Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?

How Eighteenth-Century Science disrupted the Natural Order

Oxford University Press 2015

Hb, 215pp illus, ind, bib, £16.99, ISBN 9780 198705130

FORTEAN TIMES BOOKSHOP PRICE £15.29

In a parallel universe, where I’m a commissioning editor for BBC4, I’d snap up the rights to Gibson’s new book. Animal, vegetable, mineral? has all the elements that a popular science documentary needs. Exotic experiments. Characters. History. And a ‘big theme’. Indeed, themes don’t come much bigger or more important than ‘what is life’?

Gibson includes numerous telling vignettes – such as “somersaulting polyps”, frogs “smartly trousered” to prevent copulation and “blossoming corals” – to illustrate the transformation of natural history during the 18th century. Indeed, biology – though the term wasn’t coined until the turn of the 19th century – was at the heart of the century’s scientific, philosophical and religious discourse.

Gibson shows just how rational the ideas were at the time, based on the evidence natural historians had. After all, 18th century natural historians couldn’t rely on the plethora of high-tech techniques – such as electron microscopy, genetic ‘fingerprinting’ and immunochemistry – that are now routine in biology labs. As she notes, our current approach to, for example, biological systematics “only makes sense if we trust the theories of invisible atoms and molecules more than we trust our own senses”.

Gibson neatly shows how natural historians’ philosophical and religious perspectives influenced how they viewed the same experimental evidence. Some natural historians felt that investigations into the differences between living and inert, between plant and animal, and between species meant that “God was far less involved in the regulation of nature than previously believed”. But some natural historians were