Nehemiah Grew is rightly lauded as one of the first and most sophisticated promoters of the
discipline of plant anatomy—the observation and representation of the insides of plants …

The generation of animals was a difficult phenomenon to explain in the seventeenth century,
having long been a problem in natural philosophy, theology, and medicine. In this paper, I …

Reconstructions of Romantic-era life science in general, and epigenesis in particular,
frequently take the Kantian logic of autotelic “self-organization” as their primary reference …

In the early modern period, poetic form underpinned and influenced scientific progress. The
language and imagery of seventeenth-century writers and natural philosophers reveal how …

This paper traces how the seventeenth-century poet, playwright, and natural philosopher,
Margaret Cavendish, developed her ideas on plant life in three major publications: her 1655 …

The early modern era produced the Scientific Revolution, which originated our present
understanding of the natural world. Concurrently, philosophers established the conceptual …

In an unpublished anatomical treatise written around 1670, the English anatomist and fellow
of the Royal Society of London Edmund King proposed that the human body was ultimately …

In this essay, I study the contested role of magnification as an observational strategy in the
generation theories of William Harvey and René Descartes. During the seventeenth century …

Dans les sciences qui sont difficiles par elles-mêmes, je ne mesure pas la longueur d'un
Livre par le nombre de ses pages, mais par la longueur du tems qu'il faut employer pour …

In trying to develop their respective theories of generation, Jean Fernel and William Harvey
both drew repeatedly on Aristotle's suggestion that something “analogous to the element of …