Natural History 137natural world—book, mirror, garden, museum—to a dynamic one. The
archive is a record of historical change. Buffon’s approach thus contrasted
with both the enterprise of physico- theologians such as Ray, Derham, and
Pluche, who typically sought to catalog remarkable instances of creaturely
adaptations that would serve as specifi c examples of divine ingenuity and
benevolence, and those historians of Earth who sought evidence for their
theories in scripture. These developments did not necessarily entail a de-
parture from theistic readings of nature, but rather the introduction of
a new understanding of the principle of change in the natural world.
That the divine purposes were being worked out in human history was
never seriously held in doubt prior to the nineteenth century. The at-
tempt to link chronological or sacred history with natural history brought
with it the quest for evidence of a single divine plan being worked out in
the realm of nature. Authors of the composite natural / sacred histories of
Earth had already grasped this principle. William Whiston insisted that
“the State of the Natural is always accommodated to that of the Moral
World.”^99 A similar principle was asserted by German philosopher Gott-
fried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), who claimed that a harmony existed
between “the physical realm of nature and the moral realm of grace,”
arguing that “the laws of motion and the changes of bodies serve the laws
of justice and control.”^100
The rudiments of such conceptions were already evident in the
seventeenth- century speculations about the chain of being and the justice
of God. This notion of the great chain of being was an ancient conception
according to which all existing things were graded on a scale, beginning
from nonbeing, through imperfect creatures, higher animals, human be-
ings, angels, to God. A number of thinkers had reasoned, however, that
being fi xed to a certain position on the ladder of being would limit the
happiness of creatures and that God would have created orders of being
capable of improvement beyond their original station. Some speculated
that this would simply entail the resurrection of animals and plants at
the last judgment and their restoration to perfection in which they had
existed prior to their Fall. Others, drawing upon the Neoplatonic tradi-
tion, thought that the same outcome could be achieved by allowing for
the transmigration of souls through the various levels of the ladder of
being. Lady Anne Conway (1631–1679) claimed that God’s justice was
expressed in the transmutation of things “out of one Species into another.”
The tendency of such transmutations is toward perfection: “the nature
of all creatures... to increase, and infi nitely advance towards a farther
Perfection.”^101 Leibniz, who was acquainted with Conway’s ideas, also
spoke of “the transformation of animated bodies,” suggesting that the