Joseph Breintnall. Nature Prints of Leaves , July 18, 1736. The Library Company of Philadelphia.

50 doi:10.1162/GREY_a_00231

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00231 by guest on 26 September 2021 The Veins of Pennsylvania: Benjamin Franklin’s Nature-Print Currency

JENNIFER L. ROBERTS

In the 1730s and early 1740s, Joseph Breintnall made a series of exquisite nature prints as aids to the study and classification of plants growing in America. His leaf prints, produced in the context of a thriving philosophical-horticultural community in colonial Philadelphia, were sought after on both sides of the Atlantic because they allowed the close empirical study of leaves but were more permanent and portable than real specimens. To make his prints, Breintnall coated the leaves with printer’s ink, placed them within a folded sheet of large paper, and either printed them with a hand roller or ran them through his friend Benjamin Franklin’s press. 1 This produced a remarkably clear, precise, and durable image. Breintnall made hundreds, perhaps thousands, of these prints, occasionally experimenting with other leaflike objects, including feathers and pieces of fabric. 2 Much of the interest of these prints derives from their doubled structure. One might be tempted to call it a “mirrored” structure, but the twinned leaves are not really mirror images. Rather than a reversed image of a single surface, as one would have in a counterproof, they show simultaneous impressions of the upper (adaxial) and lower (abaxial) surfaces of each leaf. For any given leaf in a Breintnall composition, the slightly blurred print on the left is the top surface, and the crisper, more precise print on the right is the underside, where the venation is more pronounced. By presenting both sides of the leaf at once, Breintnall’s prints vividly convey the dorsoventral or double-sided structure of leaves, with their venation pattern that carries a single composition through to both surfaces. The prints also highlight the impor - tance of surface area—with each leaf having two active surfaces rather than one—for newly theorized processes of transpiration (the movement of water through plants as it evaporates from leaves). Yet along with its factual efficacy, this double-siding also has aesthetic effects. It imparts a strange illusion of transparency, as if, in the unfolding of the printed sheet, the viewer were per - mitted to see through the leaves—seeing both sides of a surface at once: omniscience impossible in everyday sensory experience. It also has the effect of perfecting the leaves, transforming the arbi - trary and accidental particularities of each into what appears to

Grey Room 69, Fall 2017, pp. 50–79. © 2017 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 51

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00231 by guest on 26 September 2021 be a purposeful, symmetrical, balanced pattern (incidentally, this is an ingenious way of resolving the tension between individual and type, accident and form, that was such a concern for both aesthetics and natural history in the eighteenth century). 3 The doubling instantly contains the minor asymmetries of the indi - vidual leaves as well as the randomness and contingency of their arrangement on the paper, transforming them into a design or general system. Breintnall’s prints subtly suggest that the minute fluidities of individual leaves participate in a grander design. Despite having been generated in the smallest possible space by having been literally pressed , the leaf prints seem to have been raised above their humble plane into another dimension. Breintnall may not have thought about it in quite these terms, but he appealed to a higher design in other ways, indicating on one print that his leaves were made by God: “Engraven by the Greatest and Best Engraver in the Universe.” 4 Breintnall’s short phrase amplifies two key suggestions already whispered by the prints themselves: that leaves are already a form of natural engraving and that their tiniest reticulations have the capacity to channel the flow of powers that lie well beyond their immediate leafy boundaries. In these and other ways, Breintnall’s nature prints embody a much broader expansion of the significance and philosophical range of the leaf image in early eighteenth-century Philadelphia. Through a close analysis of the leaf prints that Breintnall and Benjamin Franklin developed for the backs of colonial currency notes, this article argues that humble maple, sage, and buttercup leaves, cast and printed on small leaflike bills, awak - Joseph Breintnall. Nature Print ened a form of period liquid intelligence that linked the spheres of Red Sage, Nasturtium, of natural philosophy, printing, politics, and economics in a single and Aspen , August 1736. The Library Company of Philadelphia. fluid relation.

52 Grey Room 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00231 by guest on 26 September 2021 Breintnall was a minor figure in the Philadelphia philosophical community of the early eighteenth century. Dabbling in printing and poetry as well as natural philosophy, he was a founding member of the Junto, Franklin’s conversation club. He was the first secretary of the Library Company of Philadelphia (forerunner of the American Philosophical Society) and the sheriff of Philadelphia County. Franklin described him as “very ingenious in many little knicknackeries, & of sensible conversation.” 5 Like many members of the Junto, he participated in natural philoso - phy experiments, producing several observations that were read before the Royal Society in London. Especially notable was a letter published in the Transactions describing his experiences of having been bitten by a rattlesnake in 1745.

| | | | |

During the years Breintnall was perfecting his nature prints, Franklin was busy printing and promoting a new issue of paper currency for the colony of Pennsylvania. In 1729, at the age of twenty-three, he had published a pamphlet titled A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency , in which he argued that a land-backed paper currency would stimulate trade, raise the value of land and agricultural products in the colonies, reduce interest rates, and, most of all, restore pliancy to an economy that had been paralyzed by the drainage of specie across the Atlantic. The British colonies in America were perpetually short on circulating coin because, while British merchants would accept only coin in payment for goods, the British Crown disallowed the export of specie currency to the colonies. 6 This is one of the reasons colonial America was the site of some of the first and most extensive experiments with paper currency in the modern world. The inflow, outflow, bal - ance, and circulation of specie were topics of urgent contestation in colonial America. 7 Franklin’s pamphlet was successful not only in convincing the legislature to produce new emissions of paper currency but ultimately in securing to himself the commission to design and print said currency. 8 As a printer rather than just a promoter of paper money, Franklin now had literally to put his money where his mouth was—to find ways to make his currency actually carry out his economic arguments. The most urgent challenge facing Franklin (or any currency designer) in this respect was designing currency in such a way that it could rebuff the threat of counter - feiting. This meant he had to confront a particularly difficult problem in the history of printing: how to create a print that could not be copied—how to create, that is, a nonreproducible reproduction. Each note had to be identical but also inimitable.

Roberts | The Veins of Pennsylvania: Benjamin Franklin’s Nature-Print Currency 53

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00231 by guest on 26 September 2021 Because the design of paper currency always sets printing against itself in this fashion, currency printing is inherently a kind of metaprinting. For Franklin, it became a laboratory for technical innovation as well as an activity that required a high degree of self-consciousness about complex problems in referentiality, symbolization, abstraction, materiality, and fluidity. 9 In the early years of his currency design, Franklin began work - ing through these problems by devising innovative anticounter - feiting strategies. One perpetual problem, for example, was the so-called raising of notes. This practice, which numismatist Eric P. Newman calls “a common occupation of colonial rascals in the evening,” involved altering the denominations printed on notes to a higher value (changing a ten shilling note into a hundred shilling note by adding a zero, for example). 10 Franklin’s response was to spell the word Pennsylvania in a different way on each of four high-denomination bills, so that if a note were raised, the improperly spelled (i.e., misspelled) “Pennsylvania” would reveal the deception. 11 Along with these inscriptive practices, he exper - imented with papermaking, including adding flecks of mica and asbestos for strength and embedding colored threads (a different color for each denomination) in the pulp. 12 Franklin also brought his knowledge of typecasting, gained while apprenticed to a printer in London in the 1720s, to bear on the anticounterfeiting project. He insisted on printing his bills using relief methods (woodcut images and letterpress) rather than from a single engraved intaglio copperplate. This allowed him to use multiple typefaces, as well as a bewildering variety of type ornaments and vignettes in combination. To reprint one of Franklin’s notes, counterfeiters would need to have all the same typesets with all the same fonts to produce the same combinations. 13 In this, Franklin was exploiting the difficulty of obtaining type and typefaces in early eighteenth-century America, especially unusual types such as the dingbats (printer’s ornaments), Hebrew and Greek letters, and the rare punctuation marks Franklin used to create decorative borders on his bills. Typefaces were extremely expensive and had to be imported from abroad. During the period of his early currency designing, Franklin was probably the only person in North America who had the knowledge and wherewithal to cast his own passable type. 14 So even in his earliest bills, as he sought to produce images that were both unique and reproducible, Franklin was already appealing to the properties of liquidity. Deploying his rare command over liquid typemetal, he was able to shape his bills in ways that could not be replicated by his peers. And tapping into the fluidly recombinatorial power of movable type (like movable type, liquid was defined in period tracts as “that which hath its Parts very easily mov’d one among another”), he

54 Grey Room 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00231 by guest on 26 September 2021 imagined the surface of each bill design as a plane on which particles of inscription would flow and settle in singular ways. 15

| | | | |

Meanwhile, in 1736, Breintnall wrote a short article in which he offered “A particular Description of the Herb which the Indians use to cure the Bite of that venomous Reptile a Rattle-Snake.” Franklin decided to publish the article in Poor Richard’s Almanack for 1737 and hoped to include an image of the herb to aid the reader in its proper identification. 16 The precise contours of the collabo - ration are not known, but Breintnall must have suggested to Franklin that they publish a nature print as the article’s illustra - tion, and Franklin took up the challenge. To make a single print from an inked leaf and put it in an album is one thing. To print a leaf in Poor Richard’s Almanack , which had a circulation of about 10,000 in 1737, is quite another. In Breintnall’s nature prints, the fragile leaf had itself served as the printing matrix. If he had tried to make more than a few copies, the leaf would have been pulped and degraded beyond recognition under the press. Franklin and Breintnall needed to Joseph Breintnall. “Rattle-Snake Herb” with direct cast leaf find a way to transform the delicate venation of the leaf into a print by Breintnall and Franklin. durable matrix that could be used to print thousands of copies. From Poor Richard, 1737 ; an And they needed to do this without sacrificing the indexical Almanack for the Year of Christ, 1737 , 1736. The American immediacy of the nature print—without sacrificing the guaran - Philosophical Society. tee that the leaf had essentially printed itself. They had to find a way to transform a singular nature print into a mass-reproducible image. Franklin, drawing on his knowledge of typefounding and his familiarity with English recipes for taking plaster molds of leaves and medals, recognized that the solution lay in developing a method of double cast - ing the leaves. 17 Using custom-formulated plaster and typemetal, he ultimately succeeded, as the fourth page of the 1737 Almanack attests. This humble page repre - sents a momentous achievement in the history of printing, a watershed in print technology. It repre - sents one of the first successful experiments with stereotyping, a printing process that did not come into its own until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 18 In stereotyping, an original relief matrix is cast to create a paper or plaster mold, which is then cast again in metal, essentially “moving” the original matrix into a more stable form for high- volume reproduction. 19 As an automatically gener - ated, mass-produced natural image, the leaf is an

Roberts | The Veins of Pennsylvania: Benjamin Franklin’s Nature-Print Currency 55

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00231 by guest on 26 September 2021 early example of an indexical multiple on paper. It is perhaps the closest thing to a photograph or a halftone—an image transferred directly from nature to a reproductive matrix without manual translation—that could have been made in the eighteenth century. The rattlesnake herb print was also momentous because it led Franklin, who was always looking for better ways to embed anti - counterfeiting measures into his bills, to realize that nature- printed leaves would prove nearly impossible to forge. By August 1739 he had printed the first Pennsylvania nature-printed notes, featuring three blackberry leaves on a sprig. 20 Franklin’s leaf prints became a standard fea - ture on the backs of mid-Atlantic paper cur - rency for decades thereafter. Franklin, with partner David Hall, printed Pennsylvania’s notes until he left to embark on his diplomatic career in Europe, when he gave over the process to Hall and another partner, William Sellers (hence the “Hall and Sellers” designa - tion on so many Pennsylvania and Continental nature-printed notes). Franklin also taught the nature-printing process to select printers in Delaware, Maryland, and New Jersey, who printed the currencies of those colonies. Franklin’s process was last used on Continental currency during and for a few years after the Revolutionary War. All in all, nature prints circulated on millions of pounds’ and dollars’ worth of paper currency in colonial and revolutionary America. 21 Archival records related to Franklin’s cast - ing and printing process are scarce because the process was by necessity secret—for obvious reasons, he did not write it down or distribute an account of it. After the last American nature-printed bills were made in the mid-1780s, the process was forgotten for the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century. Despite the robust historiography of Frankliniana that developed during this time, not until 1963 were the leaves on Franklin’s bills recognized by numismatists as having been made by nature printing rather than hand engraving. Newman, whose seminal 1964 articles in the Numismatist painstak - ingly established the bills as having been made from life casts, admits that prior to that time he “had no inkling that the leaf cuts

56 Grey Room 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00231 by guest on 26 September 2021 had not originated from hand engraving.” 22 Another reason the leaf prints remained mysterious to researchers for so long is that no examples of the blocks used to print them were known to have survived (early American type of any kind is extremely rare, since most specimens were melted down and recast). In 2012, however, a typemetal block featuring three sage leaves, probably cast by Franklin’s successor Hall in 1760, was found in the Delaware County Institute of Science in Media, Pennsylvania. 23 As established by Newman and by inten - sive research on the newly located block by historian Jessica Linker, Franklin’s process probably proceeded as follows: First he prepared a small leaf for impression by pressing it flat, adhering it face down onto a piece of cloth (so that the more prominently veined underside faced up), then adhering the cloth to a hard sur - face made either of wood or plaster. The cloth-and-leaf surface was then lightly oiled (to reduce sticking) and surrounded on

four sides with a shallow boxlike enclosure into which plaster Opposite, top: Benjamin Franklin. was poured. When dried and removed from the box, the plaster twenty-shilling note, presented a level surface holding a negative impression of Pennsylvania 1739. The American the leaf backed by the texture of the cloth. This then became a Antiquarian Society. mold. To fortify it against the heat of the typemetal that would be Opposite, bottom: Forty-shilling note, Pennsylvania, 1775. poured into it, Franklin probably mixed a combination of Courtesy the American Currency asbestos, brick dust, and mica into the plaster. The resulting Collection, Baker Library, Harvard typemetal impression returned the veins of the leaf’s underside Business School (olvwork363063) . to their original positive (relief) configuration. This thin metal Below: Benjamin Franklin and David Hall. Leaf block used matrix was then nailed to a wooden block that brought the to print paper money, ca. 1760. impression up to type height so that it could be locked into a The Library Company of printing chase and combined with the letterpress text and orna - Philadelphia, on deposit from 24 the Delaware County Institute ments on the bill. of Science. Photograph courtesy The leaves were good counterfeit protection because the quality Jessica Linker.

Roberts | The Veins of Pennsylvania: Benjamin Franklin’s Nature-Print Currency 57

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00231 by guest on 26 September 2021 of line made by the venation was too soft, subtle, and variable to be made by hand with engraving tools, and the randomness built into the reticulated structure was difficult to manufacture artifi - cially. Not just the quality of the line but the texture and tone of the print were inimitable—the cast picked up not just the veins but the surface texture of the leaves, which, when printed, attained a tonal value impossible to replicate in a simple line engraving or woodcut. The result looked more like a mezzotint or aquatint, but those processes required an engraving press rather than a letterpress. Even if one figured out how to replicate Franklin and Breintnall’s process, one would have to find an identical leaf specimen, which would be impossible. 25

Liquid Systems Franklin’s leaf prints draw on a broad range of interconnected liquid networks. The prints’ most immediate fluid derivation is the vascular tissue of the leaf itself, through which water and nutrients flow. The venation of a leaf is a hierarchical reticulate structure that branches into veinlets. Each vein is a vascular bundle incorporating ducts that bring water and minerals from the roots to the leaf and ducts that move photosynthetic sugars out of the leaf to the rest of the plant. Pores in the leaves called stomata allow evaporation of fluids from the leaf. This evapora - tion or transpiration in turn drives a much larger fluid system, causing water to move upward, against gravity, throughout the entire plant. As the stomata open to allow the evaporation of water from the leaf, the hydrostatic (water) pressure decreases and, thanks to the cohesion and adhesion of water molecules, creates a differential that “pulls” water through the plant. A column of water is essentially hoisted through the plant from the roots to the leaves. This, in turn, causes the roots to draw water from the soil and thus generates further hydrodynamic move - ments underground. The basic mechanics of transpiration were just becoming known in Franklin’s time, thanks largely to the work of British naturalist Stephen Hales, whose Vegetable Staticks of 1727 was the first experimental study of transpiration. 26 A sensation among naturalists, the book would certainly have been known to Breintnall, and Franklin frequently mentions it in his letters. 27 Hales’s work demonstrated the dynamism of plant circulation and the consequent connections between plant, soil, and atmos - phere. Following a well-established practice of anthropomorphic comparison in botanical study, he also evoked connections between leaves and people by exploring similarities between the circulatory structures of animals and of plants. Because animal and vegetable fluids followed the same hydrostatic principles and used similar capillary structures, he argued that there was “a

58 Grey Room 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00231 by guest on 26 September 2021 great analogy between plants and animals.” 28 He included a long set of calculations about the “Velocity of fluids” through both kinds of bodies by comparing human beings and plants in terms of bulk and surface area. 29 These analogies were especially evi - dent to Hales because he also did extensive experiments on mam - malian circulation and respiration, publishing Haemostaticks , his companion volume to Vegetable Staticks , in 1733. 30 One of the methods he had devised to visualize mammalian circulation structures cemented the visual analogy between animals and plants and echoed Franklin and Breintnall’s use of lead casting to depict the circulatory structures of leaves. With his associate, Rev. William Stukeley, Hales had made lead casts of the trachea and bronchial trees of dogs. Stukeley described the process in his diary: “I poured into [the lungs] melted lead which filld up all Illustration of hydrostatic experiments from Stephen their ramifications like the branches of a tree, then . . . I had the Hales, Vegetable Staticks: or, finest animal plant that ever was seen.” 31 An Account of Some Statical Hales’s understanding of the universality of circulatory Experiments on the Sap in Vegetables , 1727. The structures was part of a period rhetorical environment in which Smithsonian Institution Libraries. circulation was gaining status as a master concept. As Joyce Chaplin argues, following the publication of William Harvey’s De motu cordis in 1628, which first theorized and named the phenome - non, “circulation gained tremendous and lasting resonance within social thought. It was the first example of an idea within the modern sciences becoming a metaphor or even model for the human world.” 32 Thus, just as each small leaf taps into a more massive displacement of water through the plant and the soil, the hydrostatics of plant life could be seen as part of a grander system that included not only the “Animal Oeconomy” (a term from another important book Franklin had read carefully, Martin Clare’s Motion of Fluids ) but many other kinds of economies. 33 As Chaplin argues, “almost as soon as the concepts of circulation and equilibrium emerged in natural science, they were appropriated into dis - cussions of commerce and politics.” 34 This points to the efficacy of circulation and equilibrium as systemic concepts par excellence in natural philosophy. The concept of circulation thus functioned like the literal process it named: it con -

Roberts | The Veins of Pennsylvania: Benjamin Franklin’s Nature-Print Currency 59

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00231 by guest on 26 September 2021 nected different bodies and systems of knowledge. Franklin’s leaf prints, then, emerged from an intellectual milieu in which they could be understood as more than just pictures of leaves. Instead, they virtually demanded to be seen as tapping into a grand global system of fluid relations that embraced both the natural and the social world. We can trace these connections in Franklin’s own work by considering the connections between his leaf prints and two examples of other “circulatory systems” in which he was deeply interested. First: printing. Franklin’s leaves picture not only themselves but serve as metapictures of the liquidities and “circulations” of ink that created them as prints. Just as the leaf captures water and moves it from place to place, so is printmak - ing essentially an art, as contemporary artist Matt Saunders says, of “trapping ink and moving it from one place to another.” 35 Although the transfer of liquid in printing and transpiration is not precisely congruent, leaves and prints move liquids across and between surfaces by dint of adhesion and cohesion, chan - neling and pressure. The relationship between the liquid channels of printing and botany, while not obvious to the lay observer, is abundantly evi - dent to the printer or printmaker, who must control the flow of ink by creating physical conduits in the plate. The analogy must be directly confronted at the level of practice whenever a print - Below: James Trenchard, able image of a leaf is produced. Consider the example of botanical engraving after William Bartram. engraving. While incising lines into the plate, the engraver must Aesculus polygamia , ca. 1786. Detail. The American necessarily consider the relationship between the venation of the Philosophical Society. leaf and the linear filigree he or she is carving into the plate to Opposite: Joseph Breintnall. depict that leaf. The ultimate expression of this analogy in hand- An Aspen Leaf Pluck’d from a engraved images of leaves is usually conflicted, as in a 1786 Young Bush at Morten Garrett’s example by Philadelphian James Trenchard, where the gross 10th of June 1739 , 1739. The Library Company of Philadelphia. structure of the leaf’s venation is incised on the plate but the finer veins are replaced by crosshatching. Trenchard essentially superimposes the two systems’ vocabularies for chan - neling liquids—the leaf’s veins share space with crosshatching, the standard reticulation pattern of line engraving— what we might call engraving’s own traditional vascular system. 36 Franklin’s nature-printed banknotes avoid this conflict because the two technologies of liquid distribution coincide. The vascular pathways of the leaf become the vascular pathways of the print. The fluid distribution system of the leaf comes to serve

60 Grey Room 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00231 by guest on 26 September 2021 directly as the fluid distribution system of the print. 37 The broader disseminative and communicative project of printing is also evoked by Franklin’s leaves—not only by virtue of the intersection of botanical imagery with such common metaphors as “the leaves of a book” but in the discourse of exchange and surface area that became vivid with Hales’s work on transpiration. Hales articulated the importance of leaves in increasing the plant’s surface area and facilitating the “evacua - tions” of its fluids and the exchange of nutrients between fluid and air, plant and environment. 38 By the 1730s the beautiful surface of a leaf not only conveyed its own internal aesthetics of fluidity; it also offered a model of exchange with the wider world. The leaf’s surface was distributive as well as absorptive. 39 In a similar way, the surfaces of prints create an interface for the transfer of information. To describe printing as a process by which the informational surface area of a cultural system is increased seems perfectly logical. Another liquid system evoked by Franklin’s leaves is the hydro - graphic system. Franklin’s leaves evoke and ultimately derive from the land and the watercourses that penetrate it. The resem - blance between a botanical image of branching venation and a cartographic image of a branching river system is strik - ing. Moreover, rivers are themselves very large-scale engravings in which water has engraved the surface of the land. Franklin would have been aware of this resem - blance, as he had been deeply involved in various cartographic enterprises from the early years of his printing career in Philadelphia. He was well connected to the surveying community in Philadelphia; several members of the Junto in the early years were surveyors and inventors of surveying instruments. 40 In 1733, three years before devising the printing process for his leaves, Franklin had carved and published an important woodcut map of the contested boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania that echoes the leaf prints in its ebullient attention to the branching river systems of the Chesapeake and Delaware. 41 Franklin designed and printed many maps highlighting water and flow, including a (somewhat inaccu - rate) image of the course of the Gulf Stream. In his essay on liquid intelligence that

Roberts | The Veins of Pennsylvania: Benjamin Franklin’s Nature-Print Currency 61

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00231 by guest on 26 September 2021 is the inspiration for this issue of Grey Room , Jeff Wall suggests that the advent of digital imaging will produce “a new displace - ment of water in photography. It will disappear from the imme - diate production-process, vanishing to the more distant horizon of the generation of electricity.” 42 The liquid intelligence of photography will retreat from the developing tray to the distant river powering the hydroelectric plant. Although this image of liquid being displaced farther and farther from the image may seem declensionist, Wall’s fundamental claim is that liquid intel - ligence can operate across great distances, remaining active even when it has left the immediate scene of production. In its own way, Franklin’s currency evinces a similarly tena - cious connection between river and print. However tempting it Map of the border between might be to dismiss the resemblance between Franklin’s maps Pennsylvania and Maryland and leaves as mere pseudomorphism, the land and its water - printed by Benjamin Franklin, 1733. From Charles Calvert, fifth courses literally functioned as the ground of value for his nature- Baron Baltimore, Richard Penn, printed notes. 43 Franklin’s notes were backed not by specie but by John Penn, and Thomas Penn, land assets. They entered circulation through loan offices that Articles of Agreement: Made and Concluded Upon Between the were essentially land banks. Landowners would visit a loan office Right Honourable the Lord managed by the legislature and pledge their property as collateral Proprietary of Maryland, and the for a loan of paper money. 44 To obtain the paper notes, they would Honourable the Proprietarys of Pensilvania, &c. Touching the need to bring a property map or plat. Thus, these two kinds of Limits and Boundaries of the Two documents—map and note—would be brought together at the Provinces: with the Commission, loan office as equivalent representations of land. The land would Constituting Certain Persons to Execute the Same (1733). thus beget the notes in a process Franklin described using the vocabulary of coining. He described the notes as if they were prints or casts of the land rather than merely referential inscriptions: “Bills issued upon Land, are in Effect Coined Land .” 45 A series of liquidities thus flowed through Franklin’s leaves, creating a fluid field of associational exchange that con - nects land to leaf to print to economy. Many of these connections may seem to linger at the level of mere resemblance, metaphor, or loose evocation. Yet, if we can speak of these notes as having an “intelligence,” it is because they work to link these various forms of liquidity in a stronger, more direct way, through a process of direct transfer and perpetua - tion. The water from the land literally enters the veins of the leaf, which then literally forms the plaster mold, which then literally engraves the typemetal matrix, which then literally transfers ink

62 Grey Room 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00231 by guest on 26 September 2021 to the printed note, which then literally produces flow and cir - culation in the colonial economy. Colonial nature-print currency attempts to relay an authenticating fluidity from the land to the economy at large—to raise it, we might say, from the brook to the bank. In the process of transpiration, water is drawn from the soil up to and through the leaves. Franklin’s relay captures this elevation and nests it within a series of subsequent adhesions that pull liquids even further uphill, through different levels of being and meaning, from the natural to the artifactual to the social and the economic. Franklin’s appeal to liquid intelligence as that which binds the land to the currency notes “coined” from it is particularly com - pelling because it emerges from a milieu in which the very notion of money was undergoing a series of turbulent redefinitions, all revolving around shifting relationships between land, metal, and paper as sites or modes of value. In England, the Recoinage Act of 1695–1696 had both marked and sparked intense ontological debates about the meaning, location, and mobility of value that would continue throughout the eighteenth century. As literary historian James Thompson demonstrates, the period witnessed a gradual change from materialist to nominalist understandings of value (value as inhering in metals like silver and gold to value as an abstract negotiation marked by inscriptions on paper) and from an image of money as wealth to an image of money as capi - tal (from a hoard or treasure to be accumulated in place to an instrument that travels and replicates itself). As Thompson writes, at issue was “the re-representation of the money form, as it passes from realist to nominalist conceptions of value, in a dematerial - ization from metal to paper medium; and the reconceptualization of money as such, from wealth itself to capital, from inert hoard to money in motion.” 46 Thompson outlines the huge stakes (for art, literature, subjectivity, nationalism, and the very idea of “the economy”) of this emergent nominalist-capitalist financial model, as well as the wrenching debates, self-contradictions, paradoxes, and disavowals that tended to accompany attempts to define it. Franklin’s combination of working knowledges in typefound - ing, metallurgy, and hydrostatics allowed him to imagine new ways of navigating this crisis of materiality and value by appeal - ing to the liquid intelligence of materials themselves. For exam - ple, we might see Franklin’s transpirational currency as a tool for using liquid intelligence to bridge the yawning ontological gap between metal and paper value schemes. That gap was often expressed spatially, as a metaphorical opposition between earth and sky. Massy, metal measures of value (the material model) were associated with the ground because they appealed to the constancy of real land, because metals derived from the earth, and because the hoarding of wealth often involved the literal

Roberts | The Veins of Pennsylvania: Benjamin Franklin’s Nature-Print Currency 63

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00231 by guest on 26 September 2021 burial of coins. Paper value (the nominalist model), on the other hand, imagined money as something that flew about in the air (Adam Smith would later describe paper money taking a “waggon- way through the air” on “Daedalian wings”). 47 Few eighteenth- century commentators, however, were comfortable with this purely aerial notion of money as having an inherently extrinsic value structure—money as flimsy, papery, insubstantial, and only arbi - trarily connected to any real material guarantee. The challenge was always to imbue notes with the kind of real, material, intrin - sic value that was typical of specie currency—to get, somehow, some ground into the air. 48 American colonists were generally less squeamish about fiat money than their metropolitan counterparts because there was so little specie in the colonies in the first place, but in their turn to land banks they, too, sought assurances in the ground. 49 Given the tendency of coin to depart the colonies in trade as soon as it arrived, specie itself was sometimes imagined as aerial: The colonists “felt the need of a medium of exchange which, unlike coin, would not ‘make unto itself wings and fly away.’” 50 But the basic problem was the same: letting the currency move while somehow keeping it tethered to the earth. Franklin’s leaves, both made and modeled by transpiration, responded elegantly to this problem by forging a liquid link between earth and air. Exhibiting as it does this conduit model of reference, Franklin’s paper money has roots as well as wings. Just as a leaf hangs in the air while remaining tied to the earth, so Franklin’s bills were intended to create something like a rustling canopy of value, available for exchange with the world but still directly connected to, indeed generated by, the real land. If transpiration and hydrostatics gave Franklin a model for an unbroken material connection between earth and sky, land and paper, typefounding hinted at a way to rethink the function and value of metal in a money system. For a printer and founder like Franklin, the value of metal lay less in its intrinsic substance than in its metamorphic properties; less in its inertness or nobil - ity than in its agency as part of a family or array of generative liquid relays. In the nature-print currency, metal is not mined from the land as value in itself but is used as a liquid instrument to connect the land to its paper delegates. As printing matrix, it also serves as an agent of fecundity and regeneration. In Franklin’s lead-cast leaf prints, metal shifts from hoard to gener - ative instrument (achieving, as it does, another kind of dialecti - cal synthesis between the various antitheses of the Recoinage Act by using metal to approximate the function of dematerialized capital). As a printer in a colonial world where actual gold and silver were scarce, Franklin was in a position to imagine typemetal as the most precious metal of all.

64 Grey Room 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00231 by guest on 26 September 2021 The Liquid Image in the Early Eighteenth Century How might we define Franklin’s leaves as images ? Actively working within a system of fluid agency, they are balanced between iconic and indexical meaning, between resemblance and causation. They are pictures of natural objects as well as literal conductors of the forces running through those objects. They are both synec - doches and tributaries of a greater system of fluid relations. 51 This is a strong claim to make about the agency of any image, but it was the kind of claim not infrequently made in Franklin’s milieu. One model at hand for the notes’ liquid sorcery would be magic or idolatry, given the acheiropoietic origins of the leaf prints and their claims to true presence and healing efficacy. In this vein, Franklin’s leaf-print currency is analogous to some - thing like the sudarium (or Veronica’s Veil), also understood as a direct imprint transferring fluids and power. Franklin wrote about an encounter with the Veronica in his Autobiography. Describing his lodgings in London in the mid-1720s (when he was intensively educating himself in the art of printing), he tells of the curious “Maiden Lady of 70” who lived in his landlady’s garret. She was a Roman Catholic who had chosen to live an iso - lated, ascetic life: I was permitted once to visit her: She was cheerful and polite, and convers’d pleasantly. The Room was clean, but had no other Furniture than a Mattress, a Table with a Crucifix and Book, and a Picture over the Chimney of St. Veronica , displaying her Handkercheif with the miraculous Figure of Christ’s bleeding Face on it, which she explained to me with great Seriousness. 52 Franklin easily dismissed the “Seriousness” of the print’s mirac - ulous impression. The soon-to-be towering Enlightenment figure had no time for such idolatrous superstitions. Yet Franklin would go on to borrow from powers like the sudarium ’s throughout his career as a printer and natural philosopher. As James Delbourgo shows, eighteenth-century natural philosophy continued to rely on the rhetorics of enchantment, enthusiasm, and magic that surrounded the old miracles, borrowing magical narratives to vivify its educational spectacles and as foils to highlight its own superior explanatory powers. 53 One could not find a better exam - ple of these operations than the “Magical Picture” that Franklin himself would later promote. Devised by his friend Ebenezer Kinnersley and detailed in Franklin’s Experiments and Observations on Electricity of 1751, the demonstration featured a mezzotint of King George II that was attached to a sheet of glass that had been partially gilded. A removable foil crown sat at the top of the print. The distribution of conductive and nonconductive materials through the picture meant that volunteers attempting to remove

Roberts | The Veins of Pennsylvania: Benjamin Franklin’s Nature-Print Currency 65

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00231 by guest on 26 September 2021 the crown from the king’s head would receive a painful shock. 54 As Michael Gaudio explains, “the magical picture plays on the (superstitious) belief in the animated picture” but ultimately positions the demonstrator as a disenchanter. 55 Like the Veronica’s Veil, the “magical picture” carries a powerful charge, but it derives from rationally apprehensible “electrical fluid” rather than any miraculous source. The magical picture is but one example of an entire class of what might be called activated images in period natural phi - losophy, a class of images with which Franklin was abundantly familiar. In the early eighteenth-century transatlantic culture of popular scientific performance, images of various sorts were commonly incorporated for their ability to demonstrate “other - wise hidden properties and principles as strikingly as possible.” 56 These images were not illustrations of specimens or experiments but rather performative, dynamic images that were enrolled during demonstrations to carry and respond to the natural forces being conjured. To give just one example of a form of activated image that performed in liquid: small glass figures called “Hydrostatical Images” were placed inside tubes of water and then moved up and down as the lecturer subtly changed the air pressure in the column. 57 The images would “rise and fall after a surprising Manner,” so much so that John Winthrop, who gave this demonstration in his course in natural philosophy at Harvard for decades, pointed out to his students that more cred - ulous observers thought the experiment was a form of witch - craft. 58 The entire experiment, like so many others of its kind, relied for its pedagogical charge on the suggestion of occult magic (the diving figures were commonly known as “Cartesian Devils”) that would then be neutralized by the enlightened philosopher. 59 Gaudio argues that, for all the deflationary power of Franklin’s “Magical Picture” experiment, a current of enchantment remained alive in Franklin’s ideas about images. 60 If Cartesian devils, mag - ical pictures, and similar experimental images served broadly in a project of philosophical demystification, they also left intact, indeed reinforced, the basic model of the animated image. Although these images had been drained of any occult power, they still had agency that went far beyond mere illustration. As physical entities shot through with natural forces, the images par - ticipated directly in the movements of nature. The lesson they taught again and again was that an image can carry a force or a flow . Franklin’s nature-printed leaves, with their own conductive properties, are best seen as examples of these liquid images.

The Rattlesnake, the Dendrite, and the Metamorphics of Casting What might Franklin have taken the term liquid intelligence to mean? In the eighteenth century, a liquid was described as

66 Grey Room 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00231 by guest on 26 September 2021 “yielding to any Force impress’d; and which hath its Parts very easily mov’d one among another.” 61 Liquids (by a common mod - ern definition that rephrases these properties) are able to flow and take the shape of a container. 62 This mimetic or shape-taking faculty of liquids was abundantly familiar to Franklin, for this is the property of liquids on which all forms of casting rely. This mimetic faculty might well be described as a form of “intelligence,” especially in its primary current denotation as a form of skill or understanding (liquids somehow “understand - ing” the forms they encounter). 63 But this does not quite get us to “intelligence,” at least not in Franklin’s day. In the eighteenth century, the term more strongly denoted the communication of information, especially distant or secret information (as vesti - gially deployed in today’s “Central Intelligence Agency”). The first meaning of intelligence listed in Samuel Johnson’s dictio - nary is “1. Commerce of information; notice; mutual communi - cation; account of things distant or secret.” 64 Hence the common use of the term in newspaper titles such as the Daily Intelligencer . And hence the need to think beyond a principle of ceaseless flow in our assessment of the liquid intelligence of Franklin’s leaf prints. For if information is to be communicated from one place to another, it must not lose its shape along the way. Liquid intelli - gence, if its role in relay and transfer is to be theorized, must some - how include a principle of inscription, fixation, or memory. Liquid intelligence must have some modicum of fix to go with its flux. One of the origin points of Franklin’s nature-printed notes is the image of the “Rattle-Snake Herb” he made with Joseph Breintnall for Poor Richard’s Almanack of 1737. The rattlesnake herb was a remarkably appropriate leaf with which to inaugurate Franklin’s system of flowing-fixing liquid intelligence, because the rattlesnake, its venom, and its antidotes were already caught up in dramas of liquidity and solidification. Period descriptions of the “poisonous liquor” (venom) of the rattlesnake emphasize that it “induces a total Stagnation of the Blood in a few Minutes.” 65 John Tennent, a widely published doctor in colonial Virginia, saw rattlesnake bites as analogous to a host of afflictions caused by “Obstructions in the Vessels, and Viscidities of Blood.” 66 (The stultifying power of the rattlesnake also featured prominently in a vibrant colonial folk belief that credited the snake with powers of arrest and fixation that went far beyond the coagulant action of its venom. In this persistent folk belief, which occasioned a great deal of scientific commen - tary and which natural historians in Philadelphia and elsewhere were still trying to dislodge as late as the 1790s, rattlesnakes were believed to have a “charming or fascinating power.” 67 A rattlesnake hunting for food was thought to use “the magick force of his sparkling eyes” to bewitch and paralyze prey, which would then

Roberts | The Veins of Pennsylvania: Benjamin Franklin’s Nature-Print Currency 67

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00231 by guest on 26 September 2021 simply fall into its waiting jaws. 68 ) The medicinal value of the rattlesnake herb was said to lie in its capacity to break up toxic obstructions and restore free circu - lation to the blood of snakebite victims. Tennent recommended it as a universal medicine for all manner of conditions because it “effects that Separation or Division of the Particles of the Blood” that would return it to a properly fluid, circulatory state. 69 Given the rattlesnake herb’s powers to restore circulation, Franklin must have recognized the functional similarities between the herb whose leaves he printed in Poor Richard’s and the printed currency notes they inspired. Like its rattlesnake-herb origins, his nature-printed currency played a medicinal role. Just as the leaf of the rattlesnake herb was administered “ to quicken the Circle of the Blood, after the Coagulum is produced therein,” so were Franklin’s currency leaves meant to restore circulation to a colo - nial body that had seized up for lack of economic motivation and a sufficiently bountiful exchange technology. 70 In 1745, just a few years after publishing the leaf print in Poor Richard’s with Franklin, Breintnall was himself bitten by a rat - tlesnake. He survived and wrote a letter describing his experience that was published in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions the following year. 71 Many of the symptoms Breintnall reported con - firmed the deadening or concretion of the flesh that was associated with snakebite: “My tongue and lips became stiff and numb, as if they had been froze.” In the letter he also described strange dreams of turning into trees that racked him at night: “Sometimes I was a white Oak cut in Pieces; and fre - quently my Feet would be grow - ing into two Hickeries.” 72 These dreams compel us to rec - ognize a mythic resonance for the rattlesnake’s powers of concretion: The dreams offer an unmistakable echo of Daphne’s transformation in Ovid’s Metamorphoses .73 In George Sewell’s 1724 edition (published by the printer for whom Franklin was working at the time), Apollo, as “Passion reigns / In his warm Breast, and spreads thro’ all his Veins,” chases after Daphne. Daphne, unable to outrun him, begs her father, “transform me to

68 Grey Room 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00231 by guest on 26 September 2021 another State.” Then “a Stiffness all her Limbs possest, / And slender Films her softer Sides invest. / Her Hairs are Leaves, her Arms to Branches shoot, / And her swift Feet now fix into a Root.” 74 Breintnall’s own dreamed metamorphosis strongly recalls Daphne’s, right down to the rooty feet. On the one hand, this confers upon Breintnall something of Daphne’s cryogenic chastity, suggesting a withdrawal from “Passion” and a refusal of reproduction associated with a state of mortification. But what is odd about these dreams, given the identity of the dreamer, is that even as they imply death they also describe a state of creation. This is because arborealization transforms Breintnall into one of his own botanical objects. In becoming a tree, he becomes the living basis of his own creative work; he turns into his own oak-and- hickory art supplies. In Breintnall’s dream, the rattlesnake venom, Opposite: Plate accompanying like the Derridean pharmakon , thus has a double agency. Its pow - book one of Ovid’s ers of concretion are somehow both deadly and creative. 75 Metamorphoses . From George Sandys, Ovid’s Metamorphosis In attending to the creative logic of Breintnall’s snakebite, we Englished, Mythologiz’d, and are compelled to reconsider the liquidity of “liquid intelligence.” Represented in Figures , 1632. In concluding this discussion of Franklin’s nature prints, I would Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2017. like to unpack the implications of the rattlesnake’s double agency Below: Joseph Breintnall. and suggest that liquid cannot have “intelligence” without recourse Hickery , 1733. Detail. The Library to concretizing metamorphosis. Company of Philadelphia.

Roberts | The Veins of Pennsylvania: Benjamin Franklin’s Nature-Print Currency 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00231 by guest on 26 September 2021 I have already discussed Franklin’s leaves as “liquid intelli - gencers”—carrying value fluidly between places and epistemic spheres. But the leaf prints’ indexical transfer of liquidities is made possible only by dint of a series of crystallizations and congeal - ments. The agency of Franklin’s nature-printed bills is best described not as continuous flow but as a series of relays produced by phase transitions between liquids and solids. There can be no such thing as “an aesthetics of fluidity.” Or, rather, there can be no aesthetics of fluidity without what Cyril Stanley Smith calls “the science of solidification.” 76 Mere liquidity is useless for the project of transfer, reproduction, or representation—for intelligence— unless it is followed by a phase transition to a solid. The primary challenge in creating mass-produced nature prints involves transforming the leaf into a durable matrix— translating it, in essence, into a more solid form. To do this, one must twice produce a cast, which requires intimate knowledge of materials similarly capable of such metamorphoses. The plaster of Paris and typefounding lead that Franklin used were both metamorphic in this way. Both enter the process as liquids and emerge from the process as solids. In casting, both states are essential; the liquid performs the task of “taking the shape of its container,” translating concavity to convexity, interiority to exte - riority, transferring shapes from the outside to the inside of a form. Solidification preserves this form and allows it to be taken up by another liquid that will undergo a phase transition in turn. Michael Cole, writing of Cellini’s work in bronze casting, details this special status of metal, captured in the technology of casting: “it not only bears spirit, but it also accepts form.” 77 Thinking through the issue of phase transition requires that we recognize the liquid-solid boundary as a boundary not of categories but of states. There are no such things as “liquids” and “solids”; there are only materials that exist variously in liquid and solid states. 78 This requires us to think differently about the solids to which liquids are supposedly oppositional and to trou - ble any binary construct of liquidity as a renunciation of all that is fixed and solid. Solids and solid objects have taken the brunt of the contemporary critical aversion to fixed form, an aversion based partly in the remnants of Marxist conceptions of reification and partly in the remnants of a Cartesian view of matter as cor - puscular and inert. 79 What would it do to our thinking about the aesthetics of fluidity if we were to promote solids to a more com - plex and unpredictable status? What if solids as well as liquids were understood to provide us with Wall’s experience of “immer - sion in the incalculable”? 80 Here is what Smith, historian and metallurgist, says about the processes of solidification in casting: It is not surprising that there has been no unanimous agree - ment on the mechanism of solidification of a casting. Most

70 Grey Room 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00231 by guest on 26 September 2021 of the mechanisms that have been proposed to account for segregation are involved in some degree in the vastly com - plicated system of happenings as metal cools in a mold. Consider the balance of heat flow in the mold and in solid and liquid metal; convection movements of both liquid and solid; crystal nucleation and the growth of crystals with and without dendritic branches; volume changes occurring in spaces of varying geometry and connectivity; composition gradients (partly offset by diffusion) on both sides of the solid-liquid interface; and the production of gases, immis - cible liquids, and major or minor solid phases as a conse - quence of changes of constitution during cooling. 81 Solids, it would seem, are just as incalculable as liquids. Artisans like Franklin and Breintnall in the early eighteenth century were by necessity aware of the complexities of materials around the liquid-solid transition. Consider the typemetal Franklin poured into the plaster casts of his leaves. This was not just “lead” (as it is repeatedly labeled in the literature on his nature prints); it was instead an alloy with a specific formula, one tinkered into exis - tence by typefounders in the years after Gutenberg. Lead alone was too soft to serve in printing, so it was fortified with tin. Another essential ingredient was antimony. 82 Lead shrinks slightly as it cools, meaning that it pulls away from the mold and thus fails to preserve perfectly the shape of its container. Antimony, on the other hand, expands as it crystallizes. By adding antimony to the alloy, typefounders could counteract the shrinkage of the lead so that the liquid metal would fill all the nooks and crannies as it cooled, assuring a sharply detailed surface casting. This expansion within the antimony is driven by the forma - tion behavior of common branching crystalline patterns known as dendrites. 83 This means that the liquid branching patterns on Franklin’s leaf prints rely on the solid branching patterns of antimony. River systems, leaf venation, the dendritic crystals of Star of Antimony . The Science solidifying metals: these are each self-organizing structures, Museum, London, and the Science and Society Picture “endogenously generated stable states,” that emerge at different Library, image no. 10311472. kinds of boundaries between liq - uid and solid, between form and flow. 84 And precisely because these are autocatalytic patterns— they evince the independent agency and activity of matter— they are able to do the work Franklin asks of them. This unbro - ken chain of automatic form gen - eration is crucial to Franklin’s project because it is the assurance of autocatalysis that most thor -

Roberts | The Veins of Pennsylvania: Benjamin Franklin’s Nature-Print Currency 71

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00231 by guest on 26 September 2021 oughly secures the anticounterfeiting efficacy of the nature prints. 85 Forged by the internal agency of matter rather than human design, these patterns are what ultimately guarantee the function of Franklin’s notes, the ability of the notes to make the leap from physical to economic liquidity. Beyond the range of human design or craft, their unauthorized repli cation by such design or craft becomes impossible. The term dendrite comes from the Greek word dendron , mean - ing “tree.” And so in the crystallizations of antimony we are back to the leaf and the rattlesnake and Daphne and Breintnall after all. The liquid intelligence of Franklin’s leaves was generated from both fluidity and fixation. The rattlesnake’s principle of “viscid - ity” is coiled into the logic of the liquid notes themselves. Perhaps the rattlesnake—already multiply freighted in Franklin’s iconography—also figures the intelligence of casting and the powers that inhere not in solids or liquids but in the metamor - phoses between them.

72 Grey Room 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00231 by guest on 26 September 2021 Notes I would like to extend special thanks to Matthew Hunter, Jessica Linker, Michael Gaudio, Ethan Lasser, Susan Dackerman, and James N. Green for discussing Franklin’s nature prints with me as I prepared this article.

1. Recent research by historian Jessica Linker suggests that many if not all of Breintnall’s earliest prints, made before 1734, were printed using handheld rollers rather than a press. Jessica Linker, “Notes for Research File on Breintnall’s Leaf Prints,” unpub. ms., September 2014, Library Company of Philadelphia. 2. On the nature-printing tradition in early modern Europe, its transmission to Philadelphia, and Breintnall’s nature prints (now at the Library Company of Philadelphia), see Roderick Cave, Impressions of Nature: A History of Nature Printing (London: British Library, 2010); James N. Green and Peter Stallybrass, Benjamin Franklin: Writer and Printer (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press; London: British Library, 2006), 55–57; and The Annual Report of the Library Company of Philadelphia for the Year 1969 (Philadelphia: Library Company of Philadelphia, 1970), 35–36. 3. For an expansive discussion of the tension between specificity and gener - ality in the case of the botanical sciences, see Lorraine Daston, “Type Specimens and Scientific Memory,” Critical Inquiry 31 (Autumn 2004): 153–182. 4. The Library Company of Philadelphia holds two volumes of Breintnall’s nature prints of leaves, made in Philadelphia from 1731 to 1744. The quotation appears in volume 1. 5. Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography , ed. Joyce Chaplin (New York: Norton, 2012), 57. 6. John J. McCusker, Money and Exchange in Europe and America, 1600–1775: A Handbook (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978). On the turn to paper money and land banks in the American colonies, see E. James Ferguson, The Power of the Purse: A History of American Public Finance, 1776–1 790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), 3–24. For a skeptical view of specie shortage as a chronic or unique situation in the American colonies, see Roger W. Weiss, “The Issue of Paper Money in the American Colonies, 1720–1774,” Journal of Economic History 30, no. 4 (December 1970): 770–784. For a broad overview of monetary instruments in the North American colonies, see Ron Michener, “Money in the American Colonies,” EH.Net Encyclopedia , 8 June 2003, rev. 13 January 2011, http://eh.net/encyclopedia/ money-in-the-american-colonies/. 7. Benjamin Franklin, A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper-Currency (Philadelphia, 1729), n.p. For discussions of Franklin’s place in the debates surrounding paper money in colonial America, see Eric P. Newman, “Franklin Making Money More Plentiful,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 115, no. 5 (15 October 1971): 341–349; Dawn Barrett, “‘Modest Enquiry’ and Major Innovation: Franklin’s Early American Currency,” Visible Language 29, no. 3 (1995): esp. 319–323; and Farley Grubb, Benjamin Franklin and the Birth of a Paper Money Economy (Philadelphia: The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and the Library Company of Philadelphia, 2006). 8. For the best general survey of Franklin’s currency commissions and designs, see Newman, “Franklin Making Money More Plentiful.” On Franklin eventually securing the commission to print Pennsylvania notes, see Keith Arbour, “Benjamin Franklin’s First Government Printing: The Pennsylvania General Loan Office Mortgage Register of 1729, and Subsequent Franklin Mortgage Registers and Bonds,” Transactions of the American Philosophical

Roberts | The Veins of Pennsylvania: Benjamin Franklin’s Nature-Print Currency 73

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00231 by guest on 26 September 2021 Society 89, no. 5 (1999): 1–90. 9. On currency as metaprinting, see Jennifer L. Roberts, “The Currency of Ornament: Machine-Lathed Anticounterfeiting Patterns and the Portability of Value,” in Gülru Necip og˘ lu and Alina Payne, eds., Histories of Ornament: From Global to Local (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 308–319. 10. Newman, “Franklin Making Money More Plentiful,” 342. 11. Newman, “Franklin Making Money More Plentiful,” 342. 12. On colored threads in the paper, see Barrett, “‘Modest Enquiry’ and Major Innovation,” 324. On Franklin’s papermaking experiments, see J.A. Leo Lemay, Printer and Publisher, 1730–1747 , vol. 2 of The Life of Benjamin Franklin (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 390–391, 466. 13. Newman, “Franklin Making Money More Plentiful,” 342; and Barrett, “‘Modest Enquiry’ and Major Innovation,” 350. 14. According to Joyce Chaplin, Franklin made the first types in North America. Franklin, Autobiography, 52. 15. Martin Clare, The Motion of Fluids (London, 1735), 2. 16. See Lemay, Printer and Publisher , 465. 17. Cave, Impressions of Nature , 56–58; and Eric P. Newman, “Nature Printing on Colonial and Continental Currency,” pt. 1, Numismatist 77, no. 2 (February 1964): 147–154. Cave argues that Franklin had read “The Method of Taking-off the Leaves of Plants in Plaister of Paris, so that they may afterwards be cast in any Metal,” in The Art of Drawing, and Painting in Water-Colours (London, 1732), 19. This volume went through many editions in early eighteenth-century London. The plaster-casting process was also associated with taking casts of ancient coins and medals. 18. “Franklin’s invention . . . predated, by about fifty years, the use of stereo - typing, which was later developed in Paris as a currency printing innovation useful for producing the French assignats.” Barrett, “‘Modest Enquiry’ and Major Innovation,” 346. See also Newman, “Franklin Making Money More Plentiful,” 343. 19. In typecasting, the matrix refers to the brass mold into which typemetal is poured to create individual type letters. Throughout this essay, I use the term matrix in its printmaking sense, to mean the inscribed surface from which an image is printed. 20. Newman, “Nature Printing,” pt. 1, 154. These are direct nature prints, and thus the leaves are printed at actual size. The leaves used for currency printing are very small, about two inches wide. Some are immature leaves, picked in the spring. Some are herbs—granting them more of an association with gardens than with woods and wilderness. And sometimes only a portion of a leaf is shown. 21. Grubb, “Benjamin Franklin and the Birth of a Paper Money Economy”; Francis Musella, “Benjamin Franklin’s Nature Printing on Bank Notes,” in Alan M. Stahl, Money on Paper: Bank Notes and Related Graphic Arts from the Collections of Vsevolod Onyshkevych and Princeton University (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Library, 2010), 19; and Lemay, Printer and Publisher , 376–377. 22. Eric P. Newman, “Nature Printing on Colonial and Continental Currency,” pt. 3, Numismatist 77, no. 5 (May 1964): 613. 23. See James N. Green, “Franklin Type-Metal Blocks at the Delaware County Institute of Science,” in The Annual Report of the Library Company of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Library Company of Philadelphia, 2013), 25–28. 24. Jessica Linker, personal communication. Linker recreated the process by

74 Grey Room 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00231 by guest on 26 September 2021 following the method outlined in The Art of Painting, and Drawing in Water- Colours (see n. 17). She will present her research at a lecture in the Material Texts series at the University of Pennsylvania: “Franklin and Hall’s Printing Blocks: Anti-Counterfeiting Techniques on Mid-Atlantic Colonial Paper Currency,” December 2017. For other descriptions of the process, see Newman, “Franklin Making Money More Plentiful,” 342–345; and Cave, Impressions of Nature, 56–58. On the value of making or remaking as historical method, with special relevance to life casting, see Pamela H. Smith, “In the Workshop of History: Making, Writing, and Meaning,” West 86th 19, no. 1 (Spring–Summer 2012): 4–13. 25. For more on the social and technical intricacies of counterfeiting in colonial America, see Kenneth Scott, Counterfeiting in Colonial America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1957) (for attempted leaf- print counterfeits, see 139–140, 215); and Todd Barosky, “Legal and Illegal Moneymaking: Colonial American Counterfeiters and the Novelization of Eighteenth-Century Crime Literature,” Early American Literature 47, no. 3 (2012): 531–560. 26. The movement of fluid through plants had also been explored in the seventeenth century, but Hales developed systematic experiments for measuring it, integrated botanical study with hydrostatics, and discovered the importance of gas exchange at the leaf surface in the upward movement of liquid. For an important earlier study, see Nehemiah Grew, The Anatomy of Plants: With an Idea of a Philosophical History of Plants, and Several Other Lectures, Read before the Royal Society (London, 1682). Thanks to Matthew Hunter for bring - ing this reference to my attention. 27. See, for example, the letter about perspiration and circulation from Benjamin Franklin to Cadwallader Colden, 15 August 1745, in The Writings of Benjamin Franklin , vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1905), 284–289. 28. Stephen Hales, Statical Essays , 3rd ed. (London, 1738), 3. 29. Hales, Statical Essays , 9–10. 30. John B. West, “Stephen Hales: Neglected Respiratory Physiologist,” Journal of Applied Physiology: Respiratory, Environmental, and Exercise Physiology 57, no. 3 (September 1984): 635–639. 31. Family Memoirs of the Rev. William Stukeley, M.D. (London, 1882), quoted in A.E. Clark-Kennedy, Stephen Hales: An Eighteenth Century Biography (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1929), 16; emphasis added. Hales had suggested the casting method. 32. Joyce Chaplin, The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 78. 33. Clare, A5. 34. Chaplin, First Scientific American , 79. “Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan (1651), for example, wrote that money was to the commonwealth what ‘naturall Bloud’ was to the human body. Each, by ‘circulating, nourisheth’ the state or body.” 35. Personal communication. 36. On Trenchard’s prints for William Bartram, see Joel T. Fry, “America’s ‘Ancient Garden’: the Bartram Botanic Garden, 1728–1850,” in Knowing Nature: Art and Science in Philadelphia, 1740–1840 , ed. Amy R.W. Meyers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 60–95. 37. Franklin’s bills are relief prints, so we are not speaking of a “channel” so much as a “ridge” or “rib” that performs the ultimate transfer of the ink. The connection holds, however, since the rib originated as a channel in the plaster

Roberts | The Veins of Pennsylvania: Benjamin Franklin’s Nature-Print Currency 75

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00231 by guest on 26 September 2021 and the rib is the structure from which ink is drawn. Also, the rib then creates a channel in the printed paper. 38. Hales, Statical Essays , 13. 39. Joyce Chaplin, “The Secret Lives of Plants,” Environmental History 10, no. 4 (October 2005): 672–674. 40. On Franklin’s connections to cartography and surveying, see Franklin, Autobiography , 57; and Chaplin, First Scientific American , 117–121. 41. On the circumstances surrounding the production of this map, see Nicholas B. Wainwright, “Tale of a Runaway Cape: The Penn-Baltimore Agreement of 1732,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 87, no. 3 (July 1963): 251–293. 42. Jeff Wall, “Photography and Liquid Intelligence,” in Jeff Wall , ed. Thierry de Duve, Arielle Pelenc, and Boris Groys (London: Phaidon Press, 1996), 93. 43. I use the pejorative term pseudomorphism cautiously since one of the implications of taking liquid intelligence seriously might be that objects with similar formal qualities have similar material causes and thus bear meaningful connections. Thus, there would be nothing “pseudo” about formal similarities. I draw here on Amy Powell’s brilliant discussion of pseudomorphism in Depositions: Scenes from the Late Medieval Church and the Modern Museum (New York: Zone Books, 2012), 11–12. 44. Green and Stallybrass, 52. On the operation of land banks, see Theodore Thayer, “The Land-Bank System in the American Colonies,” Journal of Economic History 13, no. 2 (Spring 1953): 145–159. 45. Franklin, Modest Enquiry , n.p. 46. James Thompson, Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 43. 47. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations , 2 vols., ed. Edwin Cannan (London: Methuen, 1904), 1:304, available online at http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/smith-an-inquiry-into-the-nature-and- causes-of-the-wealth-of-nations-cannan-ed-vol-1. 48. The literature on the semiotic implications of monetary representation is huge. A good introduction is Marc Shell, “The Issue of Representation,” in The New Economic Criticism , ed. Marc Osteen and Martha Woodmansee (London: Routledge, 1999), 53–55. 49. Ferguson, 4–5. 50. From a circular sent to the states by Congress during the Revolution. Worthington C. Ford, ed., Journal of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789 (Washington, DC, 1904–1937), 15:1057, quoted in Ferguson, 5. 51. The bills themselves define the nature prints as a radically different type of image than symbols or emblems. The leaf prints are generally relegated to the verso side of the note, where they are distinguished from the more traditionally symbolic inscriptions on the front. When in the 1770s Franklin was called on to design the continental currency issued to help pay for the Revolutionary War, the functional distinction between emblem-image and agent-image was drawn even more finely. Franklin designed an elaborate nationalist emblematic pro - gram for the front of the notes, creating what has been called “the most elabo - rately didactic paper money the world had ever known.” Benjamin H. Irvin, Clothed in Robes of Sovereignty: The Continental Congress and the People Out of Doors (New York: Oxford, 2011), 77. Many of these emblems featured plants and trees, Franklin having borrowed them from botanical emblem books such as German botanist Joachim Camerarius’s Symbolorum ac emblematum ethico- politicorum of 1597. The reliance on emblematic plants on the face of the bills

76 Grey Room 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00231 by guest on 26 September 2021 only highlights the nonemblematic status of the plants on the back. 52. Franklin, Autobiography , 48. 53. James Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 54. Franklin describes the demonstration at length in Experiments and Observations on Electricity (London, 1751), 27–28. For discussions, see Anna S. Barnett, “Electricity and Allegiance,” Cabinet 21 (Spring 2006), http://cabinet magazine.org/issues/21/barnett.php; and Michael Gaudio, “Magical Pictures; or, Observations on Lightning and Thunder, Occasion’d by a Portrait of Dr. Franklin,” in Picturing , ed. Rachael Z. DeLue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 84–111. 55. Gaudio, “Magical Pictures,” 106. 56. Jessica Riskin, “Amusing Physics,” Harvard Library Bulletin 17, no. 1–2 (2006): 16. 57. Isaac Greenwood, Harvard’s Hollis Professor of Mathematics, used this term in his catalogue of instruments at Harvard in 1738, A Catalog of the Mathematical and Mechanical Instruments, Belonging to the Apparatus Both Such as Were Given to Harvard College by Mr. Thomas Hollis of London Merchant & Such as Before Belonged to the College, Which Catalog Was Taken Apr. 19, 1738 , reprinted in Bernard Cohen, Some Early Tools of American Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950), 140. Greenwood had connections to Franklin. In 1740, having been fired from Harvard, he was in Philadelphia at the Library Company offering lectures that used similar devices. On this, see Chaplin, First Scientific American , 54. 58. Francis Hauksbee, A Course of Mechanical, Optical, Hydrostatical, and Pneumatical Experiments (London: 1714), 13; and Timothy Foster, “The sum - mary of a course of experimental lectures in natural philosophy by Dr. John Winthrop” (manuscript copy), 1772–1774, seq. 47, in Harvard University Archives, HUC 8772.358, available at http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.ARCH: 10965589?n=47. For a detailed description of the hydrostatical demonstration, see Willem Jacob’s Gravesande, Mathematical Elements of Natural Philosophy , 4th ed. (London, 1731), 232. 59. For more on Cartesian devils, see Jennifer L. Roberts, “Submergence,” in The Philosophy Chamber: Art and Science in Harvard’s Teaching Cabinet, 1766–1820 , ed. Ethan Lasser (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Art Museums, 2017), 141–157. 60. Gaudio, “Magical Pictures,” 108. 61. Clare, 2. 62. “Liquid: State of Matter,” Encyclopædia Britannica Online , http://www. britannica.com/science/liquid-state-of-matter. 63. A shape-shifting mimesis is central to Franklin’s definition of the prop - erties of money, which not only flows but takes the shape of that with which it is exchanged: Money “is, to those who possess it (if they want any Thing) that very Thing which they want, because it will immediately procure it for them. It is Cloth to him that wants Cloth, and Corn to those that want Corn; and so of all other Necessaries, it is whatsoever it will procure.” Franklin, Enquiry , n.p.; emphasis in original. 64. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language , 6th ed., vol. 1 (London, 1785), s.v. “intelligence,” https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7029571M/ A_dictionary_of_the_English_language. 65. “The Rattle Snake,” British Magazine , August 1750, 300; and John

Roberts | The Veins of Pennsylvania: Benjamin Franklin’s Nature-Print Currency 77

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00231 by guest on 26 September 2021 Tennent, An Epistle to Dr. Richard Mead: Concerning the Epidemical Diseases of Virginia . . . Wherein Is Shewn the Surprising Efficacy of the Seneca Rattle- snake Root, in Diseases Owing to a Viscidity and Coagulation of the Blood . . . (Edinburgh, 1738), 72. 66. Tennent, 14. 67. Hans Sloane, “Conjectures on the Charming or Fascinating Power Attributed to the Rattle-Snake: Grounded on Credible Accounts, Experiments and Observations,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 38, no. 427 (1733): 321–331. 68. Bernard Germain de Lacépède, quoted in Benjamin Smith Barton, “A Memoir Concerning the Fascinating Faculty Which Has Been Ascribed to the Rattle-Snake, and Other American Serpents,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 4 (1799): 88. Important recent discussions of the rat - tlesnake’s bewitching powers include Alexander Nemerov, “The Rattlesnake: Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Place of Art in America,” in Knowing Nature: Art and Science in Philadelphia, 1740–1840 , ed. Amy R.W. Meyers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 226–253; and Christoph Irmscher, “The Power of Fascination,” in The Poetics of Natural History: From John Bartram to William James (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 149–222. 69. Tennent, 53. 70. Tennent, 10; emphasis in original. An example of the salvific, medicinal language Franklin used in his Enquiry is his discussion of paper currency encouraging lending at reasonable interest: “Money which otherwise would have lain dead in their [bankers’] Hands, is made to circulate again and thereby among the People.” Franklin, Enquiry , n.p. 71. This was not Breintnall’s first correspondence with the Royal Society and its membership. Like many members of Franklin’s circle who were galvanized by the possibilities of experimental science, he designed many natural philos - ophy experiments, some of which were conveyed to and read before the Royal Society. See Stephen Bloore, “Joseph Breintnall, First Secretary of the Library Company,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 59, no. 1 (1935): 42–56. 72. Joseph Breintnall, “A Letter from Mr. J. Breintnal to Mr. Peter Collinson, F.R.S. Containing an Account of What He Felt after Being Bit by a Rattle-Snake,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 44 (1746): 147–150. 73. My thanks to Matthew Hunter for pointing out the allusion to Ovid. 74. Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In Fifteen Books. Made English by Several Hands. Adorn’d with Cuts , ed. George Sewell (London: Samuel Palmer, 1724), 1:21, 23. 75. Franklin also had a special connection to the rattlesnake. In 1754, he designed the “join or die” logo for the colonies that went on to grace the mast - head of his paper the Pennsylvania Gazette and to become a patriotic emblem during the Revolution. Thanks largely to Franklin’s efforts (as well as the native range of rattlesnakes in America), the rattlesnake became an emblem of the American colonies, where it came to connote the transformative power of colo - nial coordination and communication. 76. Cyril Stanley Smith, “The Early History of Casting, Molds, and the Science of Solidification,” in A Search for Structure: Selected Essays on Art, Science, and History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 127. 77. Michael W. Cole, Cellini and the Principles of Sculpture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 78. 78. Here I take inspiration from Timothy Ingold, “Materials against Materiality,”

78 Grey Room 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00231 by guest on 26 September 2021 Archaeological Dialogues 14, no. 1 (June 2007): 1–16. 79. See Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms,” in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics , ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 1–10. 80. Wall, “Photography and Liquid Intelligence,” 93. 81. Smith, “Early History of Casting,” 167. 82. Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises: Or, the Doctrine of Handy-Works. Applied to the Art of Printing (London, 1683), 164. 83. In the case of antimony, these dendritic patterns had long been cele - brated by alchemists as the “star” or “ regulus ” of antimony. The regulus continued to be a topic of scientific interest through the eighteenth century. For a discussion of its importance to Newton, for example, see J.T. Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 146–156. Franklin would likely have known about this behavior of anti - mony from his earliest years working with the metal. 84. Manuel DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 14. 85. Autocatalytic patterns have a long presence in the history of numismatic authenticity (although this has been obscured by the overwhelming tendency of numismatists to focus on the symbolic features of currency). As Smith (the metallurgist) notes, some of the earliest coins to be produced were “made with a punch of a brittle crystalline material (bronze, steel, or stone) which was sim - ply fractured so that the impression conveyed an unduplicable guarantee of authenticity of the sort provided by a fingerprint, the halves of a broken clay tablet, or a split wooden tally.” Smith, “Early History of Casting,” 142. This would continue into the nineteenth century and beyond, where the generation of automatic patterns would be transferred to mechanical lathes, which would produce inimitable patterns made not by nature but by machines.

Roberts | The Veins of Pennsylvania: Benjamin Franklin’s Nature-Print Currency 79

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00231 by guest on 26 September 2021