ABSTRACT
BY THE END OF the seventeenth century the language of one science, geography, routinely pervaded the language of all the sciences. Investigators made "discoveries," which were published in "journals." Their instruments revealed "new worlds," and their natural history cabinets were filled with "curiosities." Natural philosophers and scientific popularizers accompanied their readers on "voyages" out into the vast solar system or down into myriad microscopic worlds of hitherto unimagined complexity, color, strangeness, and fine detail; Robert Hooke, for example, noted in 1665 that through the microscope "a new visible World [was] discovered to the understanding." 1 Yet although the instruments (the telescope and the microscope in particular) that took the reader or the natural philosopher on these voyages allowed the sight to reach further than the unaided eye, the voyaging itself remained imaginative, depictive, and metaphorical.
