Chapter 3 - Experimental Natural History

Summary

This chapter explains the nature of Baconian natural history and the philosophy of experiment that came to be associated with it in the late seventeenth century. It also documents the practice of this form of natural history in the early Royal Society and beyond. Baconian or experimental natural history is first set in contrast to classificatory natural history which focused on natural kinds. It was an architectonic program of experiment and fact gathering and fact ordering with a view to discovering the principles of the particular science at hand. Its subject matter ranged from celestial objects to the sea bed, from bodies, states of bodies, and qualities to natural processes. We then discuss the philosophy of experiment associated with this form of natural history as found in the writings of Boyle and Hooke who took inspiration from Bacon. We argue that it is best understood in terms of a typology of experiments, including luciferous and fructiferous experiments and crucial experiments, which were theorised and tried by the first generations of experimental philosophers. Many of the virtuosi in the early Royal Society and those within its ambit practised experimental natural history, and we illustrate this in the work and writings of Christopher Merrett, Thomas Henshaw, William Petty, and Robert Plot. We then discuss the eclipse of Baconian natural history in the wake of the emergence of a new mathematical approach to experimental philosophy that derived from the work of Isaac Newton.