Natural History 125stressed the importance of both social status and institutional setting in
legitimating observation claims. Relations issued under the auspices of
the society, it was claimed, “do contain only Matters of Fact, that have
been verifi ed by a whole Society, composed of Men which have Eyes to
see these sorts of things.” These observers were “indowed with the Spirit of
Philosophy and Patience,” unlike the purveyors of travelers’ tales such as
merchants and soldiers, who were more likely to report curiosities and ex-
aggerated novelties.^31 Similar claims about the perspicacity of the Fellows
of the Royal Society of London were made by its fi rst historian, Thomas
Sprat (1635–1713).^32
The reform of natural philosophy was not merely to be accomplished
through turning from books to the natural world and establishing quality
assurance mechanisms for witnesses. The very notion of “nature” and the
conditions under which it was to be observed also underwent a signifi -
cant transformation. In his proposals for a new style of natural history,
Francis Bacon thought that the natural historian ought to be concerned
with three aspects of nature: nature observed in its natural course, nature
“erring and varying,” and nature “altered and wrought.”^33 For the second
category Bacon hoped for a “particular natural history of all prodigies
and monstrous births of nature; of everything in short that is in nature
new, rare, and unusual.”^34 The third category included not merely hu-
man productions but what Bacon referred to as “experimental history,”
in which nature was diverted from its normal course by experimentation.
The scope of natural history was broadened to incorporate the unnatural
and the nonnatural. This was a signifi cant departure from the Aristotelian
view that the science of nature was to be founded on generalizations made
from common sense observations of nature in its normal course. The Ba-
conian scheme was premised upon the notion that nature would only
reveal its operations when put to the test, and forced out of its “natural”
state. The inclusion of the “preternatural” among the legitimate objects
of a natural history also ran counter to the Aristotelian tradition, for it
encouraged an interest in the exceptional, and inhibited the premature
formulation of general explanatory rules.
Bacon made a second claim about the natural world that signals a
major shift in the understanding of the religious signifi cance of nature.
Nature, he said, provides evidence of the attributes of the Deity, but does
not refl ect his image.^35 The notion that the world, in some sense, bore the
image of the Deity lay at the heart of the medieval emblematic under-
standing of the world. According to that view, all of the creatures in the
world are natural symbols or mirrors of the transcendent. Nature could
thus be studied as a text for its emblematic, theological meanings. This