Three Eighteenth-Century Attempts to Map the Natural Order: Johann Herrmann – Georg Christoph Würtz – Paul Dietrich Giseke
2019; Brill; Volume: 24; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1163/15733823-00241p02
ISSN1573-3823
Autores Tópico(s)Botany and Plant Ecology Studies
ResumoAbstract By the second half of the eighteenth century, the age-old concept of nature as a chain of being had been superseded by the idea that the order of nature was a two-dimensional whole. Carolus Linnaeus, for instance, stated that vegetal nature was ordered like a geographical map. Paul Dietrich Giseke, one of his followers, rendered this metaphor concrete by making a “genealogic-geographical map of the natural orders of plants.” Could mapping nature in this way help to produce a true image of it and thereby achieve a better understanding of nature’s order? I intend to answer this question by analyzing Giseke’s map along with two closely connected images of the order of nature, Johann Herrmann’s “Table of affinities between animals” and the hitherto unnoticed “geographical map” of medicines, designed by Georg Christoph Würtz. The article deals with the relation between these images, examines the respective advantages and drawbacks of their maps and situates them with respect to the models of the natural history of the time.
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