128 Harrison
teenth century, these gardens sprang up all over Europe and were regarded
as “living catalogues of plants, living catalogues of creation.”^49 The human
imposition of order on these living objects also embodied the restoration
of lost dominion. In the eighteenth century, Carl Linnaeus, author of
the classifi catory system of binomial nomenclature, reordered the botanic
gardens in Uppsala according to his new system, planting out the separate
species in a determined order, representing the fi xed patterns that God
had used in the Creation. Linnaeus also thought that the domestication
of the wilderness was a means of restoring it to its paradisal state.^50 Thus
from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, the encyclopedic garden
was regarded as a living pharmacopoeia, “a kind of surrogate Bible,” and
a recreation of the garden of Eden.^51
If botanic and physick gardens were regarded as reproductions of the
original Eden, museums came to be thought of as recreations of Noah’s
Ark. Thus the collection of “Nature’s admirable works” that belonged to
the Englishman John Tradescant the Elder (d. 1638) and provided the ba-
sis for Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum was popularly known as “Tradescant’s
Ark.” The Old Testament patriarch was regarded as a vital link in the trans-
mission of ancient knowledge from Adam to Moses, author of the Pen-
tateuch. In order to fashion a vessel that would provide suitable accom-
modation for all the animals, and to stock it with appropriate provisions
for them, Noah would have needed to have been quite an acute natural-
ist.^52 Early- modern custodians of natural history collections could regard
themselves as latter- day Noahs, bringing together in a systematic fashion
the whole realm of living things from the far- fl ung reaches of the Earth.^53
Biblical sanctions for the pursuit of natural history were accompanied
by a number of claims for the direct usefulness of the activity. At the
beginning of his Historiae animalium, Conrad Gesner listed three benefi ts
of natural history: animals and plants provide cures and other practical
benefi ts, they teach us important moral lessons, and they are emblems of
divine truths and point to the wisdom of the Deity.^54 The profi tableness
of histories of plants in the provision of cures was not seriously doubted
by anyone, in spite of the inroads made by the novel chemical medicines
of the Paracelsians and Helmontians. It was for this reason that natural
history was closely associated with medicine. One seventeenth- century
English physician wrote that “the word Physician, derived from the Greek
φυσιχπς, is plainly and fully rendred by the word Naturalist, (that is) one
well vers’d in the full extent of Natural and natural things.”^55 Only a pre-
cise knowledge of nature, the writer claimed, would enable the physician
to prepare and apply appropriate cures. While animals were also used in
the preparation of cures, they were used far less frequently than plants.