Natural History 133namely, the Foundation of [natural] Philosophy.”^82 However, the facts of
a history of nature, including the preternatural and experimental, col-
lected with appropriate safeguards to ensure their accuracy, would “give
light to the discovery of causes and supply a suckling philosophy with its
fi rst food.”^83 Bacon thus envisaged the disciplines of natural philosophy
forming a pyramid: Natural history at the bottom, physic in the middle,
metaphysics close to the top, and at the pinnacle “the summary law of
nature” that God used in the Creation.^84 Bacon’s view of the relations of
the disciplines was adopted by the Royal Society of London and was re-
produced in eighteenth- century maps of knowledge in such works as John
Harris’s Lexicon Technicum (1704), Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopedia (1728),
and in the famous frontispiece of the Encyclopédie (1751). The Baconian
vision of the methods of the sciences, along with his conception of their
interrelation, persisted until the middle of the nineteenth century.^85
In spite of this attempted elevation of the role of natural history, be-
cause it dealt with description rather than causal explanation, many con-
tinued to regard it as something less than genuine “science” or “philoso-
phy.” The discovery of causes and general explanatory principles lay in the
domain of philosophy. English Aristotelian John Sergeant (1622–1707)
thus dismissed Baconian methods as “utterly Incompetent or Unable to
beget Science.” This was because, in his view, it was “meerly Historical,
and Narrative of Particular Observations” from which it was impossible to
deduce universal conclusions.^86 It was against such long- standing preju-
dices that Wolfgang Franz, with whose description of the scope of natural
history this chapter began, was to insist that natural history should re-
ally be regarded as “belonging more properly to philosophy.” More real-
istically, perhaps, it could be contended that the important thing about
such natural histories was that they contained true observations, even if
these provided only a partial account of the relevant phenomena. In his
Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire naturelle des Animaux (1671–1676), Claude
Perrault (1613–1688) of the Parisian Academy of the Sciences observed
that some natural histories were memoirs “confi ned to the Narrative of
some particular Acts, of which the Writer has certain knowledge.” These
accounts were “only the parts” of a history, yet were to be preferred on
account of their “certainty and truth.”^87
Certain and true such relations might have been, but together they
could hardly be said to comprise a coherent body of knowledge. The dan-
ger of this approach was that natural history might become disparate col-
lections of data ungoverned by any theoretical conceptions or ultimate
end. Perrault defended this method by claiming that “things of this Na-
ture might be put into Mémoires, which are as it were Magazines, wherein