Conclusion

Seventeenth-century botany was eclectic.^[46] Zoological anatomy and physiology lent it a vocabulary, an experimental repertoire, and some explanatory theories about physiological processes. Chemistry and mechanics accounted for generation and reproduction, germination and growth, and nutrition. Some academicians took these explanations as complementary, especially when they answered related but different questions. Thus, they might explain chemically how a plant assimilates nutrients and mechanically how a plant gets larger or dies. Mariotte, for example, cited both mechanistic and chemical theories in his discussions of plant physiology. Homberg and Tournefort, however, did not try to combine the theories — Homberg's primarily chemical, Tournefort's predominantly

mechanistic — that they presented separately but contemporaneously at meetings of the Academy. Nor did the Academy as a whole encourage them to unify their hypotheses into a general account of plants. Academicians never tried to develop a treatise on plant physiology that would rival either the detailed and original works of Grew and Malpighi or the derivative, systematic essays of Régis. The natural philosophy of plants was too tentative a discipline to justify a collaborative project similar to the natural history of plants.

The Academy as an institution never encouraged members to develop a comprehensive theory of plants, to resolve their inconsistent interpretations, or to explore the implications of their piecemeal observations and conclusions. Nevertheless, it aided the development and expression of their theories in three ways. First, the Academy offered a forum for discussing and publishing these early studies of plant physiology. Second, the Academy's natural historical research supported its natural philosophical inquiries. Studies of seeds, the cultivation of plants, and chemical analysis — all ingredients of the natural historical project — fed theories about reproduction, the conditions of germination, and maturation. The official project provided not only data but also protection for the hesitant and unofficial natural philosophical studies. As a result, collaboration on the failed natural history of plants bore fruit in individual studies of plant physiology, with chemical analysis, more than any other tool of research, connecting the two kinds of inquiry.

Third, the Academy's interdisciplinary composition and interests encouraged members to study plants with the new instruments. As the next chapter will show, however, these instruments were theory-laden; they revealed novel details but also interposed a screen between observer and object. When academicians examined a plant with the microscope or the air pump, they saw not just a plant but also a link in an evidential chain that was not primarily botanical. Indeed, the cogency of their research depended on the theoretical certainty of the discipline that stimulated them to use the new apparatus. Thus, microscopic and pneumatic botany had different fates: the Academy used microscopes to support theories about physiology, but it used the air pump to clarify theories about air and the void.