Lesson 7: The life sciences in the later seventeenth century
This lesson covers changes in the life sciences in the later part of the Scientific Revolution, including the introduction of the microscope.
Introduction
Although many of the most important developments in the late seventeenth century took place in physics and astronomy, there were also important changes in the life sciences. These changes were less "revolutionary" in that they did not see dramatic rejections of the past and dramatic claims to be founding new sciences. But there were also parallels.
As the telescope vastly increased the amount of knowledge held by astronomers, so did the microscope for life scientists. Ancient authority was rejected in the life sciences as well as physics, although Aristotle and Galen were more superseded by advancing knowledge than directly challenged. Nor did the life sciences occupy a completely separate realm from physics and astronomy.
Chemistry bridged the gap somewhat, and in an era when science had not developed its current array of narrow specialties, many people worked in many fields. Robert Hooke, for example, worked in physics as well as publishing a book of microscopic examinations of plants and animals. People studying plants, animals, and medicine met and talked with people studying stars and atoms in scientific societies as well as in casual encounters.
Intellectual interchange was inevitable. Mechanical philosophy influenced the way people thought about living things as well as falling rocks and orbiting planets. After all, Descartes’s theory that animals were mechanical creatures denied any difference between living and non-living things, and asserted that the same science could cover them both.
European scientists also continued to be challenged by the influx of information they were gathering and receiving from other parts of the world. The expansion of European power over ever larger areas of the world meant that more and more Europeans were studying and collecting plants, animals, and artifacts from areas as far as Surinam, Indonesia, and Canada.
Collecting was a passion among many upper and middle-class Europeans, and the culture of collecting was moving away from "marvels" and "curiousities" and towards collections whose purpose was explicitly educational. Many collectors concentrated on natural objects – animals, plants, feathers, shells - rather than man-made objects. They arranged their collections in a more functional way, rather than going for drama or humor. They also placed more emphasis on the typicalness rather than the "exoticness" of the items displayed.
Another type of collection, of living things rather than their remains, was the botanical garden, of which many were being founded, including the great Royal Botanical Garden of France. Some of these collections and gardens became widely known (sometimes through the publication of catalogues) and popular destinations for visitors. But what was all this stuff, really?
