Species

68 Species

be properly dened only when instances were properly classied into ‘the true divisions’
of nature.”^90 For him and his contemporaries, real science meant that the labels of things
were correct representations or signs of the way the world was, and that essences were
found as axioms, or generalizations, made step by step from empirical inductions.
Bacon recognized that organisms and other things could deviate from the type.
There is no necessity for things to be constrained by their species’ essences:

Among Prerogative Instances I will put in eighth place Deviating Instances, that is,

errors, vagaries, and prodigies of nature, wherein nature deviates and turns aside from

her ordinary course. Errors of nature differ from singular instances in this, that the

latter are prodigies of species, the former of individuals. Their use is pretty much the

same, for they correct the erroneous impressions suggested to the understanding by

ordinary phenomena, and reveal common forms. ...

... we have to make a collection or particular natural history of all prodigies and mon-

strous births of nature; of everything in short that is in nature new, rare, and unusual.^91

Bacon also thinks it worthwhile to discover which things are a mixture of
species,^92 but it is clear that he considers the term in a much broader manner than the
modern sense, and his notion of hybrids in the nal phrase is quite arbitrary:

... I will put in the ninth place Bordering Instances, which I will also call Participles.

They are those which exhibit species of bodies which seem to be composed of two spe-

cies, or to be rudiments between one species and another. ...

Examples of these are: moss, which holds a place between putrescence and a plant;

some comets, between stars and ery meteors; ying sh, between birds and sh; bats,

between birds and quadrupeds; also the ape, between man and beast—

Simia quam similes turpissima bestia nobis;^93

Likewise the biformed births of animals, mixed of different species, and the like.^94

Elsewhere, in the New Atlantis (1627) he has his mythical sage enumerate the

things his utopian society can do with animal breeding in Salomon’s House:

we make them differ in colour, shape, activity, many ways. We nd means to make

commixtures and copulations of divers kinds, which have produced many new kinds,

and them not barren, as the general opinion is.^95

Although he does not think non-sterile hybridization is impossible in forming new

species, species are only mutable in a limited way.

(^90) Slaughter 1982, 93.
(^91) Bacon 1913, II.xxix.
(^92) Bacon 1960, II.xxx.
(^93) “How like us is that very ugly beast, the monkey,” Ennius (239–169?) as quoted in Cicero’s
“On the Nature of the Gods.” Thanks to Tom Scharle for the reference and translation. Simia can
mean “ape” or “monkey” and is most probably derived from the Greek simos (σιμός), “snub-nosed”
[Liberman 2013]. In the rst edition I stated wrongly that it was based on the Latin similis.
(^94) Bacon 1960, 178f.
(^95) Bacon 1913, 248.