Treating plants as laboratories: A chemical natural history of vegetation in 17th‐centuryEngland

Abstract

This paper investigates the emergence, in the second part of the 17th century, of a new body of experimental knowledge dealing with the chemical transformations of water taking place in plants. We call this body of experimental knowledge a “chemical history of vegetation.” We show that this chemical natural history originated, in terms of recipes and methods of investigation, in the works of Francis Bacon and that it was constructed in accordance with Bacon's precepts for putting together natural and experimental histories. Our paper covers a wide array of experimental investigations, carried out by people with different backgrounds, theoretical assumptions, and metaphysical allegiances (Thomas Browne, Robert Sharrock, Robert Boyle, Nehemiah Grew, John Beale, and John Evelyn). We claim that, despite their differences, these naturalists had a lot in common. First, they treated plants as laboratories of chemical investigation. Second, they used the experiments with plants to develop tools, hypotheses, and operational concepts, which travelled from one naturalist to the other, even when their respective explanatory vocabularies were widely different. Third, we show that some of them also manifested an interest in defining and clarifying the limits and structure of this new body of experimental knowledge, displaying, thus, a certain disciplinary unity.

Aquaponics nomenclature matters: It is about principles and technologies and not as much about coupling

“…It started off in parallel by US and German researchers, 20–22 combining aquaculture with highly intensive monocultures in the 1970s–1980s 49,50 . The technology of growing plants without soil already dates back to 1600 in experiments by the Belgian Jean Baptiste Van Helmont and described in the book Sylva Sylvarum by Francis Bacon in 1627, 51–53 and further investigated in 1699 by the English scientist John Woodward and the French scientists De Saussure and Boussingault, who found that plants require carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen for good growth, 53 and later in the 1860s in Germany by Sachs 54 and Knop who developed nutrient solutions and named the technology ‘ nutriculture ’ 27,55 . In 1929, Gericke (University of California) proposed the term ‘ aquiculture ’ for ‘ water culture ’ 55–57 .…”

Green Laboratories: Plant studies in the early modern period.Introduction

“…Indeed, plants became parts of the laboratory and the subject-object of experimental investigation, that is, green laboratories themselves. 20 For instance, plants were seen as natural alembics to observe natural activities in detail-thus paralleling the claim that the earth was a chymical laboratory. 21 In this special issue, we aim to explore this claim, discussing the cases in which early modern scholars conceived plants as objects of laboratory studies to investigate nature at large, leaving partly aside the investigation of botanical gardens and canonical botany-if this existed separately.…”