134 Harrison
are lockt up all sorts of things, to be made use of in times of need.”^88 Such
“memoirs” were common genres for the production of natural history in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: witness Robert Boyle’s Memoirs
for the Natural History of Humane Blood (1683) and Robert Plot’s The Natural
History of Oxfordshire (1677), subtitled “being an essay toward the natu-
ral history of England.” The issue for natural historians was exactly how
much factual information was required, and how long the business of
philosophical speculation should be postponed. Perrault observed that “it
is impossible to Philosophize without making some general Propositions
which ought to be grounded on the knowledg of all particular things,
whereof Universal notions are composed; and that we still have a long
time to work, before we can be instructed in all the particulars necessary
for this End.”^89 The danger of the Baconian model of natural history was
that it could paradoxically lead to the triumph of those very impulses
that Bacon had sought to stifl e: the “over- curious diligence in observing
the variety of things.” During the eighteenth century, critics of the Royal
Society frequently alleged that its members were more concerned with
“the collection of diverting and amusing specimens” than with “the sort
of programmatic and socially infl uential enterprise that Bacon had hoped
to promote.”^90NATURAL HISTORY AND THE HISTORY OF NATURE
The Baconian vision of natural history was of collections of facts unen-
cumbered by theoretical preconceptions. This was commendable in prin-
ciple, but had the almost inevitable consequence that some kind of order-
ing principle would move into the domain of natural history in order to
fi ll the explanatory vacuum. To a degree, this was why natural theology
came to provide an important governing principle of natural history for
much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, natural theol-
ogy was by no means the sole systematizing principle operating in natural
history during this period. Prior to the close of the seventeenth century
the study of nature had been “historical” only in the special sense that
it dealt with observed facts. From this time natural history also began to
include elements that were “historical” in the familiar sense, that is, to do
with questions of origins and change over time. Natural history, in short,
became chronological.
One impetus for this change arose out of the tendency to read the
Bible, and Old Testament narratives in particular, in an historical or literal,
rather than allegorical, sense. Works dealing with the natural history of