tour 2 of 25
Enlightenment: The Natural World
Plants
In forming large natural history collections,
collectors like Sir Hans
Sloane assumed that knowledge gained through
studying nature would benefit humankind. As a physician, for
example, Sloane was interested in the medicinal uses of the plants
and other items in his
collection.
This ideal of
usefulness was new among collectors in the eighteenth century.
While Sloane thought of it in terms of benefit to people in
general, others emphasized the benefits to the nation. This aim lay
behind the decision of the wealthy young
Joseph
Banks to fund a party of natural historians on
Captain James Cook's first voyage to the Pacific in 1768.
It was also one of the purposes behind the creation of the British
Museum, which opened in 1759 'for the general use and
benefit of the
public'.
But if
this new information about the natural world was to be put to use,
it had to be organized into a system that would allow anyone to
recognize which the useful plants were. In the late-seventeenth
century, Sloane had organized his plant collection according to a
system devised by his friend John Ray (1627-1708). But in 1735,
Carl
Linnaeus revolutionized natural history by
developing the principles of modern
taxonomy,
the system by which plants and animals are named and
classified.
Illustration:
A tray from Sir Hans Sloane's pharmaceutical
cabinet