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"So Many Things for His Profit and for His Pleasure": British and Colonial Naturalists Respond to an Enlightenment Creed, 1727–1777
| In May of 1773 the Pennsylvania farmer and naturalist John Bartram (1699–1777) wrote to the son of his old colleague Peter Collinson (1694–1768), the London-based merchant, botanist, and seed trader who had passed away nearly five years earlier, to communicate his worry over the "extirpation of the native inhabitants" living within American forests.1 Michael Collinson returned Bartram's letter in July of that same year and was stirred by the "striking and curious" observations made by his deceased father's friend and trusted natural historian from across the Atlantic. The relative threat to humanity posed by the extinction of species generally remained an unresolved issue in the minds of most eighteenth-century naturalists, but the younger Collinson was evidently troubled by the force of Bartram's remarks. Your comments "carry Conviction along with them," he wrote, "and indeed I cannot help thinking but that in the period you mention notwithstanding the amazing Recesses your prodigious Continent affords many of the present Species will become extinct." Both Bartram and Collinson were anxious about certain changes to the environment engendered by more than a century of vigorous Atlantic trade in the colonies' indigenous flora and fauna. Collinson lamented to the seventy-four-year-old Bartram that he "[felt] most for the poor ingenious Beaver and read with Indignation and concern the many many thousands of their Furs imported from America annually." Anthropomorphizing aside, he recognized the "Tenderness" of the "Sentiments" offered by his father's esteemed associate and expressed to him how closely "correspondent" they were "with [his] own Feelings."2 The emotive language that Collinson chose to characterize the sense of loss he experienced in learning of the destruction of the American beaver population called human conduct toward nature directly into question. |
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It is indeed tempting to see the communication between Bartram and the younger Collinson in terms of the conservationist impulse that their exchange implies. Collinson's empathy for the beaver, however, was not entirely consonant with a biocentric perspective. Just months earlier, in January 1773, he had written Bartram and confessed to him that "I much fear that the Extirpation of that dreadful Animal the Rattle Snake will never be accomplished notwithstanding the perpetual war against the Race."3 An animal that served human progress, such as the beaver, merited Collinson's concern, but the eminently unserviceable and downright "noxious" rattlesnake held considerably less value to him, and its extermination seemed a worthwhile pursuit. Such thinking coincided with the eighteenth-century axiom that animals were subordinate to humans and affirmed the idea of ordered hierarchy and disparity among all natural species. Naturalists were resolute in their belief that God had designed a complex universe in order to allow for a full flowering of humans' critical faculties and that he had decreed their governance over nature a logical outgrowth of their rational powers. Bartram's contemporary Thomas Short, for example, underscored this point in 1751 in his widely read Medicina Britannica, noting rhetorically that had "the Deity" not "crowd the Earth with such a Number of Different sorts of Plants ... What Room [would] there been for human Judgment, Invention, and Reasoning?"4 The early modern naturalist appeared secure in his religiously inspired and homocentric outlook on the world. Yet how should we account for his astute observations regarding purpose and change in the plant and animal kingdoms—as with respect to the rattlesnake, who was kept in "Ballance," according to Bartram, by other predators such as eagles, vultures, and deer? Naturalists' sophisticated ruminations suggest a level of introspection that belied a predominantly human-centered interpretation of nature.5 |
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