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.

The ant in Robert Hooke’s compendium and celebration of microscopy in Micrographia: or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses (1665) uniquely resists scientific scrutiny: moving about when alive, too-easily crushed when dead, the ant proves to be insistently difficult to study under a microscope. Through an extended allusion to Richard Ligon’s A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes (1657), Hooke links the unruly ant to the colonial economy of enslaved Africans in Barbados, a place that Ligon understands through sugarcane, enslaved Africans, and saltwater slavery. The story of Hooke’s ant in Micrographia uncovers what Lisa Lowe calls the “intimacy” of modern, Western liberalism and the global conditions upon which it depends. In this case, Hooke’s ant reveals the intimacy of early scientific practice and the institution of transatlantic chattel slavery, exposing in the process that a small thing can reveal vast scales of geography and their networks of exploitation.

The preface to a mid-seventeenth century edition of Verbum Sempiternum declares that “though the Volume and the Work be smal, / Yet it containes the sum of All in All.” A miniaturized devotional work, it uses its size to frame a tension between human and divine scale, and in doing so, it demonstrates the way in which all kinds of miniature texts of the eighteenth century played with the idea of a large subject in small form. This chapter uses examples of a series of miniature books published across the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to explore questions of materiality, utility, scale, and legibility. Miniature books worked on the premise of totality made accessible through compression. We might see them as a kind of epistemological comfort blanket, the promise of a world of knowledge and information that their readers could own, wear, display. And in the virtuosity of their execution, their acts of precision engraving, typesetting, and binding, they offered fine examples of human ingenuity. But at the same time, in reducing the most important documents of Western faith and civilization into compact form, they also raised questions about their own credibility.

The seventeenth-century microscopists Robert Hooke and Henry Power sought to rhetorically establish the truthfulness of the visual images produced by their instruments, but a counter-rhetoric of visuality was established by Margaret Cavendish in Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666). The microscopists’ belief that magnification revealed the truth of nature ran counter to Cavendish’s probabilistic belief that no individual could grasp the infinite truth of nature and sought explanations from the superficies of observed objects rather than the ‘interior figurative motions’ which Cavendish saw as the universal cause of all natural phenomena. While the microscopists emphasized the aesthetic beauty of the micro-visible world, Cavendish emphasized its monstrosity: for her the truth could only be perceived by the ‘natural’ eye observing things in their unmagnified state. Exploiting the microscopists’ complaints about the variability of their images and the defects of their instruments Cavendish redefines the microscopic image as definitively outside the ‘real’.

The historical backdrop for the role of microscopy in the development of human knowledge is reviewed. Atomic-scale investigations are a logical step in a natural progression of increasingly more powerful microscopies. A brief outline of the concept of atomic-scale analytical tomography (ASAT) is given, and its implications for science and technology are anticipated. The intersection of ASAT with advanced computational materials engineering is explored. The chapter concludes with a look toward a future where ASAT will become common.

The last two decades have seen remarkable developments in our understanding of early modern natural history. Historians have closely scrutinized its research methods, experimental practices, and methodological and epistemological commitments. Building on this recent scholarship, this chapter focuses on a particularly important type of natural history deriving from Francis Bacon, namely, experimental natural history. We show that this new form of natural history provided many branches of natural philosophy with a method for organizing the study of nature—of determining their desiderata, applying experiment, and structuring and exploiting their evidential and observational bases. The most important contributions of experimental natural history to the Scientific Revolution were the elaboration of a new philosophy of experimentation and the introduction of new, practice-based systems of classification.

The discovery and implementation of telescopy and microscopy extended the power of the senses, with often surprising results. The discoveries made with these instruments challenged existing theories of nature, while simultaneously demanding new theories to account for their operation, especially of vision. Moreover, early modern epistemology had to accommodate experiential evidence made by these “artificial” means. The chapter also address advances in the literature since the twenty-year-old classic, The Invisible World by Catherine Wilson.

This chapter investigates taste’s paramount importance to the production and legitimisation of experimental knowledge by early Royal Society members, including Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and Nehemiah Grew. Early scientists attempted to classify the properties of substances by reference to their flavours; in so doing, they aimed to develop medicines and technologies that could return humankind to prelapsarian felicity. Their efforts chime with Royal Society propaganda, which depicts taxonomical tasting as an inversion of Adam and Eve’s catastrophic gustation. Research into taste as a physiological process, however, presented gustation as subjective, disrupting the link between taste and objective knowledge that undergirded this rhetoric.