Rhubarb & Pearls

Consequently: he who wants to have right without wrong,

Order without disorder,

Does not understand the principles

Of heaven and earth.

He does not know how

Things hang together.

Chuang Tzu

“The impossibility of penetrating the divine pattern of the universe cannot stop us from planning human patterns.”

J.L. Borges

The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge divided animals into:

a) those belonging to the Emperor

b) those that are embalmed

c) those that are tame

d) pigs

e) sirens

f) imaginary animals

g) wild dogs

h) those included in this classification

i) those that are crazy-acting

j) those that are uncountable

k) those painted with the finest brush made of camel

hair

l) miscellaneous

m) those which have just broken a vase, and

n) those which, from a distance, look like flies.

Borges

Q. What is a camel's hair brush made of?

A. Squirrel fur

“And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to all fowl of the air, and to all the wild beasts.” Genesis

Original names were thought to correspond with their referents, but language is messy and contextual.

What’s in a name? Fireflies are flying beetles and glow worms are flies.

Linnaeus first published his sexual system of plant classification in Systema naturae (1735). He knew his system was arithmetic and arbitrary, but also that it, “made the ordering of floral collections less daunting both to the learned and amateurs.”

Linnaeus' home was a Wunderkammer:

“The walls of his rooms disappeared behind tangled branches – some thirty species of songbirds nested in them . . . Linnaeus pasted botanic prints as wall paper. . . Over the sanded, broad planked floors, he strewed his botanic manuscripts, which blinded nightingales splattered with droppings while racoons played and clawed among them." Lisbet Koerner

The Summer of 1771 saw Linnaeus still busy classifying, publishing, receiving materials, and in touch with his students (“apostles”) and other intellectuals.

“I derived more real profit from your Philosophia botanica than from all books on morality.” J.J. Rousseau

"With the exception of Shakespeare and Spinoza, I know no one among the no longer living who has influenced me more strongly! . . . not, however in botany!” Goethe

22 August 1771

Rousseau writes to a young girl: “I propose to you to note down several preliminary notions of vegetal structure and the organization of plants, in order that, should you take but a few steps into the most beautiful, the most rich of the three kingdoms of nature, you might walk there with at least so enlightenment . . .

There is nothing either complicated or difficult to follow in what I have to propose to you. It is only a question of having the patience to begin at the beginning.”

18 August 1771

Young Werther (Goethe) writes to his friend: “. . . and a last setting ray brought forth the humming beetle from its grassy retreat, and all the busy buzzing made me study the ground, where the moss that gains its sustenance from the unyielding rocks, and the heath that grows on the barren sand, revealed to me the inmost, sacred warmth of the life of Nature - at such times, how ardently my heart embraced it all.”

1771. Cook's Endeavour fleet returned home in July. Its circumnavigation had netted in the order of 1,300 new species and 110 new genera.

“The botanist who chooses to exercise himself over varieties can hardly come to the end of playfulness of nature in its numerous shapes.” Linnaeus

The video was Fraser Island Epic