Natural History 127examples of this munifi cence in our age to give me comfort: Ferdinand
the Emperor and Cosimus Medices, Prince of Toscane are herein registred
for the furthering this science of plants.”^42 John Tradescant the Younger
(1608–1662), in the catalog of his father’s famous natural history collec-
tion, wrote that because this collection of rarities offered more “variety
than any one place known in Europe could afford” the publication of its
catalog would be “an honour to our Nation.”^43 The promotion of natural
history could thus become a matter of national pride.
Natural history was also claimed to be a religious duty, sanctioned by
scripture. Adam’s cultivation of the Garden of Eden and his naming of the
beasts, the confusion of languages at the Tower of Babel, the collection
and housing of animals in Noah’s Ark—each of these narratives provided
important justifi cation for the practice of natural history and informed its
methods. When Gesner spoke of restoring old and ancient things now for-
gotten, he was referring not only to the writing of the Greek philosophers
but to an even more ancient Adamic science. In urging the recovery of
“the names of things, and things by their names,” he was alluding to Ad-
am’s naming of beasts in paradise, an episode generally taken as indicative
both of Adam’s perfect knowledge of the natures of living things, and of
the existence of a natural language in which names express true natures.
Edward Topsell thus explained that Adam had been an accomplished
naturalist and for this reason natural history was “Divine, and necessary
for all men to know.”^44 The notion of an Adamic science also motivated
Bacon and the Baconians in the Royal Society of London. According to
Bacon, “the fi rst acts which man performed in Paradise consisted of the
two summary parts of knowledge; the view of the creatures, and the im-
position of names.”^45 Bishop Thomas Sprat, in his apologetic history of
the Royal Society of London, went even further, agreeing that the pursuit
of natural history and philosophy were religious duties, because they had
been Adam’s sole vocation.^46 Adam’s knowledge, moreover, underwrote
his dominion over the creation. The study of nature, in Bacon’s project,
was to effect “a restitution and reinvesting (in great part) of man to the
sovereignty and power... which he had in his fi rst state of creation.”^47
The idea of an Adamic natural history persisted until well into the eigh-
teenth century, when Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778), on the frontispiece of
the 1760 edition of Systema naturae, depicted himself as Adam simultane-
ously naming the animals and writing the Systema.^48
The cultivation of formal botanic or physick gardens was also justifi ed
as the partial reestablishment of an original Edenic order. Such gardens
came to be regarded as living books, and as representative of Adam’s en-
cyclopedic knowledge. In the hundred years from the middle of the six-