin Stein et al., *Artists and Amateurs: Etching in Eighteenth-Century France* (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013).</footnote>

<footnote n="87">⁸⁷ Abraham Bosse, *Traicté des manières de graver en taille-douce svr l'airin* (Paris: chez ledit Bosse, 1645); Bosse, *De la manière de graver à l'eau forte et au burin* (Paris: Charles-Antoine Jombert, 1745); William M. Ivins Jr., *Prints and Visual Communication* (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1969 [1953]); Gaskell, “Printing House”; Carl Goldstein, *Print Culture in Early Modern France: Abraham Bosse and the Purposes of Print* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 19-25, esp. chap. 1. See also Marianne Le Blanc, *D'acide et*</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_92.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 5.10. "This figure shows you How Copperplates Are Printed." The printing of copperplates differed substantially from that of woodcuts and movable types. In the latter, the figures appear in relief and the ink is applied to the raised surface. In the former, however, the figures are carved into the metal plate: the resulting grooves receive the ink, the remains of which are wiped off the surface. Unlike woodcuts and movable types, therefore, the printing of copperplates required much higher pressure in order to pull the ink out of the grooves. A special press was used, known as the rolling press. (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>

printmaking, its mechanical nature notwithstanding: with the foundation of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture by Mazarin in 1648, Bosse joined as one of its first members. His *Traicté* became the reference manual on printmaking during the nearly two subsequent centuries, especially for artists who were experimenting with intaglio at an amateur level. This was the audience targeted by Bosse: meaningfully dedicated to “the lovers of this art,” the book gave practical instructions “so that all those who would like

<footnote>d'encre: Abraham Bosse (1604?-1676) et son siècle en perspective (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2004); 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), 1-26.</footnote>
to initiate themselves into [them], either as an occupation or a divertissement, could find
by themselves a sort of introduction to the Art.”<fnref n="88" />

Some years before the *Traicté*, Bosse had printed two single-sheet plates on the
process of printmaking. The first, dated 1642, showed the process of printing from
copperplate (fig. 5.10). It depicts an engravings shop, whose center is dominated by a
rolling press operated by a pressman, who pushes with two hands and one foot the X-
shaped wheel of the artifact. At the back of the room, behind the press, a workman with
blackened hands covers the surface of a plate with ink; on the right of the scene, next to
the window, another finishes wiping it with the palm of his hand. The rolling press,
exclusively used for the printing of intaglio plates, was radically different from the
letterpress used for the setting of movable types or woodcuts. In the typographic press,
little pressure was required: the ink was applied on the uppermost parts of the types or
woodcut; the white spaces of the picture were those carved in the block, and the figures
appeared in relief. For the printing of copperplates, in contrast, a much greater pressure
was required: the figures were carved into the flat surface of a metal plate—most usually
copper—that was then entirely inked; after wiping the surface, the ink remained only into
the grooves. Once in the rolling press, the plate was in full contact with the paper: the
star wheel activated two parallel rollers that concentrated the force on a line, through
which the plate was forced, so that the ink was pulled out of the grooves onto the paper.
The pressure exerted by the rollers was far greater than the one the flat plates of the
typographic press could apply, leaving on the paper the characteristic “plate-mark”
surrounding etchings and engravings.<fnref n="89" />

The second scene published by Bosse the following year presented a printmaker’s
workshop-boutique (fig. 5.11). It depicted the two main methods for the *gravure en taille
douce* or intaglio engraving: burin engraving or *gravure au burin* and etching or *gravure à l’eau
forte*. On the picture’s right-hand side, an engraver holds a plate in his left hand and
completes a figure of a Madonna by means of a burin, a steel, V-shaped chisel used
directly on the metal. The burin required skillful movements by the engraver, who had to
“press quite hard the Contours of his figures” and turn the plate on his other hand to

<footnote n="88">⁸⁸ Bosse, *Traicté*, unpaginated: “Aux amateurs de cet art . . . fin que ceux qui voudront commencer à se donner cette sorte d’occupation ou de divertissement, y puissent trouver d’eux-mesmes s’il y a moyen, quelque sorte d’introduction à l’Art.”</footnote>

<footnote n="89">⁸⁹ Bosse, *Traicté*, 69–75: “De la manière d’encrer la Planche pour apres la faire passer sur la table de la Presse entres le rouleaux pour l’imprimer”; Phillip Gaskell, *A New Introduction to Bibliography* (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 157; Antony Griffiths, *Prints and Printmaking: An Introduction to the History and Techniques* (London: British Museum Press, 1996), 13–99.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_93.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 5.11 “Intaglio Cutters Engraving with Burin and Etching.” There were two main intaglio techniques: engraving with a burin directly on the plate (taille douce or gravure au burin), which required more skillful gestures, and etching (taille douce or gravure à l'eau-forte), which was closer to drawing with ink on paper. Unsurprisingly, then, etching was the technique preferred by painters and draftsmen who, like Plumier, ventured into intaglio carving. (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>

perform curved lines. On the left of Bosse's scene, separated from the engraver by a screen placed slightly off-center, sits an etcher bowing over a plate covered with a dark acid-resistant varnish and resting on an inclined table. Unlike burin engraving, etching is an indirect technique: the etcher draws the lines of his figure by scratching the varnish away with a needle; a special acid or *eau forte*, a bottle of which stands on the top of the cupboard next to the worker in Bosse's scene, is then poured over the plate: the acid corrodes the exposed parts of the plate and carves into it the grooves that would receive the ink; the cutter can then retouch the image with the burin.

One of the innovations of Bosse was precisely to combine both techniques by retouching with the burin a plate made à l'eau forte, which was to become a standard
practice among intaglio cutters. Although most of the time combined, burin engraving and etching had slightly dissimilar results and required entirely different skills. The physical act of carving with the burin, particularly for producing a curved line, was highly demanding: the gestures of the engraver were limited by the resistance of the metal while scraping the surface off, and the lines thus made were therefore sharper and straighter. With etching, in contrast, the hand of the cutter could perform nimbler, defter strokes closer to drawing on paper and resulting in blunt-pointed lines.<fnref n="90" /> Although by no means a straightforward technique, etching was far easier and quicker than burin engraving, to the point that the latter was rarely practiced by non-professional printmakers. Despite the restrictions imposed by the medium, etching was similar to drawing on paper with ink: it allowed more free and spontaneous gestures of the hand, while the more difficult preparation of the plate with acid was usually done by the printers. Etching was therefore the preferred technique by amateur engravers, most of the time painters and draftsmen—like Plumier. For Bosse, etching was perfected to the point that it could stand as a *contrefaçon* of burin engraving, but at the reach of *honnêtes hommes*, something that may have been suggested in his scene of the printmaker’s workshop: while the engraver wears the *bonnet* of the guild, the etcher is dressed in *costume de ville*.<fnref n="91" />

## Etching ferns

The plates made by Plumier were etchings. Precisely because the gestures required by etching were closer to drawing on paper than burin engraving, the technique spread among draftsmen and painters.<fnref n="92" /> This was the opportunity for printmakers to elevate their art out of the subsidiary position it occupied in relation to the arts of *disegno*. Bosse, for instance, insisted that “it was necessary for an Engraver to know how to draw correctly, for he would not be able to imitate any Painting or Drawing without this.”<fnref n="93" /> Moreover, etchings were usually more affordable than engravings. The technique proved

<footnote n="90">⁹⁰ Griffiths, *Prints and Printmaking*, esp. 31-77, and Bamber Gascoigne, *How to Identify Prints: A Complete Guide to Manual and Mechanical Processes from Woodcut to Ink Jet* (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986).</footnote>

<footnote n="91">⁹¹ Le Blanc, *Acide et d'encre*, 96. I thank Roger Gaskell, from whom I learned most of the technical knowledge that underpins these pages, and who pointed out to me the social reading of Bosse's etching of the printmaking workshop-boutique. He also remarked that while the gentleman at the back of the scene contemplates the images hanging higher, whose darkness suggests that they were etchings, the two friars focus on the lighter plates below because of their religious theme, but probably also because they were made with burin—a more difficult technique, thus held to be more virtuous.</footnote>

<footnote n="92">⁹² Rena M. Hoisington, “Learning to Etch,” in Stein *et al.*, *Artists and Amateurs*, 15-39.</footnote>

<footnote n="93">⁹³ Bosse, *De la manière de graver* (1749), 97-8. Bosse's *Sentiments sur la distinction des diverses manières de la peinture, dessein et gravure* (Paris, 1649) was, like his *Traicté*, addressed to amateur printmakers, but particularly to painters and draftsmen.</footnote>
incredibly useful for natural historians and natural philosophers in need of images for their books and with reasonable drawing skills. Unsurprisingly, etching was the technique that the botanists at the Paris Academy of Sciences chose for their *Histoire des plantes*: in the introduction to the book, Dodart explained the academicians' preference for the *gravure à l'eau-forte* because “it allows more liberty, it is quicker & easier, & it has barely less clearness than the [burin] *taille-douce*, provided that it is well done.”<fnref n="94" /> Remember that, about the same time, Colbert addressed to the Academy a *mémoire* on the projects for the history of animals and plants: in their answer, Charles Perrault and Pierre Carcavy proposed to the controller-general to install a rolling press (*une presse de taille douce*) in the Bibliothèque du roi, where the academicians held their meetings, so as to avoid that the plates leaked out before the volumes were printed.<fnref n="95" />

Plumier’s venturing into etching (but also his printed iconographic production by and large) needs to be understood within the development of a marketplace for engravings that was, in the latter decades of the seventeenth century, sustained and specialized. From the 1650s onwards, and for most of the eighteenth century, Paris dominated European printmaking: intaglio workshops concentrated in rue Saint-Jacques, together with letterpress printers and booksellers, from the late sixteenth century; and from the middle of the 1650s, the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture began to accept engravers among its members. As Marianne Grivel has masterfully shown, printmaking became in the French capital a specialized industry: there were not only intaglio engravers, but also intaglio printers (*maîtres imprimeires en taille-douce*), and intaglio publishers and sellers (*éditeurs et marchands d'estampes*). It also became an acknowledged and regulated profession during the seventeenth century, traditionally independent from the logics of the guilds involved in the production of books, but increasingly the object of royal attempts to control and annex it to the community of booksellers and printers.<fnref n="96" />

It was also during the second half of the seventeenth century that intaglio engraving, though theoretically secondary in relation to painting or sculpture, consolidated among the fine arts. Painters, often called “painters-engravers” (*peintres-graveurs*), promoted the technique not only as a means of diffusing their paintings, but also as an aesthetic form

<footnote n="94">⁹⁴ Dodart, *Histoire des plantes*, 2nd ed. (Paris: de l’Imprimerie royale, 1679), 37: “nous préferons la Gravûre à l’eau-forte à toutes les autres, parce qu’elle a plus de liberté, qu’elle est plus prompte & plus aisée, & qu’elle n’a gueres moins de netteté que la Taille-douce, pouveû qu’elle soit bien traitée.”</footnote>

<footnote n="95">⁹⁵ AN O1 1964, cotte 2, no. 2.</footnote>

<footnote n="96">⁹⁶ Marianne Grivel, *Le commerce de l’estampe à Paris au XVIIᵉ siècle* (Geneva: Droz, 1986), esp. chap. 2; Kristel Smentek, *Mariette and the Science of Connoisseur in Eighteenth-Century Europe* (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), chap. 1. Se also Peter Fuhring, “Publishers, Sellers, and the Market,” in Fuhring, *Kingdom of Images*, 30-5.</footnote>
in itself, as Rembradt did in the Netherlands some decades before. Although *peintres-graveurs* sought to sell their works in the professional print market, they profited from an upsurge of interest in printmaking and print collecting that took place at the end of the century in France: a market and a community of connoisseurs emerged, and collectors increasingly invested in gathering printed images in the form of single-sheets, *recueils* or “ready-made” collections or compendia, and illustrated books. A more specialized category was that of the suites and series: sets of prints around a single theme which invited comparative study.<fnref n="97" /> In the domain of natural knowledge, the commerce of engraving was closely linked to the passion for the collection of books of images (*recueil d’images*) among naturalists and connoisseurs. The circulation of printed images of overseas flora and fauna took place mostly under the form of the codex rather than single sheets, not only because of the reduced and elitist readership of these, but also because the visual dimension of overseas natural knowledge served at the same time the epistemic needs of the field and the aesthetic aspirations of a community of consumers of natural history.

Once more, the figure of Intendant Michel Bégon may be a good example to consider the crucial role that intaglio engraving played in the culture of curiosity collecting, and of how books on natural knowledge interacted to a large extent with the aesthetic values of this. In 1770, that is, sixty years after his death, the French crown bought Bégon’s collection of intaglio prints significantly labeled *cabinet d’estampes* (cabinet of prints). It was composed of nothing less than 227 bound volumes of engravings or *recueils*, and included several hundred portraits of “illustrious men,” “figures and engravings” from painters like Raphael and Dürer, military maps, and images of floras and faunas by Nicolas Robert or Claude Aubriet, as well as of landscapes, medals and coins, and architectural monuments. Most of the items in Begon’s “cabinet of imprints” were not, however, *recueils* of single-sheet intaglio prints bound together for the collector, but sumptuously illustrated publications like the second edition of Vitruvius’s *Ten Books of Architecture* translated into French by Claude Perrault and David Logan’s *Oxonia illustrata* and *Cantabrigia illustrata*. Among these books, standing as both objects of collecting and learned contributions, were with no surprise Tournefort’s *Élémens de botanique* and the three first books by Plumier.<fnref n="98" />

<footnote n="97">⁹⁷ Elizabeth M. Rudy, “On the Market: Selling Etchings in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Perrin *et al.*, *Artists and Amateurs*, 41-67. See esp. 49-55 for the *recueil* and the suites and series of prints.</footnote>

<footnote n="98">⁹⁸ BNF Est. YE-25-4 “Catalogue du Cabinet de Michel Bégon, collection acquise par le roi en 1770.”</footnote>
Despite the pains he certainly had to take for the publication of his books, Plumier
saw into print a remarkable number of images. Leaving aside the rare *Filicetum americanum*
(the volume on ferns printed in 1703 without text, most of whose engravings were
published again in the 1705 *Traité des fougères*), the corpus of images printed during his life
amounts to almost four hundred copperplates. A reduced number of these engravings,
however, were reused from one book to the other: out of the 108 plates of the *Description*,
31 were reemployed in the *Fougères*. The reemployment of some of the plates of the
*Description* for the *Fougères* attests to the latter's nature: it was intended to be a more
specialized continuation of the *Description*, in which the author focused in a handful of
very similar genera—*Filix*, *Lonchitis*, *Polypodium*, *Adiantum*, *Lingua cervina*, *Hemionitis*, and
*Osmunda*. In Plumier's words, the *Fougères* was the completion of his project to compile
the descriptions of “all the plants of this kind included in the sixteenth class of the
Botanical Institutions [of Tournefort], & that I have discovered in my three journeys to
the Islands of America.” The reader, Plumier thought, “will not be surprised by the fact
that I have added [to the *Fougères*] those that I had already presented in my descriptions
of the plants of America in the Imprimerie royale in the year 1693.”<fnref n="99" /> The audience of
the *Fougères*, consequently, was much more restrained than the one of the *Description*: the
former came after a period of maturation and allowed Plumier to engage more explicitly
than in his first book with his taxonomical ambitions by focusing on what seemingly was
a blank spot of the method proposed by Tournefort for the classification of the
vegetable world—ferns have neither fruit nor flower, the two key elements of
Tournefort's classificatory system.

The circa thirty plates reemployed in the *Traité des fougères* from the *Description* bore
seemingly no substantial changes: a *Phyllitis scandens* changed its name to *Lingua cervina
scandens*, for instance, and two images of a beetle—face up and down—came to adorn the
figure of yet another *Lingua cervina*. All of the reused engravings, however, were
embellished and gained in realism by the addition of chiaroscuro and other minor
details—such as the beetle (fig. 5.12).<fnref n="100" /> These slight variations were mainly aesthetic, but

<footnote n="99">⁹⁹ Plumier, *Traité des fougères*, vii: “m’étant formé le dessein de rapporter dans cet ouvrage toutes les plantes de cette nature comprises dans la seizième classe des Intitutions Botaniques, & que j’ay découvertes dans mes trois voyages aux Isles de l’Amérique, on ne será pas surpris si j’y ay joint celles que j’ay déja données dans mes descriptions des plantes de l’Amérique de l’imprimerie Royale en l’année 1693, avec celles que j’ay découvertes dans mon dernier voyage.”</footnote>

<footnote n="100">¹⁰⁰ The correspondence is as follows (the Roman numerals referring to the plates of the *Description*, and the Arabic ones to those of the *Fougères*): I/1, II/2, III/11, IV/8, V/9, X/111, XIII/13, XVI/21, XIX/70, XX/28, XXI/35, XXII/29, XXIII/27, XXIV/43, XXV/48, XXVII/60, XXVIII/63, XXIX/62, XXX/51, XXXI/146,</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_94.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 5.12. (left) Plate of the *Lingua cervina foliis acutis* used the *Description des plantes de l'Amérique* in 1693. (right) The same plate, with modifications, as in the *Traité des fougères* (1705); the figure gained in realism by means of chiaroscuro. Note that the scratch on the higher part of the central leaf is in both images, proving that the plate from which they were made was the same. (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>

crucially important nonetheless. The images of the *Traité des fougères*, all of them, were far more elaborate than those in the *Description*, even those (and this is the consequential aspect of the story) reemployed from one book to the other. They stood for a shift in the visual strategies adopted, as well as the fluctuation of intentionality and targeted audiences that took place between 1693 and 1705. In the preface of the *Description*, Plumier had given the reasons for the plain, unadorned style of the images: the reader, said the author, “will perhaps be surprised that I do not present but the simple line [of the plants], almost without any shade, but I decided to engrave them so that one could more easily add the color, as we see in the works of [Leonhart] Fuchs, which are engraved as well in simple line [*a simple trait*], & most part of which have illuminated [by some readers].”<fnref n="101" />

<footnote>XXXII/148, XXXIII/151, XXXIV/152, XXXVI/77, XXXVII/83, XXXIX/124, XL/132, XLI/143, XLII/119, XLVI/97, L/101.</footnote>

<footnote n="101">¹⁰¹ Plumier, *Description*, sig. [a3v]: “On sera peut-estre surpris que je n’en donne que le simple trait Presque sans ombre, mais j’y esté bien aisé de les graver de manière, qu’on pust ajouter le coloris plus facilement, comme nous voyons dans toutes les ouvrages de Fuchsius, qui sont gravez de mesme à simple trait, & dont la pluspart sont enluminez.” Such a mode of representation also went along the lines of some trends in the making of natural historical images—Pliny, for instance, proclaimed in his *Natural History* that</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_95.png" /></figure>

Some collectors may have had the plates of the *Description* illuminated. At least Michel Bégon did: his stunning colored copy, still extant, has been discussed in chapter 2 (fig. 2.5). Amateurs and collectors of both printed images and natural curiosities were, after all, a crucial audience for such a book. Its images embodied a *visual polysemy*: they were made to be read for their content as much as for their form. From the beginning, Plumier tried to inscribe the same visual polysemy into the images of the *Traité des fougères*. Yet the social circumstances surrounding its publication were dramatically different from those in which the *Description* got printed. The more exuberant style, both in the new plates and in those reemployed from 1693, illustrates the tension between the aspirations and possibilities of state scientific sponsorship: they go along the lines of the discussion on the virtues of ferns included in the volume to make them more appealing to “curious people,” and embody the attempt to navigate the volatile possibilities for illustrated natural history books to get into print in Louis XIV’s France.

<footnote>“a picture is misleading when the colors are so many, particularly as the aim is to copy Nature.” Pliny, *Natural History* 25.4, ed. and trans. W. H. S. Jones, vol. 7 (London: Heinemann, 1966), 141.</footnote>
*Performing the name*<fnref n="102" />

Another thing that etching allowed artists to do more easily than burin engraving was to inscribe text within the plate—as easy as writing backwards can be. This provided a convenient means for print-makers to play with text in relation to the images. As for natural historical prints, we have seen in the previous chapter how central names had become, even in visual representations. Words and images reinforced each other. A Latinate handful of words, hanging in the blanks of the page, identified the plant or animal depicted and placed it, by a game of associations and exclusions, into an imaginary grid grouping the multitudinous items of nature that were known. The images, in turn, materialized the unspoken claims of the naming: to begin with, that the thing itself existed and had been seen by the author; that he (or she) had satisfactorily named it, and had thus adequately linked it to some species and differentiated it from some others; finally, that the inventor (of the name) was also a discoverer (of the thing).

In Plumier’s images, manuscript and printed alike, another sort of name surfaces in the blanks: his own. For the case of prints of flora and fauna, it is not clear how often they were signed by the authors, but it seems that this was a rather exceptional practice. The plates of Willughby’s fishes, for instance, were signed by neither carver nor draftsman, but by those who had supplied the money (“Sumpt. D. S. Pepys. Praes. S. R.” “Sumpt. D. Edward Haynes. e. S. R.” “Sumptibus D. Eliae Ashmole e. S. R.”). Some of those of Perrault’s *Histoire des animaux* were marked by the engraver (“Le Clerc sculp.”). In Tournefort’s *Élemens* and *Institutiones*, both the draftsman and carver went unnamed, and the same goes for his *Voyage au Levant*, although we know that Claude Aubriet drew the figures on which they are based. Signing engravings and etchings seems to have been a more common practice in the world of the fine arts: although it was an irregular practice in painting before the late eighteenth century (at least as a form of investing the work with the reputation of the artist’s name), the signature’s roots lay in the corporative traditions of artisans (goldsmiths, for instance), who marked their works.<fnref n="103" /> But, as Charlotte Guichard has shown, it is in the world of printmaking that signatures deployed

<footnote n="102">¹⁰² I use here the title of Charlotte Guichard’s Tomàs Harris Lectures at University College London, on May 17 and 19, 2016. Guichard’s work is indispensable for understanding the link between signature and authorship in eighteenth-century art. See her “La signature dans le tableau aux XVIIᵉ et XVIIIᵉ siècles: identité, réputation et marché de l’art,” *Société & Représentation* 25 (2008), 49-77; “Fragonard et les jeux de la signature,” *Revue de l’art* 177, no. 3 (2012), 47-55, and “La main et le geste. Signature et autographie au XVIIIᵉ siècle,” in *De l’autenticité. Une histoire des valeurs de l’art (XVIᵉ-XXᵉ siècle)*, ed. Charlotte Guichard (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2014), 63-77.</footnote>

<footnote n="103">¹⁰³ Guichard, “La signature dans le tableau,” 51-8; “La main et le geste,” 70-1.</footnote>
a particularly convoluted game of proper names: that of the draftsman and the carver, of the printer and the publisher, even of a dedicatee might find space in the plate. Signatures in print, Guichard argues, announced the material process of their production, while at the same time embodying an auctorial system.<fnref n="104" />

The practice of signature in Plumier’s images is worth recalling here once again (fig. 5.9). Virtually all of the plates of the *Description* included the name of the friar as the draftsman; in the *Traité des fougères*, fifty plates were marked by his *delineavit* and more than a hundred by his *delineavit et sculpsit*. Few, however, are the plates signed by Plumier in the two first editions of the *Art de tourner* (barely a dozen), and none bears his name in the *Nova genera*. Yet (and this is important) a good number of his handmade drawings bore his name as well (this is the case, for instance, of the manuscript book “Solum, salum, coelum Americanum,” in which most of the pages were marked “F. C. Plumier minimus”). What do those signatures tell us? They announce at least three things, other than his own name: first, that he is a Minim friar; second, that he can call himself “royal botanist”; third, that he is the draftsman of the images. Fr.C.P.m.b.r.d.: “Brother Charles Plumier, Minim, Royal Botanist, drew it.” In the case of the *Traité des fougères*, a fourth element is occasionally added: *et sculp*. or simply *et s.*, “and carved it.”

The question that arises is that of the value of the name on the image in a time in which the canonization of the author was yet to come.<fnref n="105" /> To start with, the link between Plumier’s being a botanist and a draftsman is obviously important. He might have had to carve those hundred copperplates himself because the printing of his book would have been far less likely otherwise, but that did not eliminate questions of credit altogether. More meaningful than his *sculpsit* on a hundred of his fern copperplates was Plumier’s *delineativit* in the large majority of his printed corpus of images. Presenting himself as a royally sanctioned botanist *and* the draftsman of the images had deep epistemic repercussions, as shown by one episode. When David Krieg, the German physician and member of the Royal Society, encountered Plumier in March 1702 at one of the meetings that Parisian naturalists held from time to time at the Bibliothèque du roi, they engaged in a discussion about Petiver’s luxurious engravings of plants and animals published periodically under the name of *Gazophylacium naturae et artis* (or the “treasure house” of nature and arts). Plumier had seen the plates of the *Gazophylacium*: “His judgments of

<footnote n="104">¹⁰⁴ Guichard, “La signature dans le tableau.”</footnote>

<footnote n="105">¹⁰⁵ Roger Chartier, “The Author’s Hand,” in *The Author’s Hand and the Printers Mind* (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), 73-86.</footnote>
your tables,” Krieg wrote to Petiver, “was that they proved your diligence & knowledge
in these things.” But then came the critique: “but it was pity [said Plumier], that they was
[sic] not well engraved & anatomized, especial the plants: but I excused you, that you did
not perhaps receive them in that state, as to anatomise them, neither that you could not
design them your self: for, sayth he, to design a plant well, it was neceßary to be a
herbarist & to know the caracters.”<fnref n="106" /> Plumier was, no doubt, boasting of his own
peculiarity, being a skilled artist—a quality shared by few fellow scholars at the time. But
it was partially this specificity that was being scarred on the images by means of his
signature, for it was on it that he was attempting to build his scholarly credit.

Furthermore, that name inscribes and displays the relationships established between
three elements. First, the *image as invention and discovery*: Plumier's identity and authority as
a naturalist were at stake in his exceptional access to the unfamiliar West Indian flora and
fauna, and boasted in the images through his signature as the draftsman. Second, the
*image as object*: a print, a drawing, a material form liable to physical mutations, and thus,
new meanings. Third, Plumier as author of both invention (as naturalist) and object (as
image-maker). The relationships between these three elements were many and unstable.
The naturalist's *depixit* (occasionally his *sculpsit*, too), or simply his handwritten or carved
name stood for his having crossed oceans to see the thing depicted; for his having
actually seen it while being knowledgeable of what he had under the eyes (sanctioned as
an expert by the learned community and by a political power); for his having depicted it,
and for his being one of the few to have done all this. It did not matter if the figures
were made in front of the real thing: what mattered was that the same person observed
them and drew them. The problem was that such a claim of invention and discovery
usually rested upon a delicate object: the image-object could be on paper or copper, but
was always liable to shipwrecks, oblivion, or simply mutation. Sometimes, the image-
object had to suffer physical change to keep on carrying its claim of invention and
discovery: a copperplate could be manipulated, new grooves carved among old ones, so
as to change not its content, but the social place of the resulting objects. Other times, the
image-object was not one leaf of paper, but many: the American ferns as *recueil*, as bound
volume, or the West Indies nature as a collection, heaped in piles. The image as invention
and discovery usually rested upon the image-object, but not always: Lister's published
account of his visit to the convent, or Krieg's manuscript one, or the guides informing

<footnote n="106">¹⁰⁶ David Krieg to James Petiver, Paris, March 30, 1702, in BL MS 4063 “Letters to Sir Hans Sloane. Vol. 28,” fol. 149.</footnote>
curious people in Paris about the friar enveloped by papers depicting far-away worlds, made his claims of authorship travel without the papers even moving or being reproduced (with the exception of Lister's copies of some of the drawings to be included in his *Journey* book).

The name of Plumier on his prints and drawings capture this dynamic, unstable game between the two faces of images (or of any “recorded form,” for that matter), between the thing, which might change, and the meanings one aspires to attach to it, which will irremediably shift with the former.

## The Spanish connection

One of the copies of Plumier's *Traité des fougères* found its way to Spain. This might have been one of the 6,000 volumes brought by Philip V from France when, soon before the end of the War of Spanish Succession, he funded the Royal Public Library (Real biblioteca pública) mostly from the collections of both his own personal library and the one that the Spanish Habsburgs had hitherto kept at the High Tower of the Alcázar in Madrid.<fnref n="107" /> Be that as it may, at some point, an adventurous copy of Plumier's book of ferns ended up in the library of the San Carlos Royal College of Surgery, an institution created in the 1780s. But this *Traité des fougères* is not like the others: the oddity of the copy lies in its physical composition, in which it differs from the usual composition of the book on several points.<fnref n="108" /> The edges, for instance, are gilded, and the binding was made in blue leather in lieu of the red Morocco typical from the Imprimerie royale during the seventeenth and first part of the eighteenth centuries (although the covers bear Louis XIV's coat-of-arms, as tended to be the case).

Even more interesting is the fact that an intaglio image not originally belonging to the book has been oddly placed between the Latin and the French title pages of the copy. It is the famous 1671 etching by Sébastian Leclerc on the Sun King's fictional visit to the Paris Academy of Sciences. The plate was the usual frontispiece of the works on natural history, mathematics, and natural philosophy published by members of the Academy of Sciences at the Imprimerie royale—the examples include Perrault's *Histoire des animaux*,

<footnote n="107">107 Elena María Santiago Páez, ed., *La Real Biblioteca Pública, 1711-1760. De Felipe V a Fernando VI, Madrid, 2 de junio-19 de septiembre 2004* (Madrid: Biblioteca Nacional, 2004), esp. the contributions by Margarita Torrione, “Felipe V, bibliófilo. El peso de Francia en la Real Librería Pública,” 48-64, and Fernando Bouza, “La biblioteca de la Torre Alta del Alcázar de Madrid,” 175-96.</footnote>

<footnote n="108">108 The copy is now kept at BHMV MED GF 98. It contains the stamp of the San Carlos Royal College of Surgery and comes from the Faculty of Medicine of the University Complutense in Madrid, which inherited the book collection of the College of Surgery.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_96.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 5.13. (left) Copy of Plumier’s *Traité des fougères* in Madrid: note the blue covers in contrast to the usual red Morocco binding of the luxury copies printed at the Paris Royal Press. (right) Sébastien Leclerc’s famous 1671 etching on Louis XIV’s imaginary visit to the Paris Academy of Sciences. The plate was used as the frontispiece for books of natural history and philosophy pertaining to the *Cabinet du roi* collection, but not in Plumier’s books. The leaf had to be folded to adapt to the smaller size of the *Traité des fougères*. (Biblioteca Histórica “Marqués de Valdecillas,” Madrid.)</figcaption></figure>

Dodart’s *Histoire des plantes*, or the *Recueil de plusieurs traitez de mathématiques de l’Académie royale des sciences* (1676). It was the plate reserved for the scientific books of the *Cabinet du roi*. The proof, if one is needed, that the plate did not belong to Plumier’s book on ferns is the size: being larger than the pages of the *Traité des fougères*, the etching of our Madrid copy had to be trimmed on the top and bottom, and its right side folded to fit the volume (fig. 5.13). Although the place and exact time of its production is equally unknown, it is likely that the loose sheets of the *Traité des fougères*, originally printed at the Imprimerie royale, were then bound in another workshop for a specific owner, who had Leclerc’s frontispiece intercalated between the first pages.<fnref n="109" />

A couple of inferences can be drawn from the Madrid copy of Plumier’s *Fougères*. First, the copy helps sustain the hypothesis that the collection of the *Cabinet du roi*, printed at the Imprimerie royale and including most of the scientific publications by the

<footnote n="109">¹⁰⁹ Here again, I owe a debt of gratitude to Fernando Bouza, both for discovering this curious copy at the Complutense’s Biblioteca Histórica and for his interpretation of it as an attempt to assimilate the *Fougères* into one of the scientific volumes of the *Cabinet du roi*.</footnote>
members of the Academy of Sciences during the first period of the institution's
existence, contributed to creating the conditions of possibility for Plumier's engravings to
see the light of day. The Minim friar might have perceived (or attempted to actually
make) his own books as part of the editorial program originally conceived by Colbert;
what now seems clear, in any case, is that his books were understood as such by some
collectors of this sort of *recueil d'images*, like the owner of the Madrid copy. Furthermore,
this has the effect of highlighting a central dimension of both the printed and manuscript
images of Plumier: that of its reception, appropriation, and construal across time and
space. It is to this convoluted story that we move in the next chapter.

Conclusion

This chapter has charted the—often tortuous—printing history of Plumier's books,
and has revealed the difficulties inherent in bringing illustrated natural history
publications into print in late seventeenth-century Paris. Unlike the curious treatise on
the *honnête* art of turnery, profusely illustrated folio volumes had few chances come into
being through the book market. Plumier, however, could see his volumes into print by
finding his way through the world of royal propaganda, in which fanciful editorial
projects played a role in praising the glory and munificence of the king. This is revealed
by the very physical characteristics of the books: while the *Nova genera* attempted to take
the way paved by Tournefort's *Institutiones*, the *Description* and the *Traité des fougères*
profited—not without struggles—from the opportunities opened by the official projects
of the *Cabinet du roi*, as well as by the extended gusto for the collecting of engravings and
“paper naturalia” that existed in Paris at that time.
<figure><img src="image_97.png" /></figure>
## 6. Plumier Revisited

### Transits in Time, Transits on Paper

It was early winter 1704, and Father Charles Plumier found himself in El Puerto de Santa Maria, a merchant town and port in the Bay of Cádiz which had housed, since the 1680s, the fleets of the Spanish Indian trade, the *carrera de Indias*. Exactly four years earlier, the sickly Charles II of Spain died childless; he had named as his successor a Bourbon, Philip, the grandson of Louis XIV of France, whose accession to the throne of Madrid opened the Spanish colonies to French commerce. It also triggered yet another international alliance against the Sun King and a fifteen-year war that depleted an already drained country. Our friar might well have witnessed the havoc of the war: only two years before his arrival, El Puerto had been sacked by the Anglo-Dutch forces, including the imposing convent of the order of Minims. It was in that monastery that, in late November 1704, Plumier died, about to set forth on his fourth journey to the Americas.<fnref n="1" /> All those years of hardship had taken their toll and turned into a wraith an already weak body. News of the friar's delicate health appeared in most of the few extant letters mentioning him over the years.<fnref n="2" /> Martin Lister, who apart from a shell-lover was also a physician, saw in him a good example of the fatuity of monastic life: “I heartily pitied F. P. an industrious honest Man, after his return from the *Indies*, who was nothing but Skin and Bones; and yet by the Rules of his Order he could not Eat any thing that was wholesome and proper for his Cure; nothing but a little slimy nasty Fish and Herbs; And tho' he took, as he told me, *Hypocochoana* five times, it had no effect upon him. ‘Tis true, I never heard him complain; But what will not blind prejudice do against all the Reason of Mankind.”<fnref n="3" />

By what we know through the original sources, it is difficult to assess the reasons for Plumier's fourth journey, as well as his destination. A good number of early nineteenth-century historians and authors of biographical dictionaries, including Cuvier in his history

<footnote n="1">¹ Michel Bégon tells us so: “Ce n’est pas à Cadis que le père Plumier est mort, c’est à Sainte-Marie dans un couvent de son ordre,” Bégon to Esprit Cabart de Villermont, Rochefort, April 4, 1705, in “Lettres de Michel Bégon,” ed. Louis Delavaud and Charles Dangibeaud, vol. 3, *Archives historiques de la Saintonge et de l’Aunis* 49 (1935), 86.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² For instance, Bégon to Cabart de Villermont, Rochefort, June 12, 1695, in Bégon, “Lettres,” vol. 1, 256.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ Martin Lister, *A Journey to Paris in the Year 1698* (London: printed for Jacob Tonson, 1699), 134.</footnote>
of the natural sciences, coincided in the opinion that the friar was being sent, in the wake
of the new Franco-Spanish alliance and at the behest of Fagon, the king's first physician,
to the Viceroyalty of Peru in order to investigate the quinquina or cinchona tree, from
which a celebrated febrifugal recently added to the French pharmacopeia (the Peruvian
or Jesuit's bark) was produced.<fnref n="4" /> With Plumier's death, France would have had to wait for
scientific journeys in the 1730s, such as La Condamine's and Joseph de Jussieu's, to have
detailed accounts on the quinquina tree.

The posthumous destiny of Plumier’s manuscript corpus has received far less attention than his never-realized mission to Peru, yet a whole new history began for the friar’s paper collection after his death. Nowadays, the large majority of Plumier’s extant papers lie in the entrails of the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, just over a mile from the convent of the Minims at the old Place Royale, on the other side of the Seine, where the botanist patiently stockpiled them during his lifetime and where they faded into obscurity for several decades after his death. For the most part, they can be found in the form of thirty-seven volumes (shelf-marked 1 to 37 in the catalog of the archives), some bound in red morocco, some others in red calf, but most of them with the arms of Napoleon I on the spine. In the days of the Empire, then, the majority of Plumier’s papers, of different types and sizes, with drawings in very diverse states of realization, were carefully pasted onto the leaves of these regular volumes. Continuity, uniformity, and unity was then (and only then) accorded to a collection of loose sheets with as varied contents and forms as times of production.

By pasting and binding, the opus of a single author was created—more than a
century after his death. The story of how Plumier’s copious drawings and notes became
an ordered and elegantly bound collection is one worth telling. This chapter, too,
proceeds in line with several of the principles promoted by approaches to the history of
the book and reading, especially those highlighting the moving and plural significations
of texts (“texts” in the large sense, from written to graphic ones). For D. F. McKenzie,

<footnote n="4">⁴ E.g. [François Noël and Joseph Planche, *Éphémérides politiques, littéraires et religieuses*, 3<sup>rd</sup> ed. (Paris: chez Le Normant et H. Nicolle, 1812), 174, and Georges Cuvier, *Histoire des sciences naturelles, depuis leur origine jusqu’à nous jours, chez tous les peuples connus, proféssé au Collège de France*, ed. Magdelaine de Saint-Agy, vol. 4 (Paris: Fortin, Mason, et Cie. Libraires, 1843), 75. Contemporary historians have widely accepted and echoed the idea that Plumier’s 1704 journey was commissioned by Fagon for the investigation of the quinquina, e.g. by P. J. S. Whitmore, *The Order of Minims in Seventeenth Century France* (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967), 197, and Roy Mottram, “Charles Plumier, the King’s Botanist – his life and work. With a facsimile of the original cactus plates and text from *Botanicon Americanum* (1689-1697),” *Bradleya* 20 (2002), 81. However, I have not found clear historical evidence for a conclusive opinion on its purpose, proponents, or destination.</footnote>
for instance, it was clear “that new readers . . . make new texts, and that their new meanings are a function of their new forms.”<fnref n="5" /> These pages aim at tracing the circulation of the corpus after the death of its author, and at doing so from a material vantage point. Over the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth centuries, these papers and drawings went through several locations in Paris (from the convent at Place Royale to the Bibliothèque du roi and the Academy of Sciences to finally the Muséum d’histoire naturelle) and were the object of copies, editions, and piracy by naturalist-authors and book-makers not only in France, but also in the Netherlands and England. These transits, whether in time or across different media, permit us to ponder the divergent, sometimes contradictory attitudes that an author’s manuscript corpus raised at different times.<fnref n="6" />

It is no surprise by now that manuscripts never ceased to be subject to a sometimes wide circulation during the entire early modern period: they were copied and plagiarized, consulted and published.<fnref n="7" /> The same happened with non-printed images such as Plumier’s drawings. Several naturalists seem to have consulted and copied the papers of the friar while these were still at the Parisian Minim convent, and some even used a few of the drawings for their own printed works. As already mentioned, Martin Lister made use of the drawings on the murex in his *Journey to Paris* (1699) during the life of the Minim. Some decades later, the Marseille anatomist, painter, printmaker, and entrepreneur Jacques-Fabien Gautier, or Gautier d’Agoty (1716-1785), also rehashed some of Plumier’s drawings and writings. In 1752, d’Agoty published the friar’s study on the auditory system of the sea turtle in the *Observations sur l’histoire naturelle, sur la physique et sur la peinture* (Observations on natural history, physics, and painting), a journal funded by himself and printed for most of the second half of the eighteenth century.<fnref n="8" /> Although the

<footnote n="5">⁵ D. F. McKenzie, *Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004 [1999]), 29.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ For a comparison, two publications with similar titles have recently dealt with the fortunes of the manuscript corpus left by two personalities of the English Scientific Revolution: Michael Hunter, ed., *The Boyle Papers: Understanding the Manuscripts of Robert Boyle* (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007) and Sarah Dry, *The Newton Papers: The Strange and True Odyssey of Isaac Newton’s Manuscripts* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ Three outstanding studies on this phenomenon are Harold Love, *The Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England* (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998 [1993]; H. R. Woudhuysen, *Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558-1640* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), and Fernando Bouza, *Corre manuscrito. Una historia cultural del Siglo de Oro* (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2002). For a more thorough bibliography on this topic, see above, 293n.153.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ “Observation XI. Concernant les sourds, & sur l’oreille de la tortue, par le R.P. Charles Plumier, de l’Ordre des PP. Minimes & Botaniste du Roi,” in *Observations sur l’histoire naturelle, sur la physique et sur la peinture. Avec des planches imprimées en couleur. Cet ouvrage renferme les secrets des arts, les nouvelles découvertes, & les disputes des philosophes & des artistes modernes* 1, no. 3 (1752), 131-8. On Gautier d’Agoty, see Sarah</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_98.png" /></figure>

weight of his scientific and artistic contribution was a matter of controversy during his own lifetime, the success of d'Agoty and that of his journal came mostly from the use of color printing and the skillful exploitation of this technique's market.

His use of Plumier's images of the turtle in the *Observations* also went along these lines. The reproduced text, he said, was a “posthumous letter” that the “Reverend Fathers Minims at Place Royale” sent him “with the drawing in color of the turtle's ear, made by the author himself.”<fnref n="9" /> Sent by the Minims or not, the letter had already been printed fifty years earlier in the *Journal de Trévoux*. In the version of 1752, d'Agoty extended the original text by introducing his own commentaries on the topic. Plumier's “observation,” then, was followed by another one by the editor on diverse anatomical aspects of the sea turtle: here he quoted extensively from different authors and used

<footnote>Lowengard, *The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe* (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 586-612. On the *Observations*, see Anne-Marie Chouillet, “Observations sur l’histoire naturelle, sur la physique et sur la peinture (1752-1757, 1771-1793),” in *Dictionnaire des journaux, 1600-1789*, ed. Jean Sgard, 2 vols. (Paris: Universitas, 1991), vol. 2, 995-8.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹ Gautier d'Agoty, “Observation sur l'oreille de la tortue,” 131: “C'est ici une Lettre postume que je communique au Public. Elle m'a été remise par les RR.PP. Minimes de la Place Royale, avec le dessein en couleur de l'oreille de la tortue, fait par l'Auteur lui-même. Ce célèbre Provençal est connu par des ouvrages qui lui ont mérité l'estime de tous les Şçavans.”</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_99.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 6.1. (opposite) Plates drawn from Plumier’s drawings on the sea turtle used by Gautier d’Agoty in the 1752 issue of his *Observations sur l’histoire naturelle, sur la physique, et sur la peinture*. (Research Library, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.) (above and left) Original drawings. (Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>

another text by the Minim friar—an unpublished one this time, but also seemingly sent to him by the naturalist’s fellow friars—on the heart of the animal, drawn perhaps from his manuscripts. It seems clear that d’Agoty had access to the folders of manuscripts kept by that time at the library of Place Royale convent, perhaps (as he claims) by means of copies made and sent to him by the Minims. A much more likely possibility is that the artist and anatomist consulted the collection himself at the library of the convent. In the *Observations*, he reproduced two plates drawn from Plumier’s manuscripts: one presented the turtle entirely from one of the (never published) drawings in the friar’s anatomical study of the animal (in fact the tortoise, not the sea turtle); the other plate showed a
profile of the head of the animal and two series of drawings of the ear and the heart of the animal, respectively (fig. 6.1). The images of the head and the ear were printed in the *Journal de Trévoux* along with the text, but those on the heart (as well as the plate on the entire beast) never got into print, which suggests that d'Agoty copied the originals in the convent itself and printed them in color.

Such uses of Plumier's drawings continued throughout the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth century. This chapter will chart the many lives that Plumier's images, mostly those from his manuscript corpus, had over nearly a century and a half. The first half of the chapter focuses on copies and editions that eighteenth-century authors in the Netherlands and England made of some of the unpublished images. The second half traces a more physical sort of transit: the fates of Plumier's original manuscript corpus, which, between the mid-eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth century, moved several times between Parisian institutions. My aim is to show that, with each new appropriation of the corpus, new meanings—and new social and intellectual places—were given to it.

## Burman and the *Codex Boerhaavianus*

It has already been noted that the last publication authored by Plumier was published in Amsterdam half a century after his death.<fnref n="10" /> The scholar responsible for the edition was Johannes Burman (1706-1779), a Dutch physician who taught botany at the Athenaeum Ilustre in Amsterdam and directed the city's Hortus Botanicus.<fnref n="11" /> Burman is now best known for his acquaintance with Linnaeus, whom he met in 1735 when the young Swede came to the Dutch Republic to do his doctorate. A fervent admirer of him and his binomial system, Burman even had his son Nicolaas Laurens (who succeeded him as professor of botany) study with the “Prince of Botanists” in Uppsala. Right before turning to Plumier's corpus, Burman had already edited other similarly colossal, unpublished works in natural history. The most famous of these was perhaps the *Herbarium Amboinense*, an edition of a monumental manuscript compiled by a contemporary of Plumier, Georg Eberhard Rumpf, or Rumphius (1627-1702). A

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ Charles Plumier, *Plantarum Americanarum fasciculus primus* [-decimus], continens Plantas, quas olim Carolus Plumierius, Botanicorum Princeps Detexit, Eruitque, atque in Insulis Antillis ipse depinxit, ed. Johannes Burman (Amsterdam: printed by the author and sold at the Botanical Garden and by the widow and son of S. Schouten (from the sixth fasciule in 1757, by Petrum Schouten) and, in Leiden, by Gerard Potuliet and Theodor Haak, 1755-1760),</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹ Ellinoor Bergvelt, Peter Jan Knegtmans, and Marian Schilder, eds., *Kleurrijke Professoren. 375 jaar portretkunst in de collectie van de Universiteit van Amsterdam/Colorful Professors: 375 Years of Portraiture in the Collection of the University of Amsterdam* (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), 38-9.</footnote>
merchant of the Dutch East India Company turned naturalist, Rumphius came to be
remembered for his research on the natural history of Ambon (which gained him the
epithet of “Pliny of the Indies”) and a tragic life (which included a blindness that did not
prevent him from continuing his natural historical work). Burman’s published version,
entitled *Het Amboinsche kruid-boek* or Ambonese herbal, drew from Rumphius’s
descriptions in Dutch and own colored drawings on the flora of the Pacific island, which
Burman ‘recovered from the archives of the VOC: he translated Rumphius’s texts into
Latin, had the drawings engraved, and eventually succeeded in having the ensemble
printed in six volumes by a consortium of eight publishers between 1741 and 1755.<fnref n="12" />

That very same year of 1755, the first volume of the *Plantarum Americanarum*,
Burman’s edition of Plumier’s descriptions and drawings on the West Indies’ flora,
appeared. The handmade images at its basis were a set of manuscript duplicates of 508 of
Plumier’s originals that had come to be known as the *Codex Boerhaavianus*: probably made
in 1733 by Claude Aubriet (the artist who accompanied Tournefort to the Levant) from
volumes at the Paris Academy of Sciences, these copies in light, onionskin-like paper
were made for, and sent to, Herman Boerhaave (1668-1738), a professor of medicine at
the University of Leiden, a celebrity across Europe in all botanical matters, and—more
important for us—a member of the Paris Academy of Sciences since 1728.

The *Codex Boerhaavianus* is known for having been avidly perused by Linnaeus at
some point during the three years he spent in the Dutch Republic when he was in his
thirties. The codex was actually an important source in Linnaeus’s *Genera plantarum*
(1737), published in Leiden and one of the early major works in which the Swedish
botanist laid the grounds of his sexual system of classification. During his stay with
Clifford in the Netherlands, Linnaeus had in mind a journey to France with the aim of
consulting some archives, including Plumier’s: “As soon as I recover my health,” he
wrote to Haller in 1738, “perhaps towards the end of April, I shall get to Paris, where I
shall have an opportunity, never perhaps to be again, of inspecting the collections of

<footnote n="12">¹² Georg Eberhard Rumphius, *Herbarium Amboinense, plurimas complectens arbores, frutices, herbas, plantas terrestres & aquaticas*, ed. Johannes Burman, 6 vols. (Amsterdam: François Changuin, Jan Ctauffe, Hermanus Uytwerf; The Hague: Pieter Gosse, Jan Neaulme, Adriaan Moetjens, Antony van Dole; Utrechth: Steven Neaulme, 1741-1755). On Rumphius and Burman’s edition, see George Sarton, “Rumphius, Plinius Indicus (1628-1702),” *Isis* 27, no. 2 (1937), 242-57, and Harold J. Cook, *Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age* (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 329-32.</footnote>
Tournefort, Plumier, Surian &c.”<fnref n="13" /> Although the opportunity never came, Linnaeus had the chance to consult the *Codex Boerhaavianus* before it passed to the hands of Burman: when Boerhaave died in 1738, the very year Linnaeus left the Netherlands, his library was auctioned; Burman, one of his students, purchased the collection, now conserved at the library of the University of Groningen. <fnref n="14" />

Burman actually narrates part of the story of Plumier’s manuscript archive in his preface to the *Plantarum Americanarum*. The result of “an indefatigable work,” the friar’s corpus “comprised around nine hundred figures and descriptions of American plants, but also included the history of birds, fishes, shells, and insects drawn from what he observed and drew in America.” In the mid-eighteenth century, the corpus was divided, Burman tells us, between the Paris Academy of Sciences and the library of the Minim convent at Place Royale. <fnref n="15" /> Although the result of many sacrifices and efforts, the collection was abandoned “to worms and moth . . . for [it has been] longtime forgotten by Authors and Botanists who so many enjoyments and advantages could take from it.”<fnref n="16" /> The Dutchman writes that he bought the volumes in a public auction of books and that he happily paid “several hundreds of florins” for them, since a substantial number of the plants represented were not well known at the time.<fnref n="17" />

<footnote n="13">¹³ Carl Linnaeus to Albrecht von Haller, Hartekamp, March, 1738, quoted in *A Selection of the Correspondence of Linnaeus, and Other Naturalists, from the Original Manuscripts*, ed. and trans. by Sir James Edward Smith, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1821), vol. 2, 321.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ Frans A. Stafleu and Richard S. Cowan, *Taxonomic Literature: A Selective Guide to Botanical Publications and Collections with Dates, Commentaries and Types*, 2nd ed., vol. 4 (Utrecht and Antwerp/The Hague and Boston: Boch, Scheltema & Holkema/dr. W. Junk b.v., 1983), 301-2; Stefan Dressler, “Plate 321. Marcgravia umbellata,” *Curtis’s Botanical Magazine* 14, no. 3 (1997), 130-1; R. M. Polhill and W. T. Stearn, “Linnaeus’s Notes on Plumier Drawings with Special Reference to *Mimosa Latisiliqua*,” *Taxon* 25, no. 2/3 (1976), 323-5. On the extant collection, see Gerda C. Huisman, *The University Library of Groningen: Four Hundred Years of History in Four Buildings, Fourty Collections, and Infinite Pictures* (Groningen: Barkhuis & University Library Groningen, 2014), 53.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ Burman’s preface to Plumier, *Plantarum Americanarum*, sig. [**v]: “Et quot non supersunt summi hujus Viri labores, indefessa operâ confecti, suâque manu scripta Volumina, quae non modo in Regiae Scientiarum Academiae, sed etiam in R.R.P.P. Minorum Caenobii Parisiensibus adservantur Bibliothecis: illa enim non modo nongentarum circiter Plantarum Americanarum icones & descriptiones continent, sed & Avium insuper, Piscius, Conchyliorum, Insectorumque ab illo in America observatorum & depictorum Historiam complectur.”</footnote>

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ Burman’s preface to Plumier, *Plantarum Americanarum*, sig. [**v]: “[Q]uae omnia cum incredibiles sumtus & labores exhauserint, dolendum sane, immo vix ferendum est, egregia haec Opera tineis & blattis in escam relinqui, orbique Literato & Botanico diutius inideri, qui tot fructus & commoda ex iis capere potuisset.”</footnote>

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ Burman’s preface to Plumier, *Plantarum Americanarum*, sig. [**v]: “Americanarum harum Plantarum, ut ab ipso auctore depictae sunt, Codices, in publica Librorum auctione sane haud vulgari, centenorum aliquot florenorum pretio, mihi evolverem, easdemque saepius summa animi cum voluptate perlustrarem, cumque aliorum Auctorum descriptionibus sedulo compararem, Plantas has ubique non ita cognitas, neque alibi temere obvias comperi.”</footnote>
The *Plantarum Americanarum* was composed of 262 unsigned plates distributed in ten books (*fasciculus*) issued between 1755 and 1760.<fnref n="18" /> Each book (with the exception of the tenth) was dedicated to a naturalist or botany-lover: George Clifford III (1685-1760), a Dutch banker patron of botanists like Linnaeus (who worked for him as his personal physician and the curator of his botanical garden); Linnaeus himself; Andreas Elias Büchner (1701-1769), a German physician to the emperor Charles VI and president of the Leopoldina; Johann Philipp Breyne (1680-1764), a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Leopoldina; Casimir Christoph Schmidel (1718-1792), physician at the court in Ansbach; Christian Gottlieb Ludwig (1709-1773), professor of botany in Leipzig; Lorenz Heister (1683-1758), professor of anatomy at Helmstedt, and finally the Swiss physicians Albrecht von Haller and Johannes Gessner (1709-1790). The dedications by Burman provide a good example of the transfer of which Plumier's drawings were the object with the Amsterdam edition: a transfer in time and space by which they abandoned Louis XIV's Paris and entered, instead, the networks of botanical research in mid-eighteenth-century Central and Northern Europe.

The plates and descriptions in the *Plantarum Americanarum* are arranged alphabetically throughout the fascicules, from the *Abutilon* to the *Ximenia*. Burman sent proofs of the engravings and the descriptions to Linnaeus as they were made—only to be usually ignored by the Swedish savant.<fnref n="19" /> But Burman insisted: he had been adapting the genera and species described by Plumier to the new system of Linnaeus and envisioned the *Plantarum Americanarum* in a sort of coordination with the latter, who was by that time preparing the tenth edition of the *Systema naturae*, perhaps his most influential work (in it, for instance, he famously coined terms such as *Mammalia*).<fnref n="20" /> Burman often queried Linnaeus on the arrangement of Plumier's drawings because some of the genera depicted by the friar could not be found in the *Species plantarum*: Burman sent the engraved images of these genera to Linnaeus and asked him whether to keep their original name, in accordance with Tournefort's method, or if they belonged to any genus included in the

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ Fasc. 1: 1-25 (1755); fasc. 2: 26-50 (1756); fasc. 3: 51-75 (1756); fasc. 4: 76-100 (1756); fasc. 5: 101-125 (1757); fasc. 6: 126-150 (1757); fasc. 7: 151-175 (1758); fasc. 8: 176-201 (1758); fasc. 9: 202-226 (1759); fasc. 10: 227-262 (1760).</footnote>

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ Burman to Linnaeus, Amsterdam, February 8, and July 19, 1757, in *The Linnaean Correspondence*, linnaeus.c18.net, letters 2151 and 2214.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">²⁰ Linnaeus, *Systema naturae, per regna tria naturae, secundum classes, ordines, genera, species, cum characteribus, differentiis, synonymis, locis*, 10th ed., 2 vols. (Stockholm: Impensis Direct. Laurentii Salvii, 1758).</footnote>
new system.<fnref n="21" /> Two months later, Burman's edition was delayed and there were seemingly still no news from Linnaeus.<fnref n="22" /> He now openly requested that Linnaeus include the illustrations of Plumier's plants in the new edition of his book. He even insisted that Linnaeus quote the drawings as "Burm. Amer." rather than refer solely to Plumier, not only so as to avoid "confusion" among botanists given that he had modified Plumier's original denominations, but also to praise Burman's own "immense labor" in making the edition.<fnref n="23" />

With the *Plantarum Americanarum*, Burman not only edited Plumier's unpublished drawings: he also replaced them into a full new social and intellectual context. The edition saw the light of day in a moment in which the circulation of botanical information into print was already clearly perceived as instrumental in the advancement towards a universal system of classification. In 1740, Albrecht von Haller, for instance, wrote to Linnaeus that

> I wish we could have a European *Flora* written upon your principles. As to a universal System, it seems hardly to be hoped for, except from some man to whom every botanist would communicate his whole stock of observations, and all his dried specimens. Dillenius has great advantages of this kind. I wish he might accomplish something before he dies! The French, so rich in materials, do nothing. Why is this? Much has been said about the posthumous works of Plumier; but on enquiry I find nothing has yet been done with them.<fnref n="24" />

By the time he acquired Plumier's drawings, however, Burman was occupied with the edition of Rumphius's *Herbarium Amboinense*, so the edition was delayed for several years—which provoked Linnaeus's protests (“Are [sic] Plumier's posthumous works

<footnote n="21">²¹ Burman to Linnaeus, Amsterdam, February 8, 1757, in *The Linnaean Correspondence*, linnaeus.c18.net, letter 2151.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">²² Burman to Linnaeus, Amsterdam, July 19, 1757, in *The Linnaean Correspondence*, linnaeus.c18.net, letter 2214: "Ne credas quod in te iratus fuerim ob moram responsionis, sed dolui impressionem Operis tam diu fuisse retardatam."</footnote>

<footnote n="23">²³ “[N]ovas Plumierii plantarum icones, sextique Fasciculi jam jam impressi numerum Tabularum, quas si novo tuo systemati inserere volueris, erit mihi gratissimum; sed scrupulum mihi movit citatio tua *plant: Plumier*: a me editarum, quum si sub ejus nomine meas denominationes novas in tuis Operibus laudes, frustra quaerent Botanici in Operibus a se ipso editis istas Tabularum citationes, an itaque non melius foret ad confusionem vitandam, mihique debitam laudem adsignandam pro inmenso labore, si meas denominationes sub titut *Burm. Amer.* citares. . . . fateor, sunt quidem plantae & icones Plumierii, sed denominationes & descriptiones mihi cometunt,” in *The Linnaean Correspondence*, linnaeus.c18.net, letter 2214.</footnote>

<footnote n="24">²⁴ Haller to Linnaeus, Göttingen, September 26, 1739, quoted in *Correspondence of Linnaeus*, 345. The edition of Plumier's drawings seems to have been planned since their acquisition by Burman in 1738: Haller, for instance, had questioned Linnaeus about that since September 1769: "What is new in the botanic world you know better than I, such as Plumier's posthumous figures," quoted in *Correspondence of Linnaeus*, 291.</footnote>
come out?").<fnref n="25" /> When Burman finally returned to the drawings, he had already read the recently published *Species plantarum* by the “indefatigable” Linnaeus and realized that the Swedish scholar had employed, exactly or with modifications, genera established by Plumier regarding several Caribbean plants.<fnref n="26" /> Indeed, Linnaeus had made extensive use of Plumier’s manuscripts in Leiden, but also of some of his printed books (particularly the *Nova genera*), albeit all of them with a declared reluctance. In the introduction to his *Genera plantarum*, the Swedish naturalist acknowledged with regret the erudite component of botany, a discipline relying to a certain extent on the collection and management of information circulated by other authors. He asserted “not to trust any author with the exception of the famous [Johann Jakob] Dillen [1684-1747] in his *Hortus Elthamensis* [1732], [Hendrik van] Rheede [1636-1691] in his *Hortus Malabaricus* [1678-93], whom I have observed to be most accurate; and *Plumier* on American [plants], who, though I trust him less, was still necessary, where no other authors were available.”<fnref n="27" /> Linnaeus’s lack of reference here to any of Plumier’s printed books also suggests his use of the friar’s manuscripts through copies. Although accepting a bookish dimension to botany, Linnaeus was careful to state clearly that he had relied on other authors only when original specimens were not at hand, and that no absolute confidence could be attributed to these sorts of sources in the study of botany. “I have,” he wrote, “made careful distinctions: I put an *asterisk* * where I was allowed to examine living plants; a *cross* † where I only could get dried plants; and no sign, where I have seen nothing, but had to trust authors and their good drawings.”<fnref n="28" />

Reluctant or not, Linnaeus based about fifty species in his 1753 edition of the *Species plantarum* on Plumier’s drawings, partly or entirely. Reluctant or not, he, too, worked quill in hand, among heaps of paper. He annotated, for instance, an interleaved copy of the

<footnote n="25">²⁵ Linnaeus to Haller, Stockholm, September 15, 1740, in *Correspondence of Linnaeus*, 348.</footnote>

<footnote n="26">²⁶ Burman’s preface to Plumier, *Plantarum Americanarum*, sig. [**v]: “Sed aliis tunc distractus curis, atque occupationibus inpediti quotidianis, in commodius tempus, quidquid hujus negotii esset, differendum censui, praesertim quod tunc totus essem in exornando *Herbario Rumphiano*; quod Opere tándem ad umbilicum perducto, perlegere jam inceperam *Species Plantarum*, ab indefesso nuper *Carolo Linnaeo* editarum. In his autem animadverti, *Plumierianas* hasce Plantas ab Auctore perspicacissimo ad certa sua genera revocatas.”</footnote>

<footnote n="27">²⁷ The works mentioned by Linnaeus are Hendrik Adriaan van Rheede, *Hortus Malabaricus*, 12 vols. (Amsterdam: Sumptibus Joannis van Someben et Joannis van Dyes, Henrici et Viduam Theodori Boom, 1678-1693), and Johann Jakob Dillenius, *Hortus Elthamensis, seu plantarum rariorum quas in horto suo Elthami in Cantio coluit vir ornatissimus et praestantissimus Jacobus Sherard* (London: Sumptibus Auctoris, 1732). Carl Linnaeus, *Genera plantarum eorumque karakteres naturales secundum numerum, figuram, situm, & proportionem omnium fructificationes partium* (Leiden: Apud Conradum Wishoff, 1737), 11. I use the translation by Staffan Müller-Wille and Karen Reeds, “A Translation of Carl Linnaeus’s Introduction to *Genera plantarum* (1737),” *Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences* 38 (2007), 570.</footnote>

<footnote n="28">²⁸ Linnaeus, *Genera plantarum*, trans. S. Müller-Wille and K. Reeds, 570.</footnote>
first edition of his own *Genera plantarum* (1737) while preparing the *Species plantarum*: in those handwritten notes, he referred directly to the *Codex Boerhaavianus* as “Plum. hist. mss.,” a reference also used by Burman and in other duplicates of the friar’s manuscript drawings.<fnref n="29" /> Annotated copies of most of Plumier’s books can also be found in Linnaeus’s personal library, which was sold in the 1780s (after the death of Linnaeus’s son) to the English botanist James Edward Smith (1759-1828): the scion of a wealthy merchant family and friend of Joseph Banks, by then president of the Royal Society, Smith succeed in purchasing Linnaeus’s entire collection—composed not only of his books, but also his manuscripts (including the correspondence) and specimens—in 1783 for 1,000 guineas, after it was offered to Banks and he declined the offer. Smith used Linnaeus’s materials to fund the Linnean Society as an institution independent from the Royal Society (too concerned with “all the branches of philosophy to enter into the minutiae of natural history”).<fnref n="30" /> The Linnean collection includes Plumier’s *Description*, interspersed with comments from the hand of Linnaeus, most of them bringing the friar’s nomenclature up to date with his own binomial system. The plates of Linnaeus’s copy of the *Plantarum Americanarum* also bears almost systematic amendments to the original names of the plants. Linnaeus’s copy of the *Nova genera* was annotated in French and Latin, but by an unidentified reader—a Frenchman perhaps, for he associated each genus with specific “classis” following Tournefort’s system, minutely identified some of them with living specimens in Paris (the *Brunsfelia* at the Jardin du roi, he wrote in a margin, flowered in 1708), and made frequent references to French naturalists (like Augustin Lippi for the *Musa* or Surian in his *Hortus Siccus*, his herbarium, for the *Cornutia*).<fnref n="31" />

Although Burman successfully saw the *Codex Boerhaavianus* into print, it was mostly through the handmade copies themselves that Linnaeus made use of Plumier’s drawings on the flora of the West Indies. This highlights that manuscript information played a role just as important in the mid-eighteenth century as it had about fifty years before: despite Linnaeus’s exhortation against relying on authors, his triumphant system of classification

<footnote n="29">²⁹ Polhill and Stearn, “Linnaeus’s Notes on Plumier Drawings,” 325.</footnote>

<footnote n="30">³⁰ James Edward Smith, “Introductory Discourse on the Rise and Progress of Natural History,” *Transactions of the Linnean Society* 1 (1791), 52; Stephen T. Asma, *Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 118-20.</footnote>

<footnote n="31">³¹ LSLA BL 1157 (*Description*), BL 1156A (*Plantarum Americanarum*), and BL 731 (*Nova genera*). Part of Smith’s acquisition in 1784, their proceeding from Linnaeus’s personal library is indicated in the flyleaf (“Ex. Bibl. Linn. 1784. J.E. Smith.”). The commentor of the copy of the *Nova genera* BL 731 is identified in the flyleaf, but I was not able to decipher the name. Among his notes, consider particularly those to the *Brunsfelia*, p. 12 (“Il a fleuri au Jardin du Roy en 1708”); to the *Musa*, p. 24 (“Mr Lippi assure que la fleur est d’une seule pliece et en Lys”), or to the *Cornutia*, p. 32 (“Surian. Hort. Sicc”).</footnote>
was largely grounded on paper archives and especially on visual representations, such as
those by Plumier, whose material life was often more complicated than has usually been
recognized.

Plumier in England

Plumier never set foot in England (a bit to his regret, as he once assured a fellow
botanist), but his manuscripts and books circulated widely on the other side of the
Channel. What matters to us here are the modes of this circulation: they were copied by
hand and through print, they were translated and pirated, they were cut and pasted, they
were corrected quill in hand and annotated in the margins. This is not to say that Plumier
was a well-diffused author among English botanists: he was not. But the many lives of
his drawings and copperplates in England support my argument that the managing of
paper information was pervasive in the making of natural history; moreover, they provide
an astonishing example of specific material practices surrounding not only the making,
but also the reading of images at the turn of the eighteenth century.

To begin with, another set of duplicates in several volumes reached Oxford in the
early eighteenth century; one of these volumes came into the hands of another, much
better known naturalist and traveler in the Caribbean islands, Sir Hans Sloane.32 That's
hardly a surprise: Sloane's monumental collection encompassed such a number of natural
specimens and substances, antiquities, prints, drawings, books, and manuscripts that it is
actually at the origins of the British Museum, the British Library, and the Natural History
Museum in London.33 Like Boerhaave's codex, the album of duplicates in Sloane's
private library had a complicated history. The volume was previously owned by William
Sherard, whose collection later became the library of the Botanic Garden in Oxford. As
we have seen in previous chapters, Sherard had close links with the Paris circle of
naturalists—he had attended Tournefort's lectures at the Jardin du roi during the late
1680s—and pursued, during most of his lifetime, an ambitious intellectual project
originally proposed to him by Tournefort and envisioned also by Plumier in his youth:
the composition of a new *pinax* to replace Gaspard Bauhin's one of 1623. With this aim

<footnote n="32">32 For want of an opportunity to consult the *Codex Boerhaavianus* at the University of Groningen, Burman's engravings are here compared with this other set of duplicates.</footnote>

<footnote n="33">³³ The British Library launched between 2008 and 2011 the Sloane Printed Books Project, with an online catalog of Sloane's collection of printed books: http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/sloane/. Furthermore, the British Museum, the British Library, and the National History Museum, London, are also currently hosting a collaborative project on Sloane's multifarious collection of natural and artistic objects, printed books, and manuscripts.</footnote>
in mind, Sherard amassed a respectable herbarium and a considerable collection of botanical manuscripts and books. Among these were the copies of Plumier's drawings, which most likely reached him through Vaillant, or perhaps Boerhaave, both lifelong friends of his.

Sherard eventually donated his collection to the Botanical Garden in Oxford, and with it the duplicates of Plumier's drawings, by then bearing the title of *Delineationes Plantarum Americanarum* (Sketches of American Plants).<fnref n="34" /> Two of these albums are still kept at the Sherardian Library in the Bodleian; another one, however, somehow found its way to Sloane's private library and later became part of the British Library.<fnref n="35" /> This last volume contains 137 simple line drawings made at different moments and probably by different hands (the ink and the size and type of the paper of the original drawings, pasted on the pages of the volume, differ from one another). Three different paginations, sometimes even four, coexist in each drawing (some older than others; some on the original pages and others on the leaves on which they were adhered). Just like Boerhaave's codex, these duplicates seem to have been made in Paris shortly after the death of the friar: the nomenclature used for identifying the plants is the one employed during Plumier's time and, with the exception of some allusions to Georg Marcgraf's contribution to the *Historia naturalis Brasiliae* and Tournefort's *Institutiones*, virtually all the drawings include references to Plumier. Some of these handwritten references are to his *Nova genera*, some others to the catalog of the plants printed at the end of the same volume and seemingly inventorying the totality of specimens he described in America; most of them, however, cite the volumes and pages of the manuscript ("Plumier Hist. Manuscr.") mentioned also in Burman's edition and Linnaeus's interleaved copy of the

<footnote n="34">³⁴ Dillenius, the first holder of the chair of botany endowed by Sherard at Oxford, consulted these duplicates. Johann Jakob Dillenius to Linnaeus, Oxford, August 29, 1738, quoted *Correspondence of Linnaeus*, vol. 2, 110-1: "All Plumier's *Clusiae* have, doubtless, rigid, thick, smooth leaves, without serratures. I have seen those of but two species, knowing the others from Plumier's drawings only, according to which they are all different, and by no means the same species. Plumier, as well as you yourself after him, asserts to the fruit to be pulpy." Perhaps Sherard had in mind an edition of Plumier's drawings: after all, Sherard was (like Burman) a prolific editor of some of his colleagues' works. He was involved in the posthumous publication of Sébastien Vaillant's *Botanicon parisienne* (a thorough account of the flora in the Parisian area illustrated by Claude Aubriet and bequeathed to Boerhaave) and edited Paul Hermann's *Paradisus Batavus*, a treatise published by the Elzevier house and profusely illustrated by the author, who was an accomplished draftsman himself.</footnote>

<footnote n="35">³⁵ Bodl. MSS 189-90 and BL Sloane MS 4017. I have not consulted the volumes at the Sherardian collection, but used the *Catalogue of Manuscripts Belonging to Oxford University Department of Botany, Deposited in the Bodleian Library Oxford, 1957, and referenced Mss. Sherard 1-478* (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 1953), 11, in which they are described as of 332 and 349 leaves respectively.</footnote>
*Genera plantarum*—certainly the original volumes kept at the Paris Academy of Science from which the Dutch and Oxford copies had been made.<fnref n="36" />

Interestingly, the album of the *Delineationes plantarum Americanarum* is not the only
manuscript item by Plumier in Sloane's personal library: a particularly remarkable one is a
word-by-word manuscript translation of Plumier's first book into English. In the form of
a small duodecimo volume of a little more than a hundred pages and bound in Sloane's
coat of arms, the translation is undated and unsigned, written in a tiny, cramped
handwriting and bearing the English title *Description of American plants with their figures*. It
includes no printed or manuscript images, but a few annotations (some in Latin) referred
in the text to works of other authors, such as Leonard Plukenet's *Almagestum botanicum*
(1696).<fnref n="37" /> The author of this translation is unknown (although it has been attributed to
James Petiver),<fnref n="38" /> as is whether or not it was made with the aim of publication.

Some attempts indeed were made at the very beginning of the eighteenth century for publishing an English edition of Plumier's works, and these took place around the figure of Hans Sloane. One of the most enthusiastic advocates of the French friar was a contemporary of his, the Dutch physician Pieter Hotton (1648-1709) of the University of Leiden, the successor of Paul Hermann at the chair of botany. Hotton became fellow of the Royal Society in 1703 and a champion of Ray's method in the Netherlands: he supervised the publication of Ray's *Methodus emendata* and was said to have applied the classification system to the arrangement of the plants and trees in the Leiden botanical garden. Hotton also was a correspondent of Sloane, to whom he wrote on several occasions about Plumier's works: in 1704, for instance, he requested Sloane's help for publishing the *Nova genera* (probably an English translation) with Samuel Smith and Benjamin Walford in London—printers of the Royal Society and of books such as Petiver's *Musei petiveriani*, Ray's *Synopsis methodica*, or Newton's *Optiks*. <fnref n="39" /> Although Hotton's idea never came to fruition, he kept on writing to Sloane about the Minim's

<footnote n="36">³⁶ BL Sloane MS 4017 “Delineationes plantarum Americanarum.”</footnote>

<footnote n="37">³⁷ BL Sloane MS 2337 “C. Plumier A Description of American Plants”; Leonard Plukenet, *Almagestum botanicum, sive phytographiae Plukenetianae onomasticon methodo sintheticá digestum* (London: Sumptibus autoris, 1696).</footnote>

<footnote n="38">³⁸ Samuel Ayscough, *A Catalogue of the Manuscripts Preserved in the British Museum Hitherto Undescribed*, vol. 2 (London: John Rivington, 1782), 669.</footnote>

<footnote n="39">³⁹ Pieter Hotton to Sloane, Leiden, August 22, 1704, in BL Sloane MS 4039, fol. 347-9.</footnote>
work: he described to him the *Traité des fougères* soon after its publication and inquired about the death of the friar until as late as 1707.<fnref n="40" />

Apparently, it was also Hotton who sent a copy of the *Nova genera* to another English naturalist in the circle of Sloane, one who was instrumental to the reception of Plumier's images in England: the apothecary James Petiver (c. 1665-1718).<fnref n="41" /> Petiver is an interesting figure in the global commerce of natural knowledge: from his shop in Aldersgate Street, he learned to capitalize on both the support of Sloane (to whom he bequeathed his collection of specimens) and on the English overseas commercial and military expansion. The apothecary actually became a pivotal broker within a long-distance network of natural historical information exchange—he even printed some “brief directions for the easie making and preserving collections of all natural curiosities,” giving instructions for the conservation and transport of animal, plant, and mineral specimens.<fnref n="42" /> On the other side of the Channel, his correspondents and suppliers included Tournefort, “Botanick Professor of the Royal Garden at Paris.” Plumier himself was not on the main list of suppliers displayed at the beginning of his *Musei Petiveriani* (1695), but acknowledged “that Curious Botanist” for having sent to him a few American species via Tournefort.<fnref n="43" /> These American specimens, together with others also collected by the friar and sent via Vaillant, eventually entered Sloane’s extensive herbarium (fig. 6.2).<fnref n="44" />

<footnote n="40">⁴⁰ Hotton to Sloane, Leiden, November 10, 1705, and January 11, 1707, in BL Sloane MS 4040, fol. 86-7 and 291-2 respectively.</footnote>

<footnote n="41">⁴¹ This is at least what he tells Sloane: Hotton to Sloane, Leiden, December 21, 1706, in BL Sloane MS 4040, 274-5.</footnote>

<footnote n="42">⁴² Petiver, *Brief Directions for the Easie Making, and Preserving Collections of all Natural Curiosities* (London, [1709?]). On Hotton’s sending the *Nova genera* to Petiver see Hotton to Sloane, Leiden, December 21, 1706, in BL Sloane MS 4040, 274-5. On Petiver see Raymond P. Stearns, “James Petiver, Promoter of Natural Science, c. 1663-1718,” *Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society* 62 (1952), 243-365; Marjorie Swann, *Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England* (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 90-6; James Delbourgo, “Listing People,” *Isis* 103 (2012), 735-42, and Kathleen S. Murphy, “Collecting Slave Traders: James Petiver, Natural History, and the British Slave Trade,” *The William and Mary Quarterly* 70, no. 4 (2013), 637-70. On Petiver’s role in the exchange and circulation of specimens, letters, and books, consider his instructions to George Harris in 1698: “Procure Correspondents for me however you come, and take directions how to write them, and procure something from them you stay,” in Petiver to George Harris, October 18, 1698, in BL Sloane MS 3333, fol. 235-6, quoted in Susan Scott Parrish, “Diasporic African Sources of Enlightenment Knowledge,” in *Science and Empire in the Atlantic World*, ed. James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew (New York: Routledge, 2008), 289.</footnote>

<footnote n="43">⁴³ The *Darea Americana major pubescens* and the *Darea Americana Lichenoides*. Petiver, *Musei Petiveriani centuria prima, rariora naturae* (London: Ex Officina S. Smith & B. Walford, 1695), 47 and 73.</footnote>

<footnote n="44">⁴⁴ The *Lycopodium cernuum* L., labeled “Americ. Vail.” and mentioned by Petiver in the *Philosophical Transactions* 23 (1702), 1451: “Monsieur Vaillant . . . hath also sent it to me collected by that Curious and Acurate Botanist Pere Plumier.” I am greatly indebted to Charlie Jarvis for taking and sending to me reproductions of these two specimens, now kept at the London Natural History Museum as H.S. 329 and H.S. 163. See also J. E. Dandy, *The Sloane Herbarium: An Annotated List to the Horti Sicci Composing It* (London: British Museum, 1958), 188, and http://www.nhm.ac.uk/research-curation/scientific-resources/collections/botanical-collections/sloane-herbarium/.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_100.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 6.2. Dried specimens of the *Trichomanes membranaceum* L. (left) and the *Lycopodium cernuum* L. (right) collected by Plumier in the West Indies and sent to Petiver via Tournefort and Vaillant, respectively. They eventually entered Sloane's herbarium. (Natural History Museum, London.)</figcaption></figure>

Not only the specimens, but also the drawings by Plumier circulated among London naturalists like Sloane and Petiver despite the fact that, curiously, there seems not to have been direct contact between the friar and these foreign scholars, with the exception of those who visited him in his Parisian convent. For a certain time, for instance, one of Petiver's correspondents in Paris was David Krieg, who had stayed in London for some time with the apothecary, through whom he met Ray and Sloane and joined the Temple Coffee House Botany Club. The coffee house at the Temple was an informal assembly for natural history funded in the late seventeenth century and a central space of sociability for naturalists from England and abroad (like Andreas Gundelsheimer, the physician who accompanied Tournefort in his travel to the Levant).<fnref n="45" /> Krieg had

<footnote n="45">⁴⁵ Andreas Gundelsheimer to Sloane, Paris, September 27, 1698, in BL Sloane MS 4037, fol. 130-1: "Faites mes tres humbles complimens a toute la compagnie de votre coffeehous." On the Temple Coffee House Botany Club, see Margaret Riley, "The Club at the Temple Coffee House Revisited," *Archives of natural history* 33, no. 1 (2006), 90-100. On coffee houses as a place of scientific sociability, see Robert Iliffe, "Material Doubts: Hooke, Artisan Culture and the Exchange of Information in 1670s London," *The British Journal for the History of Science* 28, no. 3 (1995), 285-318, and Larry Stewart, "Other Centers of Calculation,</footnote>
encounter the friar in his convent at Place Royale, where he was shown the collection of drawings on American flora and fauna, and at the gatherings of the Parisian circle of naturalists that took place at the Bibliothèque du roi in rue Vivienne. In one of those meetings, the German met French savants like the botanist Sébastien Vaillant or the chemist Etienne-François Geoffroy (elected that same year to the Royal Society), as well as the friar Plumier, who “promised to write to you & to send you some things,” Krieg informed Petiver. “He sayd; he would fain make a voyage into England to see you & Dr. Ray, but would not change his habit, in which could not venture to go there [to England].”<fnref n="46" /> Plumier might not have been able to set foot in England with the habit of a Catholic regular order, but his images came to Petiver’s hands nonetheless, mainly thanks to Tournefort’s mediation.<fnref n="47" />

The copy of the *Nova genera* owned by Petiver, now extant at the Cambridge University Library,<fnref n="48" /> is worth describing for a number of reasons, particularly at the material level. Petiver made a sort of scrapbook out of the volume. Remember that the *Nova genera* was organized in two parts: in the first half were the written descriptions and lists of specimens for each genus, and in the second the engravings. Petiver had some of the figures in the book’s copperplates copied by etching, and he then carefully cut and pasted these copies next to the written descriptions in the first part of the volume, and sometimes even next to the plates they duplicated (fig. 6.3).<fnref n="49" /> Like the Madrid copy of the same book, but through a different strategy, the Cambridge volume puts the images and text of the volume side by side.

In his copy of the *Nova genera*, Petiver also included handwritten annotations cross-referencing Plumier’s text and images to two other works. The first, with the

<footnote>or, Where the Royal Society Didn’t Cout: Commerce, Coffee-Houses and Natural Philosophy in Early Modern London,” *The British Journal for the History of Science* 32, no. 2 (1999), 133-53.</footnote>

<footnote n="46">⁴⁶ BL MS Sloane 4063, fol. 149.</footnote>

<footnote n="47">⁴⁷ See Tournefort to Sloane, Paris, April 10, 1698, in BL MS Sloane 4037, fol. 55 (“Le Père Plumier est arrivé des isles d’Amérique tout chargé de plantes extraordinaries”), or Tournefort to Sloane, Paris, January 24, 1703, in MS Sloane 4039, fol. 77 (“Le Père Plumier va faire imprimer le Catalogue de toutes celles [plants] qu’il a veues en Amérique, ce sera un beau recueil”).</footnote>

<footnote n="48">⁴⁸ CUL CCB.47.76.</footnote>

<footnote n="49">⁴⁹ On scrapbooks and science, see James A. Secord, “Scrapbook Science: Composite Caricatures in Late Georgian England,” in *Figuring It Out: Science, Gender, and Visual Culture*, ed. Ann B. Shteir and Bernard Lightman (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2006), 164-91, and Clare Pettitt, “Taxonomy and Travel in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Scrapbooks,” in *Travel Writing, Visual Culture, and Form, 1760-1900*, ed. Mary Henes and Brian H. Murray (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 21-41. There are also other, minor manuscript inscriptions by Petiver in the Cambridge copy of the *Nova genera*, such as an “A” placed next to the name of some species, a sign that he used in other works to indicate that those plants were also in Europe (“Litera in margine prosita indicat plantas illas quibus praesigitur, aut Angliae Indigiens ese, aut in Agris passim cultas,” *Hortus siccus pharmaceuticus* [London: 1715], 1).</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_101.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 6.3. Pages from the copy of the *Nova genera* owned and modified by Petiver. Note the annotations and the intaglio copies of some of the images in Plumier’s engravings, cut and pasted by Petiver next to the volume’s text and plates. (Cambridge University Library)</figcaption></figure>

abbreviation “Jam. Cat.” and a page number, referred to the catalog of plants on the island of Jamaica published in 1696 by Sloane.<fnref n="50" /> The second set of annotations pointed to Petiver’s own work: he systematically referred each genus (in the descriptions, as well as in the index and the plates) to one of his own paper museum, the *Gazophilacii naturae & artis*. Just like his previous *Musei Petiveriani* (1695-1703), the *Gazophilacii* consisted of lists of species of a wide variety of plants, insects, birds, and shells. While the *Musei* was organized in “centuriae,” or groups of a hundred species, the *Gazophilacii* were arranged in decades (“decas,” or “decadis” in the plural). Each decade, in the form of a fascicule, had ten intaglio plates, each with several figures depicting the species enumerated in the list preceding them. Petiver published up to ten decades, between 1702 and 1709 (that is, until the 100th plate), but had others ready for publication. These, however, did not come into being until long after the death of the author, in a 1767 volume including both the

<footnote n="50">⁵⁰ Sloane, *Catalogus plantarum quae in Insula Jamaica sponte proveniunt, vel vulgò coluntur, cum earundem synonymis & locis natalibus; adjectis aliis quibusdam quae in Insulis Maderae, Barbados, Nieves, & Sancti Christophori nascuntur* (London: Impensis D. Brown, 1696).</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_102.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 6.4. Plate in one of Petiver's unpublished *Gazophilacium* reproducing most of the figures in the engravings of the *Nova genera*. (Smithsonian Libraries, Washington, DC.)</figcaption></figure>

printed and unpublished decades.<fnref n="51" /> The handwritten references by Petiver in his copy of the *Nova genera* refer to four of these posthumous plates: a first number indicated a plate from 1 to 4 (corresponding to the plates 119 to 122, all entitled “American Plants, &c.”) and the second a specific figure within the plate.⁵² These are precisely the figures Petiver copied from, and then cut and pasted in, his copy of the *Nova genera* (fig. 6.4).

The copy of Plumier's *Nova genera* owned and altered by Petiver in a scrapbook-like manner confirms the central role that paper records (printed and manuscript, images and texts alike) had not only in the overseas circulation of natural historical information, but also in the daily making of knowledge on the natural world. The figure and work of Petiver has been studied for his broker role in long-distance networks of specimen and object collecting: his “Brief directions” are a good example of this. But his copy of the *Nova genera* at the Cambridge University Library, as well as his use of the images already printed, such as Plumier's, makes him an interesting case for understanding the salience

<footnote n="51">51 Jacobi Pettiveri *Opera, Historiam Naturalem Spectantia: Containing Several Thousand Figures of Birds, Beasts, Fish, Reptiles, Insects, Shells, Corals, and Fossils*, vol. 1 (London: Printed for John Millan, 1767).
52 Petiver, *Opera*, and pl. 119-122.</footnote>
of paper records in the making, transfer, and management of natural historical information during the late seventeenth century and well into the eighteenth century.

In the first place, the copy of the *Nova genera* proves the pervasiveness of books and printed materials (not only specimens) in communities of exchange, such as that at the center of which were Petiver and Sloane. The great collector Sloane, for instance, not only accumulated a vast herbarium and more than twenty thousand medals and coins, but also a colossal library of half a hundred thousand printed books, manuscripts, prints, maps, and miniatures that he had gathered over seventy years (he died aged 93).<fnref n="53" /> His correspondence with Tournefort offers a good example of this. Sloane had attended Tournefort's lectures at the Jardin du roi in 1683, while visiting Paris and Montpellier with the English physician Tancred Robinson during his youth: he and Petiver had kept a lifelong commerce of letters, specimens, and books with the French professor since then.<fnref n="54" /> Tournefort sent them dried plants collected during his trips to Spain, Portugal, and the Levant, as well as French books, among them his own.<fnref n="55" /> Books, in fact, seem to have largely dominated the exchange between the English naturalists around Sloane and the Temple Club, on the one hand, and the Parisian scholars around Tournefort, on the other. The exchange of printed materials across the Channel was actually intense. Gundelsheimer, for instance, wrote to Sloane in 1698 about the shipment of books printed in France that he had commanded to him and to Tournefort (ranging from the *Histoire des plantes qui naissent aux environs de Paris* to printed catalogs and treatises to “little papers that will serve to amuse the gentlemen at the Temple coffee house”) and reporting on new publications, including the fortunes of Plumier's book on ferns.<fnref n="56" />

<footnote n="53">⁵³ M. A. E. Nickson, “Hans Sloane, Book Collector and Cataloguer, 1682-98,” *British Library Journal* 14, no. 1 (1988), 52-89, gives useful tools for navigating the now scattered paper collection of Sloane.</footnote>

<footnote n="54">⁵⁴ Jean Jacquot, “Sir Hans Sloane and French Men of Science,” *Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London* 10, no. 2 (1953), 85-98.</footnote>

<footnote n="55">⁵⁵ See Tournefort's letters to Sloane, like BL Sloane MS 4037, fol. 44 (“[Andreas Gundelsheimer] vous remettra six estampes des plantes que j'ai fait graver pour le premier volume de l'hisotire de l'academie royalle, et j'aurai l'honneur de vous envoyer ce volume aussitôt qu'il sera imprimé ce qui ne tardera pas car je veux le faire commencer incessamment”), fol. 55 (“Je vous enverray par Mr Lister la cucurbita monomotapensis cortice tomentoso et mon histoire des plantes des environs de Paris qui sera bien tot finie”), and fol. 211 (J'ay eu l'honneur de vous envoyer . . . l'histoire de l'academie royalle des sciences composée en latin par Mr Duhamel. . . . Je vous envoye aussi la premiere feuille de mon ouvrage latin qui a pour titre Institutines rei herbariae”); MS 4059, fol. 84 (“je vous envoyerois quelques bagatelles que iay ramassé en Espagne et en Portugal”) and fol. 111 (“J'aurois bien souhaité qu'il eut peu vous porter mon livre mails il vous assurera qu'il s'en faut encore sept ou huit feuilles qu'il ne soit fini, ainsi vous ne le recevrez que dans le commencement de l'année prochaine”), or MS 4063, fol. 11 (“Nous voicy arrivez pour nous embarquer pour la Candie. Nous esperons Mr Gundelsheimer et moy trouver des tres belles choses et je vous assure que nous vous en ferons part. J'ay laissé à Mr Geoffroy un examplaire de mon livre intitulé Institutiones Rei Herbariae”).</footnote>

<footnote n="56">⁵⁶ Gundelsheimer to Sloane, Paris, September 27, 1698, in BL Sloane, MS 4037, fol. 130-1.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_103.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 6.5. (left) Plate VI from James Petiver's *Pteri-graphia Americana*. (Real Jardín Botánico, Madrid) (opposite) Copperplates in the *Traité des fougères* from which four of the figures of Plate VI (fig 7, 8, 15, and 16 – third and fourth column in the second and fourth rows) were drawn. (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.) Note that the first figure in the second row is the one copied from the *Lingua cervina* analyzed in chapter 5 (see fig. 5.12). The comments in Petiver's plate ("rare," "on moist rocks," for the *Lingua cervina*) were also drawn from the *Traité des fougères*. Petiver, however, does not refer to Plumier in this figure (or in any other, for that matter), but the third volume of the *Historia plantarum* by John Ray.</figcaption></figure>

In the second place, the example of Petiver also corroborates the consequence of material forms of appropriation and paper management in the daily work of naturalists: copying, either by means of paper and ink (like Plumier) or through print itself (like Petiver), was the most visible of these forms as far as images were concerned.

More broadly, the example calls attention to the fact that those scholars who reemployed Plumier's images for their own purposes (whether these uses took the form of editions like Burman's or copies like d'Agoty's or Petiver's) had made it their business to publish compilations of images by other authors. Petiver was, after all, a maker of images no less than a naturalist. The initially unpublished plates of the *Gazophilacii* are not his only copy of Plumier's printed images: he also used the friar's images in a series of twenty copperplate engravings entitled *Pteri-graphia* [from the Greek πτεροί, “fern”]
<figure><img src="image_104.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_105.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_106.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_107.png" /></figure>
*Americana . . . ex Insulis nostris Charibbaeis* and printed, seemingly by the apothecary himself, in 1722.<sup>57</sup> The *Pteri-graphia* is yet another sort of paper museum by Petiver, following roughly the same structure as those mentioned above. The plates were accompanied by three pages of written text, also carved or etched in copper rather than printed with moveable types. The text listed 506 natural species, namely 179 sorts of ferns, and several dozen kinds of mosses, of corals and submarine sponges, and of shelled mollusks and insects. These items came up to about 400, most of them (but not all) depicted on the twenty plates that followed the list: each item referred to the number of the plate and the figure in which it was pictured.<sup>58</sup>

The plates in Petiver's *Pteri-graphia* deserve a particularly focused attention. Many of the plates were signed by Sutton Nichols (fl. 1680-1740), a London artist known mainly for his architectural elevations and bird's-eye urban views.<sup>59</sup> Sutton signed most of the plates as the carver ("sculp."), and only in the last one did he inscribe his name also as the draftsman ("delin. et sculp."). The interest of the *Pteri-graphia*'s engravings for our purpose is that the large majority of the figures in them (around fifteen figures per plate) were reduced copies of those in Plumier's *Traité des fougères*—mostly ferns, but also mushrooms, corals, and algae (fig. 6.5). In Petiver's engravings, the figures followed the order neither of those in Plumier's book nor in Petiver's own list at the beginning of the *Pteri-graphia*. The names given by the English apothecary to the species were not those used originally in Plumier's book, and they were organized according to Ray's system, not Tournefort's, as in the *Traité des fougères*. A double net of cross-references linked the figures in the plates with the items in the list, and the listed items with the figures.<sup>60</sup> Apart from these multiple numerations, other references were carved around the figures: mention was occasionally made to John Ray's third volume of the *Historia plantarum* ("Ray 3"); comments were included on the rarity of the species and their environments ("rare," "in all woods," "often in woods," "in woods plentifully," "by rivers," "runs

<footnote n="57"><sup>57</sup> Petiver, *Pteri-graphia Americana icones continens plusquam 400 filicum variarum specierum*. *Viz.* *Arborescentes, scandentes, spinosas, floriferas, aliasque perraras; nec non muscos, lichenes, fungos, corallia, spongias, aliaq. Non pauca submarina cui adiiciuntur crustacea, testacea, aliaque animalia ferè omina ex insulis nostris Charibbaeis viz Antego Barbados, St. Christophers, Nevis, Jamaica, & figuris Aenaeis, Folio incisis. XX Tabulis. A Jacopo Petiver, Soc. Regal. S. Lond.* [London, 1712].</footnote>

<footnote n="58"><sup>58</sup> Roughly the last hundred items of the list were included into a section labeled "American shells in our Museum, whose figures are not depicted in the *Gazophilacio Naturae*," and they were not depicted in the plates. These last hundred items included references to Petiver's gathering of specimens that eventually integrated Sloane's collection upon the apothecary's death.</footnote>

<footnote n="59"><sup>59</sup> Lucy Peltz, "Nicholls, Sutton (fl. 1680-1740)," *Oxford Dictionary of National Biography* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/20115</footnote>

<footnote n="60"><sup>60</sup> Both the plates and the figures on them were twice numbered (the numeration to which the list referred and another one that sent back to the list (introduced by a "C." of "catalogue")).</footnote>
about trees,” “on trunks of trees”), all of them equally taken from the descriptions in
Plumier’s *Traité des fougères*.

To better understand the way in which Petiver copied and reframed Plumier’s
images of ferns, consider the example of the *Lingua cervina*, whose original plate in
Plumier’s book has already been analyzed in the previous chapter. The engraving by
Petiver included, first, a reference to the page and species entry in Ray’s book (“Ray 3, p.
52, 15”), where the English botanist used the same name given by Plumier (“Lingua
cervina foliis acutis, & ad oras summitatum pulverulentis,” or “hart’s tongue acute with
powdery edges”) and attributed its description to the friar; Petiver, in contrast, gave
another name to the species, “Phyllitis lineata, hinc inde dentata,” and no mention was
made to Plumier—no mention was made to the friar in the entire *Pteri-graphia*, for that
matter.<fnref n="61" /> As all the other figures, Petiver’s version of the *Lingua cervina* was a reduced and
simplified copy in etching of the original in the *Traité des fougères*. Petiver’s figure included
two other written references on the plate itself, “rare” and “on moist rocks,” both drawn
also from the *Traité des fougères*, where Plumier noted that “I have found this Plant on the
Island of St Domingue, but rarely, & always against moist rocks.”<fnref n="62" />

The *Pteri-graphia* was, therefore, a graphic and (to a certain extent) written synthesis
of Plumier’s *Traité des fougères*: it copied in a reduced and slightly simplified form the
figures of the latter, comprised them into composite plates of four rows and four
columns, and transformed the voluminous, 170-plate folio published at the Imprimerie
royale (whose circulation was necessarily limited both by its format and its not being
originally a marketable product) into a short pamphlet of twenty-three plates (twenty of
images and three of text).

Petiver’s *Pteri-graphia Americana* was a synthesis, however, that crucially lacked
mentioning its own source. The friar was not mentioned even once in the whole
pamphlet: no reference was made to any of his books or manuscripts, although there
were to Ray’s and Sloane’s. Likewise, Plumier’s original nomenclature was replaced with a
new one. While he did not mention the (by then deceased) author of the drawings, he
took good care in carving the name of some other people. Nearly half of the plates were

<footnote n="61">⁶¹ Petiver, *Pteri-graphia*, pl. 6; Plumier, *Traité des fougères de l’Amérique* (Paris: de l’Imprimerie royale, 1705), 116, pl. 132, and John Ray, *Historia platarum*, vol. 3 (London: Apud Sam. Smith and Benj. Walford, 1704). Ray was obviously not referring to Plumier’s *Traité des fougères*, which appeared a year later than the third volume of the English naturalist, but to the friar’s *Description*, where the same species of *Lingua cervina* was treated, p. 28, pl. 40.</footnote>

<footnote n="62">⁶² Plumier, *Traité des fougères*, 116: “J’ay trouvé cette Plante dans l’Isle de Saint Domingue, mais rarement, & toûjours contre les rochers humides.”</footnote>
"humbly dedicated by Iames Petiver, F.R.S." to some of his living correspondents and suppliers: Reverend George Jago (d. 1726), Vicar of Haberton; a certain Captain Richard Canning (d. 1726) of the Royal Navy; a Christopher Eglinger, physician in Basel; the renowned Dutch apothecary and collector Albertus Seba (1665-1736); the Galilean naturalist and experimentalist Antonio Vallisneri (1661-1730) in Padua; the Spanish apothecary Joan Salvador (b. 1683); the Puritan pastor Joseph Lord (1672-1748) in the British colony of Carolina; a Captain Thomas Walduck in Barbados, and Hannah English Williams (d. 1722), also in Carolina. As in the case of Burman's engravings, Petiver's plates gave to Plumier's drawings yet another life within a new network of social and intellectual exchange.

So, how can we understand this unacknowledged appropriation in print of
somebody else's visual materials? The easy answer to this question would be one in terms
of piracy, but this is a slippery concept; one, moreover, that happened to be widely
dynamic and malleable across time and space.<fnref n="63" /> To begin with, the printing conditions
under which Petiver brought out the *Pteri-grahia* are not clear: as in the case of the *Musei
Petiveriani* or the *Gazophilacii naturae & artis*, we do not know much about who printed it
or at the expenses of whom (perhaps Petiver himself). It is also not entirely clear whether
any of these paper museums were printed with commercial purposes in mind. However,
it is worth remembering, as Adrian Johns has pointed out, that copyright policies did not
see the light of day until the late eighteenth century, and the general concept of
"intellectual property" only crystalized in the nineteenth century.<fnref n="64" /> It was in the second
half of the seventeenth century, however, that the notion of piracy emerged. The English
trader and writer Daniel Defoe (1660-1731), for instance, authored "an Essay on the
Regulation of the Press" in 1704 (a year before the printing of the *Traité des fougères*) in
which he outlined the delicate boundaries of the "most injurious piece of Violence"
when somebody "robs Men of the due Reward of Industry, the Prize of Learning, and
the Benefit of their Studies."<fnref n="65" /> Defoe included among these forms of piracy printing
practices that were well-extended on both sides of the Channel, and one of them
consisted of abridgements or reeditions "in smaller Print, and meaner Paper, in order to

<footnote n="63">⁶³ The fundamental book on the topic of piracy in the book trade is Adrian Johns, *Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutemberg to Gates* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), esp. chap. 1-7. Johns, however, focuses on written culture, not images.</footnote>

<footnote n="64">⁶⁴ Johns, *Piracy*, 497-518.</footnote>

<footnote n="65">⁶⁵ Daniel Defoe, *An Essay on the Regulation of the Press* (London: n.p., 1704), 19, referred to in Johns, *Piracy*, 497.</footnote>
sell them lower than the first Impression”—a description that could fit well the *Pteri-graphia*, if we knew more about its commercial distribution.

For the moment being, it is worth stressing one aspect in particular in the story of Petiver's reemployment of Plumier's images of ferns. While the role of scholars like the English apothecary in gathering specimens and natural objects has been widely acknowledged, the part they played in another sort of accumulation has been much less stressed: that of paper information, particularly of a visual kind, as a pivotal component of the natural historical work in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as— and this was much more important—the editorial business linked to it. The drawings with which Plumier secured royal patronage and intellectual credit re-became a commodity in Petiver's hands, reshaped to fit into a new environment.

c3

Still another set of copies from Plumier's manuscript drawings circulated through London in the late eighteenth century. Between May 8 and 19, 1794, Leigh and Sotheby auctioned part of the library of John Stuart, third Earl of Bute and Prime Minister to king George III. Fond of natural history and natural philosophy, Bute became a patron of science and even printed at his own expense a massive illustrated work on British flora in nine volumes.<fnref n="66" /> He also created an extensive collection of natural specimens, scientific instruments, manuscripts, books, and prints.<fnref n="67" /> The auction of 1794 was only devoted to the “botanical and natural history part of the library,” and this alone took ten days to sell. “His Lordship's noble collection” included more than 1,200 items, among which were not only printed books, but also “coloured drawings in the natural history.” Of Plumier, there were two copies of his *Nova genera*, two others of the *Description* and one of the *Traité des fougères*. Among the “books of drawings”—which included about eighty volumes of manuscript drawings, from the originals of Jacob and Johann Philipp Breyne's *Flora capensis* to those at the basis of Bute's own publication—five volumes were attributed to Plumier. Entitled “Plants and Flowers,” the five volumes amounted to more than three hundred images “neatly drawn and coloured, mounted and bordered.”<fnref n="68" />

<footnote n="66">⁶⁶ *Botanical Tables, containing the different families of British plants* (n.p. 1785), a work “more splendid that useful” according to William Clarke [*Repertorium Bibliographicum: Or, Some Account of the Most Celebrated British Library* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014 [1819], 192] of which only sixteen copies were printed.</footnote>

<footnote n="67">⁶⁷ G. L'E. Turner, "The Auction Sales of the Earl of Bute's Instruments, 1793," *Annals of Science* 23, no. 3 (1967), 213-42.</footnote>

<footnote n="68">⁶⁸ *A Catalogue of the Botanical and Natural History Part of the Library of the Late John, Earl of Bute. Including his Lordship's Noble Collection of Coloured Drawings in Natural History* (London: printed by the authors, 1794), 52.</footnote>
Either at the 1794 auction or later, those five volumes ended up in the hands of Joseph Banks (1743-1720), from where they passed to the British Museum and, then, to the Natural History Museum in London, where they are kept today under the title “Plants by Plumier.” The drawings are in very different stages of realization (some simply sketched in pencil, others finished in ink, others still even colored), pasted onto the pages of the volumes within a colored frame, and including on occasion several nomenclatures (from the original by the friar to the Linnean one).<fnref n="69" /> The story of how these drawings got into Bute’s collection is obscure, but it seems clear that these were also copies of the same drawings from which those in Boerhaave’s, Sherards’, and Sloane’s collections came. It is possible to compare, for instance, the manuscript images in Bute’s volumes with those printed under Burman’s supervision in Amsterdam. The image of the *Rivina floribus coryndrosis* (basketvine), for instance, appears in Bute’s albums drawn in ink and colored (although pencil lines can be detected beneath); the exact image is the one published by Burman in the *Plantarum Americanarum*, although inverted—the result of having manuscript images directly transcribed onto the plate (fig. 6.6).

It seems, therefore, that manuscript copies of Plumier’s original drawings (either those at the Academy of Sciences or those at the Minims’ convent, or both) were made and circulated between Paris, the Netherlands, and London. What is less clear is who made those copies, from which images in particular, and how many of these volumes were transiting across Europe. Another set of duplicates, for instance, appears to have been on the market at the dawn of the nineteenth century: these eight folio volumes, also with the title *Delineationes plantarum Americanarum* and dated between 1689 and 1697, were sold as part of the library of Charles L’Héritier de Brutelle (1746-1800), a Parisian magistrate and botanist.<fnref n="70" /> This colossal collection also included the totality of the Minim’s printed books: the *Description*, both the first edition (in Latin and without texts)

<footnote n="69">⁶⁹ NHM BAUER UNIT SHELF H 1-5. The drawings in the five volumes include annotations referring to both Burman's *Plantarum Americanarum* and the *Nova genera*. Curiously, the copies of both works at the London Natural History Museum also include pencil annotations referring both to each other and to the volumes of the "Plants by Plumier." I was not able to establish the exact origins of any of the two printed works (although that of the *Nova genera* comes from the library of the Minim convent in Vitry-le-François, a town in the Champagne region), nor the approximate date of the pencil cross-references. They were perhaps made either while at Lord Bute's library, when they integrated Bank's collection, or either after they entered into the Natural History Museum. The *Nova genera* bears the classmark Special Books 581.9 (79P9.9) PLU, and the *Plantarum Americanarum* 581.9 (79P9.9) PLU F.</footnote>

<footnote n="70">⁷⁰ *Catalogue des livres de la bibliothèque de feu C. L. L'Héritier de Brutelle* (Paris: chez Guillaume Debure, l'ainé, 1802), vi: "L'on trouvera quelques premières éditions d'une belle conservation, des Manuscrits précieux & inédits, sur la Botanique par le Père Plumier, M. Patris, médecin, & autres," and 160: "1503. Copie des</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_108.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_109.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 6.6. (above) Engraving of the *Rivina floribus coryndrosis* (basketvine) in Burman's edition of the *Plantarum Americanarum* by Plumier. (left) The same species in an ink-and-watercolor drawing in one of the five volumes owned by the Earl of Bute. Note that Burman's engraving inverts the manuscript image. (Natural History Museum, London.)</figcaption></figure>

manuscrits du père Plumier, sur la botanique. 8 vol. in-fol. br. en cart. Gr Pap. Ces manuscrits, qui n'ont pas été imprimés, sont très-Précieux.”
of the *Filicetum* and the bilingual version of the *Fougères*, the *Nova Genera*, and Burman's ten fascicules.<fnref n="71" /> Although the destiny of the “unpublished and precious” albums is unclear, L'Héritier was acquainted with distinguished Linnean naturalists in London, like the distinguished Joseph Banks or Aylmer Bourke Lambert. The latter was a Fellow of the Royal Society and one of the first members of the Linnean Society, to whose library he donated, at about the same time as his friend L'Héritier's death, the large book of tracings on onionskin paper of Plumier's drawings—these, however, are said to be copies of other copies kept at Oxford.<fnref n="72" />

Be that as it may, the catalog of L’Héritier’s library demonstrates that manuscript copies of Plumier’s unpublished drawings (most of them in onionskin paper) were still circulating at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when a minor interest in the Minim’s papers still existed among naturalists. At about the same time, for instance, a practically unknown French naval officer and botanist (curiously) named Aubert Aubert du Petit Thouars (1758-1831) wrote a natural history treatise of the flora of the islands of France and Borbon (now Mauritius and Réunion) and dedicated one of its parts (the *Ptérographie*, devoted to ferns) to Plumier, “who first shed light on this interesting family of plants.”<fnref n="73" /> The manuscript, unsurprisingly, was never published in its original form, and the author donated it to the library of the Paris Academy of Sciences. Another example that Plumier’s manuscripts still either were copied or at least consulted at the turn of the nineteenth century brings us back to the drawings of the crocodile. In 1800, the same year in which L’Héritier and Petit-Thouars died, the French translation of an illustrated natural history of fishes by the German naturalist and ichthyologist Marcus Elieser Bloch (1723-1799) appeared.<fnref n="74" /> In a notice devoted to the friar, Bloch gave high praise to Plumier’s work, particularly his anatomical studies: his “very exact anatomy of the crocodile, the sea turtle, a sort of West Indian lizard, the Martinique viper, and a large frog” constituted, in his eyes, one of the most remarkable aspects of the manuscript corpus. Bloch regretted that the “Tétrapodes” drawings were unpublished:

<footnote n="71">⁷¹ *Catalogue du feu L'Héritier de Brutelle*, 148-9.</footnote>

<footnote n="72">⁷² LSLA MS 635 "Tracings from unpublished drawings of Plumier in the library of the Botanic Gerden, Oxford."</footnote>

<footnote n="73">⁷³ BIF MS 1824 "Flore des îles de France et Bourbon. Ptérographie ou description et histoire des fougères qui croissent dans ces îles, consacrée à la mémoire du R. P. Plumier, qui le premier à porté la lumière dans cette famille intéressante, par Aubert du Petit-Thouars." The manuscript was donated to the Paris Academy of Sciences on June 29, 1829.</footnote>

<footnote n="74">⁷⁴ Marcus Elieser Bloch, *Histoire naturelle des poissons, avec les figures dessinées d'après nature*, vol. 10 (Paris: Imprimerie de Crapelet, 1800), 117-33.</footnote>
It would truly be a loss for natural history if this manuscript, and above all the part that
deals with the anatomy of animals, was never published. In a moment in which the modern
taste [*gout*] for travels and natural history increases more and more, it is to be expected that
they would be described by other authors. . . . But can we praise somebody else for having
penetrated to the interior of the animals as Father Plumier did, and having given to us such
a detailed anatomy? . . . I am inclined towards the publication of useful works, and willing to
grant the manuscript, with its drawings, to a publisher, and for a very modest sum; or I offer
to publish it myself, if there is a number of subscribers large enough to cover the printing
expenses.<fnref n="75" />

At the turn of the nineteenth century, images of far-flung floras and faunas were as
appealing to the eye as they had always been. An editorial project as the one proposed by
Bloch for Plumier's images rested on its potential reception by a broad public interested
in such objects of science and art—and history. But it was not only their beauty that kept
them still slightly alive: some scholars kept on consulting and punctually copying some
parts of the corpus—by that time, at the Muséum d'histoire naturelle. Bloch relates, for
instance, that a folio volume of 169 pages came into his hands through a certain
“Parisian who was in the service of the king” and brought it to Berlin, where it was sold
at a public auction and bought by Bloch. The manuscript, entitled “Zoographia
Americana,” contained drawings of fishes and birds, duplicates of drawings in one of the
portfolios left by Plumier in the Parisian convent of Minims after his death, and
reorganized into new folders at the beginning of the nineteenth century.<fnref n="76" />

Unsurprisingly, Bloch's call for having Plumier's corpus published never came into
fruition, but it is worth noting the concept that would only reach its due recognition in
print. He wanted the publication of the entire manuscript on animals, and advanced not

<footnote n="75">⁷⁵ Bloch, *Histoire naturelle des poissons*, 127-8: “Ce seroit une véritable perte pour l’histoire naturelle, si ce manuscrit, et sur-tout la partie qui traite de l’anatomie des animaux, n’étoit jamais publiée. Quant aux animaux mêmes, le goût moderne des voyages et de l’histoire naturelle qui augment de plus en plus, fait espérer qu’ils seront peu à peu décrits par d’autres auteurs. . . . Mais peut-on bien se flatter que quelqu’autre pénètre dans l’intérieur des animaux, comme a fait le père Plumier, et qu’il nous donne une anatomie aussi détaillée? Toutes les parties anatomisées de ces animaux, sont représentées sur trente-cinq planches. Je veux bien me prêter à la publication des ouvrages utiles; je veux bien ceder à un libraire le manuscrit avec les dessins, et pour un Prix très-modique; ou je m’offre moi-même de les publier, s’il se presente un nombre de souscripteurs assez grand pour fournir à la plus grande partie des frais de l’impression.”</footnote>

<footnote n="76">⁷⁶ Bloch, *Histoire naturelle des poissons*, 124. The volume to which Bloch refers was entitled “D.O.M. Zoographia Americana, pisces et volatilia continens, auctore R. Patre Carolo Plumier, ordinis Minimorum provinciae Franciae et Botanico regio.” The same exact name cannot be found in the corpus, but a folio volume of drawings also entitled “Pisces et volatilia” was in the library of the Minim convent at Place Royale according to a catalog of 1722 (Maz. MS 4147 “Catalogue alphabétique de la bibliothèque des Minimes de la Place Royale, à Paris). The drawings were reorganized into new folders thereafter: one of the extant volumes is entitled “Zoographia Americana,” but the first word was corrected as “Ornitographia” and this one does not refer to “pisces et volatilia continens,” but “quadrupedia et volatilia.”</footnote>