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“Their Wonderful Mechanism” Looking at Bugs in the Age of Enlightenment

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“Their Wonderful Mechanism” Looking at Bugs in the Age of Enlightenment “Their Wonderful Mechanism” Looking at Bugs in the Age of Enlightenment 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 robert hooke, Micrographia, 1665 “Their Wonderful Mechanism” Looking at Bugs in the Age of Enlightenment HEN ROBERT HOOKE peered Williams College and organized in three through his microscope into the sections corresponding to the body segments of Weyes of a dronefly, he didn’t simply catch an insect, 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 Europe’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 entomology: 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 life, bugs in turn experiment indexes a shift of empirical contributed to shaping the new ways that interest towards the study of bugs rooted in these scientists were describing their world. developments in the way European intellectuals The 17th century saw the publication of the were understanding their world. But so too earliest texts devoted to insects, 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 Scientific Revolution, 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. Francesco Redi and Johannes Goedaert staked bold theological claims on their respective argu- ments about spontaneous generation and metamorphosis, 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 physician Marcello Malpighi 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 flies alone. of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glass: With Observations and Inquiries Thereupon London: 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 Microscopes, Hooke’s Micrographia, which initially appeared a General History of Insects in 1665, was the first major work published on microscopy. 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.” (fleas 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 science of Nature,” wrote Hooke, “has been already too long made only a work of the Brain 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 abiogenesis. 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 Amsterdam: 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 Experiments 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 botany 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 anatomy 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
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