Conclusion

Scientific instruments did not play a major role in botanical research at the Academy. They were used only infrequently to examine plants, and very often the issues addressed were not botanical. Plants in a vacuum tested theories about the properties of air and the effects of airlessness. Instead of using microscopy to explore plant anatomy systematically, academicians sought only such observations as would address specific physiological theories.

Academicians had no program, and their research was piecemeal and lacked continuity. Patronage was irrelevant, because the microscopes, thermometers, and aerometers were inexpensive enough that academicians could have bought them with their own funds, while the air pumps were designed and owned by the academicians themselves. In these respects the Academy was no better than the private societies. Yet it was less Baconian than its rivals and its institutional continuity counteracted the centripetal individualism of physiological research.

The two principal instruments used to study plants, the microscope and the air pump, were of different value to botanists. The microscope had a more established place, because it seemed to provide clearer and more definitive evidence. Mariotte, La Hire, Tournefort, and their contemporaries knew how to describe what they saw. They could relate their observations

to zoological models and could fit them into accepted patterns of thought about plants. Plant microscopists evoked two paradigms, one factual and the other logical, and such appeals to zoology and to analogical reasoning enabled botanists to explain what they saw through the lens.

With the air pump, however, savants were unsure of themselves. Experiments with plants were designed to ascertain whether plants were like animals in requiring air for their vital functions, but plants behaved inconsistently in the vacuum: some seeds sprouted while others did not, some seedlings died immediately while others survived and grew for a day or two. Unexpected and confusing phenomena — the excessive production of water, the appearance of gray filaments, the cracking and expansion of the soil — occurred in every experiment. Botanical pneumatics fell prey to disputes between conflicting theories about air and the vacuum. Academicians were cautious, therefore, in interpreting their observations of plants in the vacuum and did not build on this research.

Scientific apparatus offers decisive evidence only within the context of a paradigm that allows savants to identify and understand crucial phenomena. But in the late seventeenth century, botany was changing, and its new accretions depended on borrowed theories that sometimes failed. When academicians used new tools to study plants, their research seemed meaningful if the cross-disciplinary analogies worked, but otherwise they could not interpret their findings. Without a satisfactory theory, studies of plants simply accumulated evidence on both sides of debates about other natural phenomena, as the case of botany and the new instruments reveals.