The first page of Description des Plantes de l’Amérique (Plumier, 1693). 

Contexts in source publication

Context 1

... Description des Plantes de l'Amérique ( Fig. 2) is a well-organized study divided into two parts, the first consisting of descriptions and the second of illustrations. Carefully drawn pictures, often of full size, are included. The descriptions are short and objective, eventual medicinal properties are mentioned briefly, if at all (one of the reasons for this may have been that ...

Context 2

... he had consulted on the nature of South America and the Caribbean, whose authors include Gaspard Bauhin, Leonhard Fuchs, Gonzalo Oviedo, Jean Baptiste du Tertre, José (Christophorus) Acosta, Piso, and Marcgrave (Plumier, 1693). Likewise, Sloane announced in his natural history of Jamaica that he had not included pictures of plants Charles Plumier had already illustrated: ‘[Plumier] has saved me a great deal of trouble, finding his Figures so Good, that I did not judge it necessary the same plants should be engraved again, but only referr’d to, in my History ’ (Sloane 1707, vol. I). European overseas expansion contributed to a change in the way scholars observed and understood nature. The confusion created by the multitude of new species, and the difficulty of describing them according to the traditional methods of describing plants and animals, were factors in the development of a new kind of natural history (Livingstone, 1992). Natural history in the Renaissance had been a literary form, offered on the premise that the writer had read everything about the plant or animal in question, beginning with the Egyptian hieroglyphs (Foucault, 1970). The usefulness of plants to humans – be it practical or symbolic – played a vital role in botanical descriptions. The colonial expansion to the western hemisphere challenged this traditional form of natural history. The first natural historians of the New World had no tradition of literary knowledge to draw from, and consequently they were left with only their faculties of sensory perception upon which to base their reports. This led to a change in how plants were understood, a move from a distinctly anthropocentric view to the idea of nature as an organism with a life of its own. Thus, the encounter with the tropical nature of colonies like the Caribbean islands was one factor in the changing of the associative natural history of the Renaissance to the more empirical science of the late 17th century. The new empirically based accounts of the flora of the New World represented a more neutral and ‘stripped’ natural history. Even if the literary tradition of natural history gave way to observation and documentary, most natural historians still adhered to the tradition of including the medical or practical usefulness of plants as an essential part of the descriptions. Botany and medicine were in the 17th century still thought of as the same branch of learning, although a process of their separation was underway; in the latter part of the century, botany increasingly emerged as a distinct scholarly discipline of its own while the medical aspects of natural history were to be found in pharmacopoeias (see Ogilvie, 2006). Charles Plumier’s work aptly exemplifies this development. Although he often notes how the plants he observed were used, he is clearly a representative for a new way of practising botany. Among the natural histories and travellers’ accounts that described the Caribbean flora, Description des Plantes de l’Amérique (1693) is the most reminiscent of a modern flora. Plumier’s works represent a new approach to natural history in the Caribbean, which is much more ‘professional’ in that he is more conscious of the plants’ structure and more objective in his presentation. Instead of including anecdotes and medicinal properties (although he devotes more attention to the latter in the posthumously published Traité des fougères de l’Amerique from 1705 than in Description des Plantes de l’Amérique ), not to mention signs and symbols, he focused on classification. To him, the structure of plants was more important than their properties. While botanists were sent to the colonies to hunt for plants that could be of economic interest they also did what Sörlin (2000) called ‘ordering the world for Europe’. One of the systems created by humans in order to make sense of the natural world is taxonomy, which includes both the theory and practice of classification. As Slaughter (1982) observed, the traditional medieval taxonomy, which was based on Aristotle and folk medicine, broke down as a result of an explosion of new information as botanical observations increased both in Europe and in its colonies. Reports from the tropics with their strange flora and fauna confused earlier conceptions of the structure of the natural world. Plumier wrote his natural history at a time when natural historians did not have to feel obliged to use a single pre-eminent principle of classification; there was still room for rivalling systems (see Cooper, 2007). Plumier used a scientific taxonomy that was being developed by his teacher Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, the ‘father of the genus concept’. Tournefort adhered to a tradition of classification following Aristotle’s view according to which all beings possessed essential features that expressed their essential nature. He differentiated genera on the basis of floral and vegetative characteristics. Plumier’s Description des Plantes de l’Amérique (Fig. 2) is a well-organized study divided into two parts, the first consisting of descriptions and the second of illustrations. Carefully drawn pictures, often of full size, are included. The descriptions are short and objective, eventual medicinal properties are mentioned briefly, if at all (one of the reasons for this may have been that Plumier made his first trip together with his colleague J. D. Surian, whose task it had been to examine and report on the medicinal plants). In the preface, Plumier praised earlier writers treating the flora of the Antilles, but acknowledged the difficulty in finding the plant classes, as the local names of the plants were being used. He brought order to the matter by regrouping the plants in three classes, divided into genera, and by giving them Latin names: the first class included Fougeres , Hemionites , Polypodes , Langues-de-cerf , and Capillaires , the second Arum & Dracontium and Saururus , and the third Perploques (climbing plants). Saururus was a new genus for which Plumier invented the name based on the Greek word for lizard tail because Plumier thought that the plants in this genus were reminiscent of lizards’ tails. The plants were grouped according to the structure of the flower and the fruit, as recommended by Tournefort. The plants were mostly named according to a polynomial nomenclature in which the names were composed of several Latin words describing the plant. Linné first used the polynomial system but abandoned it in favour of the binomial one in which a generic name was followed by a specific epithet, using only the two first parts of the polynomial. Thus Plumier’s Fuchsia triphylla flore coccinea (which means ‘three-leaved fuchsia with red flowers’) became simply Fuchsia triphylla . Carl von Linné accepted, almost without change, Plumier’s descriptions and arrangement of several genera and species. Botanists travelling in America were faced with the task of naming the animals and plants they encountered for the first time. By the time of Plumier’s travels in the Antilles, American animals and plants had been written about, collected, and transported to Europe for almost two hundred years. The foreign flora and fauna were still exotic but the initial confusion created by them had given way to a more pragmatic view. The plants had to be given names and, it was hoped, put to use. The pragmatic methods used in the naming of plants meant that the old Adamic ideal according to which plants’ names corresponded to their nature had definitely come to an end (Irving, 2008). On the whole, the inclination was to fit the new species into the already existing picture. Stearns (1970) distinguishes four methods of naming species in the New World. First, the species could be given a generic name already used for a previously known species. Second, a new name could be invented to describe a previously unknown American species, such as the rattlesnake. Third, some unknown species were given names adapted from what either was, or was thought to be, the already existing indigenous name, as in the cases of the papaya, potato, or tobacco plants. Fourth, more complicated situations arose when a European name was given to a species similar but not identical to one found in Europe. For instance, the Spanish natural historian Oviedo describes ‘a fruit that the Christians call quince, but it is not a quince. But they are the same size, and round and yellow’ (Oviedo, 1959). Different nationalities bioprospecting in the Caribbean used different names for indigenous species. For example, the English gave the pineapple its name because of its resemblance to a pine cone while the French word ananas is derived from the Guarani word for exquisite fruit. Plumier was caught in the confusion of the naming practices of New World plants. For example, he called one plant used to cure snake bites Arum hederaceum, amplis foliis & perforates (Fig. 3), although according to him the plant was called Clematis malabarensis, solus vitis, colore dracunculi by Gaspard Bauhin and lignum colubrinum primum by Acosta, whereas Father du Tertre for his part had called this same plant simply bois des couleuvres (Plumier, 1693). The correct taxonomic placement would come later in 1829 when the genus name was changed and the plant was named Philodendron hederaceum . Another plant used for serpent bites Plumier named Clematis baccifera, glabra & villosa, rotundo & umbilico folio . The French population of Martinique, however, called it, according to Plumier, Liane a serpent and in South America the plant had several names: Caapeba des Brasiliens , (in Marcgrave’s work) l’erva di nostra Senora , Herbe de Nostre-Dame , and Cipo de Cobras des Portugais (Plumier, 1693). Plumier by no means had the last word on this plant: it was called Cissampelos caapeba by Linné, and later became known as Pareira brava and Cissampelos pareira . With so many parallel names in use, it is no wonder that Plumier felt there ...