touched on many scientific fields. There were also many similarities between the topographical correspondence and the sixteenth-century astronomical community visible in the letters of Tycho Brahe.17 More broadly, topography and astronomy required geographically dispersed observers to collaborate with each other. Investigators distributed across different cities and countries cultivated connections with each other through travel and correspondence because developing knowledge in these fields required contributions from a wide geographical area. In the case of astronomy, this meant dispersal around the globe, as, for example, with the eighteenth-century effort to observe the transit of Venus. The more widespread observers were, the more accurately they could calculate the distance from the earth to the sun from transit data.
Correspondence and collaboration in natural history and antiquarian studies were shaped, however, by the particular priorities and demands of these fields. In the topographical disciplines, because investigators were dispersed across the landscape and the goal was to build up a complete understanding of that landscape, each one had a unique store of knowledge to contribute (even more so, perhaps, than in astronomy). This meant that priority—being scooped—was less of a concern. Though concerns related to priority and plagiarism were by no means unheard of in the topographical fields, they seem to have been more of a concern in the mathematical disciplines, natural philosophy, and mechanical philosophy, where practitioners’ stores of knowledge were not unique and they were more often in competition to deliver scientific results. To take one example, Robert Hooke’s career was peppered with priority feuds with Isaac Newton, Christian Huygens, and others.18 Furthermore the topographical disciplines were also differentiated by their political resonances. The production of knowledge through correspondence was intimately connected to the national visions promoted in topographical works. Other scientific pursuits gained presence on the political and cultural stage; Newton’s preeminence in the eighteenth century was such a source of national pride for the British, for example, that his name became a byword for British science and he was accorded a state funeral at Westminster Abbey.19 However, no other disciplines took on as their object the formation of the “whole body and book” of the nation.
This was a distinction with a difference. There was a particularly tight connection between the construction of Britain as a scientific object and the medium of correspondence. The naturalists’ Britain reflected the medium in which it was constructed. This is evident in Childrey’s assertion that readers of his Britannia Baconica gained knowledge that made them neighbors to one another, though they might live at opposite ends of the island. It can be seen as well in naturalists’ interest (even obsession) with the mechanics of travel and communication, especially the prominent places they accorded in their books to roads and waterways, the physical pathways that knit the country together. It is also visible in the divisions and inequalities that cut through these books, the social and intellectual hierarchies that they created between England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales.
The medium of writing and the exchange of writing through correspondence defined the intellectual, political, and social contours of the topographical Britain. Collaboration was accomplished through the constant, everrenewing circulation of written material. “Papers” accumulated relentlessly as scholars collected and exchanged information. One could turn to the next empty page of a notebook and scribble another observation or copy a quotation. If a notebook was full, another sheet could be folded in or a new notebook started. Those who preferred to store their notes on slips in cabinets or closets could always hook in another piece of paper.20 Letters piled up, gathered in bundles, bound in books, and stacked in presses, organized according to idiosyncratic personal filing systems. Papers could be continuously multiplied to accommodate the seemingly endless flow of new knowledge about nature and human history pouring through seventeenth-century Britain.21
Not so with print. Print seemed to impose a finality that did not always accord with the abundance flowing from nature and human history. In the summer of 1676, John Ray wrote to his young contemporary Martin Lister, “Your Notes and Observations in Natural History do very well deserve to be made publick … I have only this to object to you, and my self, against their speedy Publication, that the longer they lie by you, if still you prosecute the same Studies and Enquiries, the more perfect and full they will be, every day almost adding or correcting, or illustrating somewhat; but if you have quite given over those Researches, defer not to put them out.”22 Ray’s words illustrate the paradox confronting all naturalists and antiquaries, indeed all collectors, in this period: they felt an imperative to make knowledge public, and yet any making public via printing was necessarily also a cutting off, an end to one’s researches that invariably left some knowledge behind. According to Ray’s letter to Lister, having already given up on the project was the only justification for publishing it as it was. Concerns about representing natural and human history fully and accurately ran so deep that they could even retard the progress of correspondence. In a letter to Edward Lhuyd containing some observations on fossils discovered in the cliffs of Harwich, just south of Ipswich on the North Sea, the apothecary Samuel Dale, a close associate of John Ray, apologized for taking so long to transmit his account. His excuse was that he was “desirous of making another Tour to Harwich <Cliff> before I wrote, that I might accompany this with some more fossils, and make my observations more perfect.”23
Although “papers” were the primary medium in which natural historical and antiquarian knowledge was constructed, and print fell short in that any given printed book was an incomplete representation of natural and human history, transferring knowledge to print was a priority for most active investigators. They regarded printing with appreciation as one of the primary tools for prosecuting and disseminating natural history, though their esteem for it could be qualified under particular circumstances.24 John Evelyn, in a phrase typical of the age, highlighted the “happy invention of that noble Art” in a treatise on collecting and interpreting ancient and medieval manuscripts (he was commenting on the ways in which scholars could use printed texts as aids in interpreting medieval manuscripts).25 Properly managed, printing made an author’s words visible to the learned world, entering them into the historical record as copies found their way into private and public libraries. Naturalists particularly valued printing as a guardian against plagiarism—a handwritten text shared with one or two people was more easily dissociated from its author than was a text made available to hundreds via the press. Printed texts also fed back into the production of scientific knowledge. By the eighteenth century printed botanical catalogs were the foundation for a globalized natural history. Far-flung investigators compared the images and textual descriptions in standardized texts with specimens discovered in the field, allowing them to determine with more accuracy whether a species had been previously identified.26 It was just these kinds of catalogs, of plants, insects, fish, and birds, that John Ray spent his life compiling and publishing.
Printing one’s writings was also one of the surest ways of preserving them for the future. In October 1691, after perusing the manuscript of John Aubrey’s Naturall Historie of Wiltshire, John Ray wrote that he wished “that you would speed it to the Presse. It would be convenient to fill up the blanks, so far as you can; but I am afraid that will be a work of time, & retard this Edition.”27 As he composed the text, Aubrey had left blanks when he lacked concrete information; many, but not all, of these had been filled in by the time Ray read the manuscript. Aubrey, an old man, had written much over the course of his life but published little—in such a case, Ray felt, getting the book into print was more important than filling in its last few lacunae.28 Aubrey regarded print as the surest fail-safe against misuse of his texts (including plagiarism) and the strongest platform on which to establish a scholarly reputation that would persist after his death.
Avoiding print was clearly neither possible nor desirable. But its perceived deficits could be at least partially remedied. Insofar as they could, naturalists and antiquaries sought to replicate the openness and endless expandability of scribal exchange in their printing projects. This contradicts often-assumed features (or effects) of early modern printing. Whereas Elizabeth Eisenstein has argued that the invention of the printing press allowed texts to be standardized, fixed, and widely disseminated,
