Natural History 123tury, one author observed, he would had to have written a new history of
animals, for “the fi rst Tome of Zoography is still wanting.”^20
Early- modern naturalists thus found themselves increasingly torn
between two apparently different kinds of activity, the one philological
and grammatical, the other to do with matters of empirical fact. The new
orientation of natural history called for a set of observational procedures
of equal rigor that could supplement the more traditional text- based ap-
proaches. Eventually, the new observational approach was to supplant the
authority of the ancients. By the beginning of the seventeenth century the
idea of rehabilitating an ancient natural history was overtaken by calls for
the complete reformation of the discipline.
THE REFORMATION OF NATURAL HISTORY
Natural histories of the seventeenth century show an increasing tendency
to be critical of written sources, to stress fi rsthand observation, to set out
specifi c criteria for accepting eyewitness accounts—in short, to move
natural history away from a preoccupation with documents to a direct
engagement with nature. While this process might originally have been
motivated by a need to supplement the writings of the ancients, the late
sixteenth century witnessed a growing reaction against the authority of
the ancients, fuelled by a general impulse to reform the spheres of religion
and learning. The Protestant Reformation had successfully challenged the
authority of the Roman Church and its de facto philosophical saint, Ar-
istotle. The German reformer Martin Luther (1483–1546), who had insti-
tuted reforms within the Church, had argued that the universities, “where
only that blind, heathen teacher Aristotle rules,” also stood in need of “a
good, thorough reformation.”^21 Luther’s sentiments were echoed by edu-
cational reformers. Swiss preacher of medical reforms, Paracelsus (1493–
1541), argued for the supremacy of the Codex Naturae, the book of nature,
over against the books of Galen, Avicenna, and Aristotle. Inquiring minds,
he insisted, ought to turn to that library of books that “God himself wrote,
made and bound.”^22 To know God’s book, moreover, scholars needed to
leave their cloistered libraries and enter the world of things. In England,
Francis Bacon (1561–1626) allowed that there might have been a time
in antiquity “when natural science was perhaps more fl ourishing” but
nevertheless insisted that “new discoveries must be sought from the light
of nature, not fetched back out of the darkness of antiquity.”^23 This was
particularly true in natural history, he argued, where “we see there hath
not been that choice and judgment used as ought to have been; as may