by itself.”57 But issues could be included in the four or five “parcells of books” the bookseller received each year.
Despite frustrations with knavish carriers and worries that papers could be lost, naturalists depended on their carriers. Notes and asides in their letters indicate just how much. In 1683 and 1684 many of the letters that Aston wrote to William Musgrave and Plot contained some reference to a packet of books or papers being sent by carrier. During these years, the three served overlapping tenures as secretaries of the Royal Society.58 Their correspondence dealt largely in the official business of the society. This included determining the contents of each issue of Philosophical Transactions, then printing in Oxford, as well as exchanging scientific news garnered from all over Britain and the Continent, giving accounts of each society’s meetings, and distributing sets of queries for large-scale demographic and natural historical projects that required hundreds of informants, such as William Petty’s demographic study of parish christenings, marriages, and deaths.59 Almost invariably each of Aston’s letters included a postscript saying that he was also sending a bundle, or a roll, or a parcel of papers by the next carrier.60
Movers and Shakers: Making Things Travel
Sometimes circulating the material goods of knowledge was as easy as crossing the street. One day in 1683 John Aubrey decided to show his friend Elias Ashmole a “Barberian Lyon” skin given him by Edmond Wyld, a merchant acquaintance with business in northern Africa (“Barberian” is a reference to “Barbary,” or present-day North Africa):
I obtained some time since of my worthy friend Edmond Wyld Esq. a Barberian Lyon’s skin…. When I carried [it] in my hand from my Lodging to Mr. Ashmole’s office (a crosse-alley between the 2 streets) there was a great mastiffe belonging to that alley (that I did not presently see), that came smelling after it with great astonishment, the people of the alley called to me, and told me of it: and asked what it was, for they never saw the dog doe so {that is, follow anyone down the street} before, though they (sc. Coach-makers) bring in quantities of tanned skinnes for their use.61
Aubrey stepped out to show a rare lion’s pelt to his friend Ashmole, a collector of such things, and a large dog followed him down the alley between his rooms and Ashmole’s office: just another day in the life of the virtuoso, but an incident Aubrey felt worth sharing in a letter to his Oxford-based friend William Musgrave, then a secretary of the Royal Society.62 The ease with which Aubrey could step down the alleyway to Ashmole’s office suggests why so many naturalists and so much scientific activity were concentrated in London. Though an experience could be retailed in a letter, collaboration was much easier when people and resources were short walks away from each other.
Yet not all collaboration could happen in London. Natural history and antiquarian studies took place in farm and field and provincial town; learned activity was distributed across Britain. In addition it required natural and antiquarian materials, such as Aubrey’s lion skin, as well as books and papers. The stuff of natural history included living plants, seeds, dried and pressed leaves, flowers, and roots; formed stones and other mineral specimens; and dead and preserved animals or animal parts, such as pelts and bones. Antiquaries picked up in the course of their travels old coins, fragments of ruined buildings (ancient Roman as well as more recent monastic varieties), urns, Saxon weaponry and jewelry, and sketches of ruined buildings, monuments, and ancient earthworks. As explored in this section, naturalists and antiquaries had to find ways to move all this stuff through their correspondence.
The impulse driving naturalists to collect and move massive amounts of materials was twofold. In the first place, naturalists were increasingly interested in both systematization and understanding the regional distributions of naturalia. Some gentlemen collectors still built their collections primarily for show, filling them with the rarest and most unusual specimens. Ashmole, for example, sought to highlight objects “extraordinary in their Fabrick” as well as those that might prove useful to medicine, manufacturing, or trade.63 However, naturalists increasingly prioritized systematic collecting.64 In order to develop systematic, complete accounts of nature, they needed to collect not only extraordinary natural specimens but also a multitude of more run-of-the-mill specimens. To understand regional distributions, they also needed to know where these specimens came from. These priorities can be seen in the great catalogs of plants, insects, fishes, and birds produced by John Ray, in part from notes and drafts left by Francis Willughby.65 Edward Lhuyd assembled a collection of formed stones in order to produce a systematic field guide to British formed stones for the use of other naturalists.66 In instructions to plant collectors in northern Wales (discussed more extensively below), Lhuyd requested ten to twelve samples each of herbs of ordinary size and fifteen to twenty of very small species (possibly because small plants were more easily damaged in transit).67 The queries Lhuyd sent out before his natural history collecting expedition through the Celtic regions of Britain and France indicated the range of systematization. Lhuyd distributed about four thousand query sheets, blanketing every Welsh parish and parts of Cornwall, Scotland, Ireland, and Brittany.68 Lhuyd asked his respondents in every parish to identify for him antiquities, fish, animals, plants, formed stones, rocks, and manuscripts. Lhuyd asked not for the most notable specimens but for representative specimens from every single parish. Only then could nature be mapped across the nation.
Lhuyd, in fact, regarded the “exotics” that filled some gentlemen’s cabinets of curiosity with disdain because systematic accounts of nature could not be made from them—nor could they be used to map regional distributions of plants and animals. They were surprisingly uniform across different collections. They were also sourced from a more international market. For example, Lhuyd wrote in 1699 of a collection recently purchased by the University of Edinburgh that it contained relatively few specimens representing the natural production of the individual collector’s “own country.”69 In order to differentiate kinds of organisms and go about the project of constructing a British natural history, it was necessary to collect as many specimens as possible and, if possible, multiple specimens of each kind, from within Britain, and to document where they were collected.
Although naturalists collected as broadly as possible, their collections were inevitably imbalanced. As he became more homebound, Ray’s collection of insects, for example, tilted toward species he and his daughters could collect within walking distance of his home in Essex. This imbalance was the second term of the equation regulating the exchange and circulation of specimens. By collecting multiple specimens of individual species, naturalists ensured that they had extras on hand to trade with fellow naturalists.70 In addition, naturalists sometimes circulated unique specimens with the expectation that the originals would be returned. Through exchange, naturalists built the kinds of collections upon which systematic treatises could be built. Through circulation, naturalists at least gained the sight of various specimens, though not permanent ownership of them.
In the late seventeenth century Lhuyd drafted a set of instructions for collecting plants from the mountain and coastal areas of northern Wales. The instructions requested that plants be collected along the streams and rivulets at the top of Cader Idris and specified that a “trusty fellow” who could navigate the treacherous upper reaches of the mountain while “observing punctually” an exacting set of directions for what to collect and how to collect it should be chosen for the job.71 This person was unlikely to be Lhuyd’s literate correspondent; as Lhuyd observed elsewhere, an “illiterate shepheard” was more likely to have the necessary familiarity with mountain tops.72 Notably, though Lhuyd’s instructions for collecting plants were largely written in English, plant names were given in Welsh (in which Lhuyd was fluent). Lhuyd used the terminology with which his readers, and the “trusty fellow” chosen to scale the mountain, would have been familiar. Collecting plant specimens across Britain required moving across languages, using the names familiar to the places in which those plants could be found. In other words, doing natural history on a national scale required familiarity with regional linguistic topographies.
The
