Linnaeus’s adjustable herbarium cabinet performed his “order of things” through shifts, adaptations, and changing neighbors. In this process, some conceptual translating and (re)editing must have often been done between the three dimensions of the cabinet and its 16,000 botanical samples and the two dimensions of the charts, the collations and constellations produced with the help of the cubbies changed how Linnaeus looked upon and read nature in the outside world; this in turn fed back into the conclusions of his own books. Historian of science and Linnaeus expert Staffan MüllerWille describes the new role of the specimens and the collection in this context: “What thus counts for the collector is no longer the individual objects in the collection, but their place in an endless, serial system whose links mutually represent themselves as well as their respective species.”³⁷ The effect was that it “[…] was the herbarium in its totality, rather than arbitrary type specimens, which served as a tool in the determination of plant species and genera.”³⁸ Müller-Wille also points out that up until Linnaeus’s movable shelves naturalists would commonly organize their herbarium sheets by binding them into book-like objects, thus lending the plants a certain "nite or at least linear order. In contrast, the cabinet allowed a more open-ended research without tearing apart the entire collection.³⁹ Like Gessner, Linnaeus employed a form of constellational thinking—even though neither notions of ecology nor species evolution were relevant at that time. From this point of view, Linnaeus’s cabinet also evinces a curatorial-editorial quality because it broke with the former tradition of the botanical quasi-book as too stubborn, replacing it with a significantly more multistable reading machine—something we are familiar with both in the context of 1970s conceptual art’s experiments with unbound publications and, more mundanely, in the way we nowadays file research in folders on the computer.


One Bird, Four Hands: Brisson & Buffon

Concurrent with the naming of the Paradisaea apoda L., one of the largest European bird collections of its time was changing ownership in Paris upon the death of the influential René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur (1683–1757) whose private cabinet d’histoire naturelle was enormous for the period. Relying on an international network sending birds from all corners of the world, Réaumur was an esteemed pioneer in modern bird taxidermy and one of the first naturalists to stuff and mount bird skins using wire to imitate more life-like poses. In addition to the sheer extent of the bird collection itself this new display method encouraged new avifaunal assumptions. Two emerging illustrated bird book series are particularly fascinating examples for the way in which collection curators entwined birds, things, and words during the early history of modern ornithology.

Created in the 1760s to 70s, both these publications have been lauded as the “vanguards of a new type of study of birds.”⁴⁰ Their respective authors were Mathurin Jacques Brisson (1723–1806) and Georges-Louis Leclerc Compte de Buffon (1707–1788), two rivaling naturalists who each accessed and employed Réaumur’s bird collection—albeit at different times. Even though they studied birds using the same bird-objects, their respective conclusions were quite different, both in scientific information and aesthetic approach. Whereas Brisson aimed for seemingly more objective descriptions in the tradition of the Renaissance encyclopedia, Buffon preferred to enrich his passages with literary interpretations and metaphorical embellishments. While Brisson’s six-part Ornithologie (1760) was the last publication he ever produced, Buffon’s Histoire naturelle des oiseaux (1772) would be one early element in a monumental natural history writing project that had expanded to thirty-six volumes by the time he died in 1788.

Brisson was employed as a collection curator by Réaumur until the latter’s death in 1757. His research position was not unlike that of Conrad Gessner’s—in that both lacked experience with living birds in the wild but nevertheless were inspired by the promise of a complete survey. Brisson carefully studied Réaumur’s birds as well as the skins in other collections in Paris, and in this process far increased the number of known bird species; for instance by three times in comparison to those included in Systema Naturae.⁴¹ Beyond this broadening of natural history’s horizon of avifaunal diversity, however, Brisson applied a deeply introspective gaze on the organization of the collection itself. The important historian of ornithology Paul Lawrence Farber quotes the following statement: “I have been led to think of arranging the animal kingdom into an order different from those used up to the present time. My intention in this labor was solely to instruct myself and to place myself in the position of being able to judge the most convenient place to put a specimen of a new animal which would arrive to be placed in a cabinet.”⁴²

Like Linnaeus’s herbarium, Brisson’s engagement with the bird collection created a kind of curatorial-editorial loop with regards to his bird book: His insights in the bird collections fed a complex ornithological writing project, which in turn led to the rearrangement of the specimens under his care based on the intellectual system he was devising for them as he researched. According to Emma Spary, “[n]aturalist treatises such as Brisson’s not only constituted a discourse about the collection, but also a level of the collection itself.”⁴³ Yet, what does it mean for the legacies of ornithology that so many naturalists were privileging a collection curator’s perspective and resulting agency over a careful, slow experience in a bird’s natural habitat and life world? For Farber, Brisson’s writing conventions reflect a “stiff museum posture” as the descriptions are limited to the birds’ external appearance, remaining unanimated by lived or habitat experience. Farber also says that “Brisson’s Ornithologie is a good example of the collection-catalogue approach to natural history. The selection of material, the style, the scope, and its audience are all linked to a particular famous collection.”⁴⁴ Echoing this, Spary points out that the internal organization of Brisson’s volumes as well as the individual descriptions and visual renderings of the birds “function as distinguishable units like the material objects”; here, associations between the bird specimen objects, established taxonomies, printed bird images, and ornithological texts form a kind of closed system.⁴⁵ The result is a sense of artificiality and estrangement that is not even easily counterbalanced by more than 200 fine bird engravings commissioned from the esteemed illustrator Francois-Nicolas Martinet (1731–1800). [Fig. 08]