Picturing Seeds of Poppies

Abstract

The middle of the seventeenth century saw the emergence of a new kind of botanical observation: Microscopical observations of seeds. Previously, naturalists had made observations of seeds to complete their description of plants published in herbals, but for the first generation of Royal Society microscopists—Henry Power, Robert Hooke, and Nehemiah Grew—seeds became the centre of attention. This essay details this transition in plant knowledge by zooming in on just one kind of seeds: The poppy seed. Poppy seeds were abundant in early modern England as they were found in fields, gardens, kitchens and pharmacies. They were also excellent specimens to look at through microscopes, but for different reasons. Focusing on pictorial representation, especially, I analyse the diverse ambitions behind Power, Hooke, and Grew’s observations of poppy seeds, and how they used pictures to further these. The comparison of these three observations of the same specimen highlights the diversity of strategies for scientific representation in the early Royal Society while showing that intense, instrument-enhanced observation did not produce a stable epistemic object, but a multiplicity of epistemic images.