be seen in the great catalogs of plants, insects, fishes, and birds produced by John Ray, in part from notes and drafts left by Francis Willughby.65 Edward Lhuyd assembled a collection of formed stones in order to produce a systematic field guide to British formed stones for the use of other naturalists.66 In instructions to plant collectors in northern Wales (discussed more extensively below), Lhuyd requested ten to twelve samples each of herbs of ordinary size and fifteen to twenty of very small species (possibly because small plants were more easily damaged in transit).67 The queries Lhuyd sent out before his natural history collecting expedition through the Celtic regions of Britain and France indicated the range of systematization. Lhuyd distributed about four thousand query sheets, blanketing every Welsh parish and parts of Cornwall, Scotland, Ireland, and Brittany.68 Lhuyd asked his respondents in every parish to identify for him antiquities, fish, animals, plants, formed stones, rocks, and manuscripts. Lhuyd asked not for the most notable specimens but for representative specimens from every single parish. Only then could nature be mapped across the nation.
Lhuyd, in fact, regarded the “exotics” that filled some gentlemen’s cabinets of curiosity with disdain because systematic accounts of nature could not be made from them—nor could they be used to map regional distributions of plants and animals. They were surprisingly uniform across different collections. They were also sourced from a more international market. For example, Lhuyd wrote in 1699 of a collection recently purchased by the University of Edinburgh that it contained relatively few specimens representing the natural production of the individual collector’s “own country.”69 In order to differentiate kinds of organisms and go about the project of constructing a British natural history, it was necessary to collect as many specimens as possible and, if possible, multiple specimens of each kind, from within Britain, and to document where they were collected.
Although naturalists collected as broadly as possible, their collections were inevitably imbalanced. As he became more homebound, Ray’s collection of insects, for example, tilted toward species he and his daughters could collect within walking distance of his home in Essex. This imbalance was the second term of the equation regulating the exchange and circulation of specimens. By collecting multiple specimens of individual species, naturalists ensured that they had extras on hand to trade with fellow naturalists.70 In addition, naturalists sometimes circulated unique specimens with the expectation that the originals would be returned. Through exchange, naturalists built the kinds of collections upon which systematic treatises could be built. Through circulation, naturalists at least gained the sight of various specimens, though not permanent ownership of them.
In the late seventeenth century Lhuyd drafted a set of instructions for collecting plants from the mountain and coastal areas of northern Wales. The instructions requested that plants be collected along the streams and rivulets at the top of Cader Idris and specified that a “trusty fellow” who could navigate the treacherous upper reaches of the mountain while “observing punctually” an exacting set of directions for what to collect and how to collect it should be chosen for the job.71 This person was unlikely to be Lhuyd’s literate correspondent; as Lhuyd observed elsewhere, an “illiterate shepheard” was more likely to have the necessary familiarity with mountain tops.72 Notably, though Lhuyd’s instructions for collecting plants were largely written in English, plant names were given in Welsh (in which Lhuyd was fluent). Lhuyd used the terminology with which his readers, and the “trusty fellow” chosen to scale the mountain, would have been familiar. Collecting plant specimens across Britain required moving across languages, using the names familiar to the places in which those plants could be found. In other words, doing natural history on a national scale required familiarity with regional linguistic topographies.
The “trusty fellow” was specifically instructed to “gather nothing that grows lower than a quarter of a mile of the Top.” Given the changeability of Welsh weather and the precariousness of the footing at the top of the mountain, his task was not without some danger. The collector was warned to go only “as high as he can with Safety” but to push that limit as far as possible. Collectors were also to “be directed to a baich or sandy place where Môrgelyn grows” (“Môr-gelyn” was a “Tea-plant”) as well as the interior of Harlech Castle, a Norman castle that by the seventeenth century was “a place much talkd of” not for its defensive capabilities but on account of the plants growing in its ruins. At each place the collector gathered multiple samples of the roots, leaves, and branches of all the plants, being “cautious in picking up the very least thing his eyes can discover.” The collectors were paid one farthing for each distinct species collected. The plants collected from Cader Idris alone “can not amount to less than 2 shillings.”73
Once the collector had returned with the specimens, he handed them off to a packer, who prepared them for shipment by carrier. The packer was addressed throughout the instructions in the second person, and it was he who was to select and supervise the collector and the carrier. The instructions to the packer and carrier were as follows:
You must get a box of an indifferent size; such as you might guesse would scarce contain them; then lay in some mosse at the bottom of it lightly besprinkle’d with water. Soe lay in the shrubs & greater plants first, pressing them down with your hands pretty close; then a little mosse lightly wetted; & soe the rest of the plants, putting here & there a little mosse upon them as you lay ’m in. When all are put in fill up the box with Mosse: that they may have noe room to be dishevld in the Carriage & besprinkle it lightly with water: Soe nayle it up securely, boreing some small holes in several parts of the cover, wherein the Carrier must besprinkle a handful or two of water every night; & see the box layd in a sellar or some cool place. They should be gather’d one or two or at farthest 3 days before the Carrier sets out.74
These directions for packing and shipping the plants were based on procedures developed by Jacob Bobart, the Younger, the head gardener at the Oxford Physic Garden, and had been used to transport plants to Oxford from France, Italy, and Germany.75 For the plants to be shipped successfully—that is, for them to be more alive than dead when they arrived at the Physic Garden—the carrier had to follow pretty specific instructions. To the carrier, who was used to transporting less finicky goods such as wool, grain, manufactured items, and perhaps books, these requirements may have taken some getting used to, especially the request to “besprinkle a handful or two of water every night; & see the box layd in a sellar or some cool place.”76 Thus preserved and cared for, nestled in their beds of damp moss, the plants would safely make their way from Cader Idris to the sheltered beds and glass houses of the Oxford Physic Garden. Similar procedures could be used to transplant live snails as well: Lhuyd sent some via carrier to Martin Lister, at work on his Historiae conchyliorum, in a “small strawberry basket” packed with wet moss.77
As these examples show, collecting and sending specimens were more complex than sending and receiving a letter or a packet of papers. First of all, more people were involved—in addition to the carrier, collectors and packers were needed. Furthermore those people needed to follow specialized, carefully elaborated procedures in order to ensure that the plants were successfully transported. When carrying a packet of papers, a carrier needed to know only the address of the recipient. When delivering plants, a carrier also needed to know how to care for his living freight. He had to take on some of the knowledge of the naturalists and become skilled in tasks that gardeners and botanists took for granted.
Naturalists expended much effort managing exchanges such as these because writing was insufficient as a means of conveying information. They had to see and physically handle specimens. This was evident in a 1691–1692 exchange between John Ray, Lhuyd, and Jacob Bobart, who had gathered a collection of Oxfordshire insects. Lhuyd, as one of Ray’s contacts, served as an intermediary between Bobart and Ray. Ray wanted to see the insects in order to determine if there were any species found in Oxfordshire that he had not seen in Essex—this would add to the completeness of the natural history of insects on which he was working (published posthumously in 1710 as Historia insectorum). Ray was frustrated by efforts to describe the insects in letters, writing to Lhuyd that “by Descriptions I doubt we shall hardly scarce come to a right understanding of one another.”78 Ray was unable to travel so far as Oxford to see the specimens