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and pestilential vapors? By my word, it is not to such a place that Jean- Jacques will go

looking for amusement.^6

Even minerals could evoke disgust because they were extracted from the very bowels of

the earth. This left the study of plants alone as a suitable vocation for sensitive souls, pro-

vided, Rousseau warned, that one avoided the pharmacological uses of plants, which forced

one to dwell on disease and ugliness:

These medicinal notions are hardly apt to make the study of botany agreeable.

They cause the dappled meadows and bright flowers to fade, suck the cool damp

out of the hedged fields, and make the green glade and the forest shade insipid and

disgusting.^7

In short, anything that recalled the body’s physical needs and frailties was a reminder of

humanity’s debased state. Plants, being clean, pure, fragrant, and aesthetically appealing

turned the mind away from images of corruption and death to reveries of sensual pleasure

and joy:

The sweet fragrances, the lively colors, the most elegant shapes seem to vie with one

another for the right to hold our attention. One need only love pleasure to abandon

oneself to such sweet sensations.^8

Such qualities of plants, Rousseau believed, made botany the subject most likely to lead

one closer to God.^9

Rousseau greatly admired Linnaeus and determined to master his sexual system

of classification. He also believed that the same aesthetic qualities that made the

study of botany so conducive to piety also made it the most suitable subject of study

for women— provided they did not take it “too seriously.” According to Rousseau,

women, being closer to nature than men, had a natural affinity for botany. However,

this same closeness to nature steered women’s minds toward disorder and irrational-

ity. The study of botany, he argued, could counteract these irrational tendencies by

introducing order and discipline into their lives. However, Rousseau cautioned that

the “search for abstract and speculative truths, for principles and axioms of science ...

is beyond a woman’s grasp.”^10 The sexual theory of plants was one of the “speculative

truths” that Rousseau thought women should avoid. In his Letters on the Elements of

Botany:  Addressed to a Lady, Rousseau referred to stamens and pistils only obliquely

as “essential parts” in the course of warning against the dangers of finding double-

f lowered blossoms in the garden:

Whenever you find them double, do not meddle with them, they are disfigured; or,

if you please, dressed after our fashion: nature will no longer be found among them;

she refuses to reproduce any thing from monsters thus mutilated: for if the more bril-

liant parts of the flower, namely the corolla, be multiplied, it is at the expense of the

more essential parts [reproductive organs], which disappear under this addition of

brilliancy.^11