Conclusion

The Academy's corporate character affected its scientific inquiry, by providing continuity of goals across the lifetimes of individual members and by encouraging division of labor within research teams. These advantages favored ambitious projects. But the natural history of plants never came to fruition as planned because it was plagued by serious problems. The goals of research were unrealistic given the methods available. Chemical analysis was difficult to interpret. Relations among academicians were not harmonious. Funding was erratic, and manuscripts were stolen. Ministerial intervention on the side of practical rather than theoretical research damaged morale.

Neither the structural benefits of collaboration nor the relative independence of strong-minded individuals entirely surmounted these problems.  Dodart  and Tournefort faced a difficult choice. If they were true to the original intentions of the project, these would become a straitjacket. But if they changed its goals, reported research selectively, and published their own views rather than those of their co-workers, they alienated fellow academicians. Both chose the latter course.

By contrast the Academy's work in the natural philosophy of plants required little team effort yet achieved a modest success. It was carried out by academicians who worked independently of one another and did not always submit research plans to the institution or its protectors but instead read finished papers to their colleagues preparatory to publishing them. It enjoyed minimal material support from the institution but at least was free from ministerial interventions.^[52] In the natural history, academicians emphasized experiment and observation over theory, but the uncertain theoretical implications of that work undermined the project. In the natural philosophy, theory and experiment were more effectively wedded. If the natural history of plants tested the Academy as a company that produced science, the natural philosophy of plants revealed it as a company that reviewed what its individual members had produced. For the natural history the institution provided labor, materials, experiment, observation,

and analysis; for the natural philosophy the institution served primarily as a referee of ideas. Academicians' failures in the natural history revealed tensions between the Academy and its patrons in the seventeenth century; academicians' achievements in the natural philosophy helped establish the pattern of the Academy's activities in the eighteenth century.