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Home , Francesco Redi, Hans Sloane, Histoire Naturelle, Jan Swammerdam, Marcello Malpighi, Robert Hooke

“Their Wonderful Mechanism” Looking at Bugs in the

an exhibition by troy sherman But as mankind became more enlightened, the great wonders of nature in these small animals began to be observed . . .

carolus linnaeus, Fundamenta Entomologiae, 1772

Cover art from hooke, , 1665 “Their Wonderful Mechanism” Looking at Bugs in the Age of Enlightenment

HEN peered Williams College and organized in three through his into the sections corresponding to the body segments of Weyes of a dronefly, he didn’t simply catch an , demonstrates how scientific discourse the bug peering back: concerning bugs he saw his world converged with and reflected in its gaze. helped shape empirical Within each pane of methodologies and the insect’s compound technologies, colonial eyes, wrote Hooke in expansion, and 1666, “I have been able political thought to discover a Land- during western scape of those things ’s age of which lay before my Enlightenment. window.” In Hooke’s Hooke’s observa- study, the dronefly’s tion dramatizes the play eyes not only served as between knowledge and experimental material culture at an important to demonstrate the stage in the history of observational capacity : in the 17th of his microscope, and 18th centuries, as but also provided a robert hooke, Micrographia, 1665 European natural philosophers visually captivating turned unprecedented amounts of their metaphor for the new technology. Hooke’s attention towards insect , bugs in turn indexes a shift of empirical contributed to shaping the new ways that interest towards the study of bugs rooted in these were describing their world. developments in the way European intellectuals The saw the publication of the were understanding their world. But so too earliest texts devoted to , and with them did insects cast themselves back onto the a profusion of increasingly technical descriptions world that their observers were constructing, and illustrations. Throughout the next century, shaping reflexively the terms and tools of their the view of insects as pests borne from “the observation and, by extension, the social order putrefied remains of other animals” gave way that conditioned it. to an insatiable interest in bugs. (In scientific taxonomy, a true bug belongs to the order Troy Sherman Hemiptera of the class Insecta, but in common Graduate Program in the History of Art parlance all insects may be called “bugs,” and Williams College that is my variable usage here.) This exhibition, Class of 2021 drawn largely from the Chapin Library of

3 Head

An insect’s head contains its sensory organs: the ocelli, the eyes, the antennae, the mouthparts. It is the seat of a bug’s navigation and perception of its world.

If the microscope was chief among the technologies that altered the sensorium of empirical knowl- edge production during the , then its preferred object of inquiry — the insect — proved an able referent for this expanded universe. Bugs served for early microscopists not only as ideal experimental media, but also as challenges to existing investigatory methods and as material reference points for broader philosophical and natural historical debates. and Johannes Goedaert staked bold theological claims on their respective argu- ments about and , and both were required, by the exigen- cies of their research and the formal complexity of their subject matter, to develop unprecedentedly rigorous illustration and experimental techniques. Italian transitioned seamlessly between his studies of human and insect vasculatures, and Robert Hooke’s compound microscope was calibrated according to the compound eyes of the bugs it was magnifying. As this striking mise en abîme of microscopic gazing at insects suggests, looking closely at “God Almighty[’s] . . . smallest Animals” provided, for natural philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries, a means to situate the radically new world they were uncovering.

robert hooke, Micrographia, 1665

4 Robert Hooke, 1635–1703 text suggests: close to half of its 240 pages were devoted to insects, almost 30 of which went to Micrographia, or, Some Physiological Descriptions alone. of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glass: With Observations and Inquiries Thereupon : Printed for John Martyn, 1667 George Adams, 1750–1795 Gift of Alfred Clark Chapin, Class of 1869 Essays on the Microscope: Containing a Practical Description of the Most Improved , Hooke’s Micrographia, which initially appeared a General History of Insects in 1665, was the first major work published on . It left an indelible imprint London: Printed by Dillon and Keating, 1798 on scientific culture and experimentation Transfer from Williams College Library By the end of the 18th century, the logical yoke between insects and microscopy was well established, even taken for granted: in the early optical sections of Adams’ treatise, no mention is made of bugs; yet the plates which accompany this writing show microscopes in use, magnify- ing, exclusively, insects. Scarcely a century after its invention, the microscope had chosen insects as its preferred experimental media, suitably small and complex to reveal the almost fractal significance of a universe so thoroughly imbued with providential order. “If we examine insects robert hooke, Micrographia, 1665 with attention,” wrote Adams later on in his Essays, “we shall soon be convinced of their for generations to come, in large part due divine original, and survey with admiration to Hooke’s striking, full-page illustrations of the wonderful art and mechanism of their nature’s most “material and obvious things” structure.” ( and flint, moss and molds). The text was important symbolically as well as scientifically, marking a transition away from reasoned specu- lation about the natural world and towards rational, often mechanized observation of it. “The of Nature,” wrote Hooke, “has been already too long made only a work of the and the Fancy.” His promising new technology — a means for Europeans to observe the world literally anew — would help usher in his desired revolution, one of a “return to the plainness and soundness of observations.” In- sects, whose small size and physical complexity suited them well to microscopic scrutiny, proved the ideal subject matter for a science of close george adams, Essays on the Microscope, 1798 looking, as even a cursory glance at Hooke’s

5 to typify the scientific methodology that was being invented throughout the 17th century. For disproving the theory of spontaneous generation in flies, Redi became a firebrand among Europe’s intelligentsia and was perse- cuted by the Church, which led him to temper his findings with theological as well as rational justifications against . This subtle play of influence between existing and develop- ing orders of knowledge was typical in the 17th century, and was instrumental in the accession Francesco Redi, 1626–1697 of insects to a place of popular and experimental pride in European thought. Experimenta Circa Generationem Insectorum : Andreae Frisii, 1671 Purchased on the Tobias Cabot Fund

The Italian naturalist Francesco Redi was one of the Scientific Revolution’s most accomplished thinkers. His on the Generation of Insects (first published in Italian in 1668) was a fiercely rationalist and highly rigorous text, one of the first to employ the elements of control and repeatability which would come

f. redi, Experimenta Circa Generationem Insectorum, 1671

6 marcello malpighi, Opera Omnia, 1686

7 Johannes Goedaert, 1617–1668 Metamorphosis et Historia Naturalis Insectorum Middelburg: Jacobum Fierensium and Johannem Martinem, 1662?–69? 3 vols. in 1 Purchased on the Tobias Cabot Fund

Jan Goedaert was among the first crop of European natural philosophers of the Scientific Revolution to instrumentalize the new technol- ogy of microscopy for the study of insects. His Metamorphosis Naturalis is a foundational text in the early development of entomology, as it was perhaps the first to accurately describe the life cycles of insects and, more generally, was an early example of the strides towards anatomical marcello malpighi, Opera Omnia, 1686 specificity which could be made through the application of the microscope. Goedaert was a trained painter, and his illustrations for the Marcello Malpighi, 1628–1694 Metamorphosis reflect this: its text is decorated novelly with an observational exactitude that Opera Omnia would, over the course of the next two centuries, London: Robert Littlebury, 1686–87 become common fare in European scientific 2 vols. in 1 practice. Gift of Alfred Clark Chapin, Class of 1869

Marcello Malpighi was a paradigmatic poly- math: his application of the microscope to pursuits ranging from medical science to helped cement the novel technology in Europe’s scientific consciousness, and his studies often proved influential for their respective disciplines. Best known for his work on the human vasculature, he also published extensively on insect and generation (the Malpighian tubule system, which he first elucidated, is named for him). Through the lens of his microscope, Malpighi viewed with equal experimental verve the bodies of mammals and arthropods, drawing exciting and often inflam- matory connections between their respective machinations. Though his mark on the would be seen most clearly in the field of microscopic anatomy, each aspect of his work was influenced by its totality. johannes goedaert, Metamorphosis, 1662

8 Thorax The thorax, an insect’s midsection, contains the legs and wings. It is the site of a bug’s mobility.

Western Europe’s destructive colonial impulse was tied to the expansion of its markets and entrenchment of its industries; insects (more intensely scrutinized than ever before) thus became unprecedentedly saleable in the 17th and 18th centuries. Increased interest in the study of led to an influx of curiosities to the continent, a result of colonial collecting practices abroad; exotic insects — manifold and easily transportable — were among the most numerous natural wonders flooding European collections. Bugs, however, were not simply valued as rarefied specimens, but also as basic commodities: as the textile trade, for example, began to expand, so too did Europe’s obsession with cochineal, a critter used to make unsurpassably rich red dyes. These bugs propagated almost exclusively in Spanish colonies, shaping European trade relations and, at times, expansion itself. Eighteenth-century Europe also saw the dawn of apiculture as a formalized discipline, and with it a marked instrumentalization and economization of the scientific study of . As the 18th-century profusion of improved designs might suggest, the same economic–taxonomic colonial urge which radically altered ecosystems abroad was instrumental in reshaping the European landscape.

, A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and , 1725

9 Melchisédec Thévenot, 1620–1692 Recueil de Voyages de Mr. Thevenot : Estienne Michallet, 1681 Gift of Alfred Clark Chapin, Class of 1869

Thévenot was a well-travelled and well- connected French polymath whose studies on topics ranging from to magnet- ism were highly regarded in their time, and whose acquaintances included the noted Dutch microscopist (with whom Thévenot corresponded frequently). This omnibus of his travel writings is generously illustrated with engravings of maps (including the earliest of the ) and natural history specimens. The visual affinity between his depictions of the landscape and those of the curiosities it contained yokes the practice of exploring or conquering an environment with that of studying it: rivers, in these images, echo sinuously the vasculature of the insects found around them; textures of these creatures’ native mountains are reimagined in the outlines of their tiny frames.

melchisédec thévenot, Recueil de Voyages, 1681

10 Antonio Maria Tannoja, 1727–1808 Delle api e loro utile e della maniera di ben governale: trattato fisico–economico–rustico : Printed by Michele Morelli, 1798–1801 Vol. 2 of 3 Purchased on the Tobias Cabot Fund

Formanoir de Palteau, b. 1712 Nouvelle construction de ruches de bois: avec la façon d’y gouverner les abeilles inventeé par M. Palteau; et l’ de ces insectes . . . Metz: Joseph Collignon, 1756 Purchased on the Tobias Cabot Fund

Texts like Formanoir’s colourful report on Europe’s new wave in beehive construction or Tannoja’s broader set of recommendations for management from a hundred years later are emblematic of the impulse among enthusi- asts, collectors, and proprietors of insects, which grew steadily throughout the 18th century, to apply and invest in natural philo- formanoir de palteau, sophical insights about insect anatomy and Nouvelle construction de ruches de bois, 1756 behavior. In each author’s studied proposals for beehive design and techniques came in the to populate miniature facto- meant to increase the insects’ productivity, we ries as prescribed and tightly organized as those can see the imbrication of a steadily formalizing which would overtake Europe in the following scientific practice (and especially its objects of century. study) with market . Bees, as it were, Hans Sloane, 1660–1753 A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica: with the Natural History of the Herbs and Trees, Four-Footed Beasts, Fishes, , Insects, , &c. of the Last of Those Islands . . . London: Printed by B.M. for the author, 1707–25 Vol. 2 of 2 Gift of Alfred Clark Chapin, Class of 1869

“Power, wisdom, and Providence of God Almighty,” wrote Hans Sloane in the second antonio maria tannoja, Delle api e lor utile, 1801 volume of his sumptuously illustrated natural

11 history of Jamaica in 1725, “appear no where [sic] more than in the smallest Animals, called insects, which are provided with such as are necessary to bring them thro’ their several Changes, to Perfection.” Sloane’s that God’s perfection and divinity reflects itself in His humblest creations was symptomatic of the evolving opinion on insects in European scientific thought, but it also served somewhat to efface their increasingly common role as instruments of capitalist accumulation and natural resource exploitation. A large diagram accompanying the introductory chapter of Sloane’s Voyage to Jamaica, however, helps m.e. chevreul, The Laws of Contrast of Color, 1859 redirect our focus: it shows a cochineal planta- tion in Mexico, where indigenous workers, one of whom supplicates to a colonial official in the front right corner, pick tirelessly the tiny red insects from the thorny stems of cacti. George Edwards, 1694–1773 Essays upon Natural History, M.E. Chevreul, 1786–1889 and Other Miscellaneous Subjects London: Printed for J. Robson, 1770 The Laws of Contrast of Color Williams College Archives New edition Translated from the French by John Spanton A respected natural historian throughout the London: Routledge, Warnes, & Routledge, 1859 middle decades of the 18th century, Edwards Purchased on the Mary L.H. Richmond Fund was employed by Sir Hans Sloane (author of the popular travelogue and natural historical Chevreul’s foundational study on color theory account of the island of Jamaica) as a minia-­ was extraordinarily influential at and after the turist and record keeper. His Essays upon time of its initial release in 1839, providing a Natural History was broad in its scope, foundation for the scientific study of color and ranging from descriptions of the “characters its perception. Chevreul was a highly practical of eminent men” (including Sloane himself) chemist, who, prior to working on developing to thorough instructions for insect preservation. a unified theory of color, had studied the prop- His catalogue of Sloane’s (which would erties of animal fats, which inflected much of become the founding collection for the British his later work. Though the dye derived from the Museum upon his death) reveals that, except insects Sloane depicted a century earlier would for vegetables and shells, insects were Sloane’s have been used primarily to color textiles and most collected natural history specimens (at not bookplates, the brilliant red illustrations 5,439 discrete entries). included in Chevreul’s text serve, in this context, as stark reminders of the natural, social, and economic systems which interact to condition our knowledge of the world.

12 Abdomen An insect’s abdomen contains its reproductive organs, as well as its and digestive tract. It is at once the source of a bug’s life, its propagation, and its waste.

From the moment that King Solomon advised the “sluggard” to “go to the , consider her ways, and be wise,” insects have served as a continuous moral and political wellspring in Western thought. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the tenor of comparison between human and insect sociality shifted from figurative moralism to empirically informed, studied pragmatism. While earlier texts like Thomas de Cantimpre’sBonum Universale de Apibus (1250s) or Johannes Nider’s Formicarius (1430s) used cursory (and often disingenuous or secondhand) observations about insects to introduce moral messages, Enlightenment studies seamlessly enfolded close looking and high experimental standards with theological and political arguments about providential order, political sovereignty, or industry. Likewise, the study of bugs came to be used itself as a nationalist idiom — especially across the Atlantic, in the , where natural history (including entomology) flourished as Americans pored over the landscape in search of a national identity.

smith and abbot, Rarer Lepidopterous Insects of , 1797

13 Thomas de Cantimpré, 1200?–1270? Dit is der Bien Boeck Zwolle: Pieter van Os, 1488 Gift of Alfred Clark Chapin, Class of 1869

Thomas de Cantimpré’s 13th-century “bee book” is emblematic of the medieval world’s interest in bugs in that it is not actually all that interested in bugs. As with other texts from the Middle Ages which took insects as their subject matter or structuring metaphor, this text (first pub- lished in as Bonum universale de apibus) proposes insects as exemplars of certain ideal human behaviors, and uses their industriousness and obeisance to stake a theological claim. Insects are moral metaphors rather than objects of inquiry — and while the latter would come to change over the next few hundred years as scientific practice grew into its own ideology, charles butler, The Feminine Monarchie, 1623 bugs would continue to captivate European thinkers figuratively and anecdotally, even and especially once their order and mechanism book. Its influence on the practice of beekeep- had been fully explicated. ing and the scientific study of bees in Europe was enormous, as it contains both specific, Charles Butler, d. 1647 categorical advice for apiarists and novel ob- servations about the social and biological The Feminine Monarchie: or, The Historie of Bees of the insects. Chief among these was the London: Printed by John Haviland, 1623 claim, somewhat scandalous at the time since Gift of Alfred Clark Chapin, Class of 1869 it contradicted ’s own opinion on the matter, which Butler staked boldly in his title: Butler’s natural history of the honeybee — the that were helmed not by Kings, but first text of its kind, and certainly among the Queens. The text’s most famous quirk is its most ambitious — is a charming and dutiful inclusion of Butler’s own musical notation for a madrigal based on the sounds which bees emit while swarming, but by and large The Feminine Monarchie is comprised of information that would not be wholly unfamiliar or eccentric to beekeepers today. For insect-focused texts of the time (it first saw the press in 1609), its practical- ity was exceptional, and in many ways the book presages the reasoned, observational revolution which would soon overtake European natural philosophers’ interest in bugs.

14 John Thorley, 1671–1759 conditioned Thomas de Cantimpré in the 13th century and the earliest avowed entomologists Melisselogia, or, The Female Monarchy: of the 18th. Being an Enquiry into the Nature, Order, and Government of Bees . . . London: Printed for the author, 1744 Gilles Augustin Bazin, 1681–1754 Gift of Duane W. and Leeta L. Bailey The Natural History of Bees . . . Seeing only 784 copies printed upon its release Translated from the French in 1744, Thorley’s curiousMelisselogia was a London: Printed for J. and P. Knapton cottage affair. Its author was a minister and avid and P. Vailant, 1744 beekeeper who had little scientific knowledge of Purchased on the Tobias Cabot Fund the insects. As such, the text is largely citational, taking its information directly from the likes of Like Butler’s seminal text more than a century Natural History of Bees Joseph Warder and Jan Swammerdam and before, Bazin’s was intended to strike a middle ground between deriving its title from Butler’s famous study of a century earlier. Considering its frequent practical manual and scientific tome. Bazin’s desultory appeals to political order, Melisselogia goal was to bridge the divide between those serves as a clear example of the uptake of “who have treated [bees] most learnedly, and insights from the rapidly emerging but still with the greatest exactness… [but who] have unincorporated field of entomology (about the no real relation to Bees” and those “who breed social organization of bees and their manage- them, and who might make their advantage ment by apiarists) into anecdotal or even folk of them… [but] have scarce any knowledge of understandings of insects. Throughout the bees.” Composed in nineteen parts as a dialogue text, Thorley stresses the industry of these tiny between a hapless but curious dilettante, creatures and admires the unfailing sovereign Clarissa, and her pedantic mentor, Eugenio, power which their Queen holds over them the text serves as a clear indication of the social while also urging his readers’ fealty to the position and market-driven, utilitarian bent of divine authority of King George. In this much intellectual labor in the nascent discipline sense, the book is situated epistemologically of entomology. Moreover, its detailed descrip- between the orders of knowledge which tions and painstakingly rendered illustrations index the enormous strides which the study of insects has made, over the course of a little more than a century, towards scientific rigor and observational exactitude.

Dionysius Lardner, 1793–1859 The Bee and the White : Their Matters and Habits London: Walton and Maberly, 1856 Gift of Duane W. and Leeta L. Bailey

Lardner was a prolific science writer for the popular press who published on topics ranging john thorley, Melisselogia, 1744 from astronomy to Charles Babbage’s analytical

15 engine. The Bee and the White Ants, which saw a second edition in 1878, was the only of his several dozen books to focus on insects, and it contains careful recapitulations of recent research into the behavior of its titular critters. Though it begins with a theological prelude that mirrors those of his 18th-century forebears in expressing wonder for a Creator whose perfection is as visible “in the economy of an insect, as… in the structure and motions of a planet,” Lardner’s text is resolutely scientific in the as-then recently minted sense of the term (William Whewell had first used the thomas say, American Entomology, word “” only two decades earlier). 1824–28 In this way — and in its clinical illustrations of insects drawn from a growing network of Thomas Say, 1787–1834 knowledge production among scientists in the discipline — the text serves as a thorough index American Entomology, or Descriptions of the of the cultural of knowledge about Insects of North America insects into the codified practice of entomology. : Philadelphia Museum, 1824–28 Vol. 1 of 3 Purchased on the Tobias Cabot Fund James Edward Smith, 1759–1828 John Abbot, 1751–1840 Compiled and published during the newly inde- pendent United States’ earliest wave of natural The Natural History of the Rarer historical identity-building, Say’s remarkable Lepidopterous Insects of Georgia . . . collection makes a convincing pictorial case for London: Printed by T. Bensley the vibrancy and distinctiveness of the American for J. Edwards, 1797 landscape and the tiny beasts which populate Vol. 1 of 2 it. American Entomology was compiled through Gift of Alfred Clark Chapin, Class of 1869 Say’s extensive travels to the young country’s rapidly expanding frontier, and he was the first The result of a collaboration between a well- American to describe many of the insects in- respected, resolutely Linnean botanist (Smith) cluded (along with thoughtfully detailed illus- and an accomplished natural illustrator of the trations) in his text’s three volumes. Following Americas (Abbot), this text is regarded for its a decade’s worth of exploration and collecting, novelty and precedence (it was perhaps the Say composed much of American Entomology in earliest work devoted to the insects of the North the utopian, intellectually progressive commu- American continent) as well as its remarkably nity of New Harmony, , situated on detailed and strikingly colourful depictions of the new state’s southwestern border with Illinois. Georgian . Released in a combined French and English edition for a primarily European audience, the collection marked an early instance of European, especially English, Chapin Library, Williams College interest in the natural history of the strange May 2020 new country across the Atlantic.