ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the largely invisible episode of early eighteenth-century botany by analysing how the entrenched community of natural historians responded to Blair’s challenge. Fundamental to analysis is the claim that natural history was a contingent social and cultural enterprise of time and place. Natural history had become respectable by 1700. It was also an enterprise practiced by an identifiable, disciplined community of natural historians who had as their central aim the first-hand observation of God’s creation and its systematic organisation. In particular, methods of classification had become entrenched as powerful analytical and predictive tools, and had begun to transform the practices of natural history in the early eighteenth century. Natural history, and especially botany, would be promoted as a legitimate and socially respectable activity, and in particular Raian classification would remain culturally dominant as one of the most important ways of knowing and interpreting nature in England.
