Generation, Classification, and Human-Plant Analogies in the Mid-Eighteenth Century

Abstract:Focusing on three pseudonymously published mock-scientific treatises on artificial generation from the 1750s, this article considers the roots and purposes of human-plant analogies in the period. The first half establishes how the texts express anxieties about human classification in light of Linnaean botany, treatments of liminal organisms such as the sensitive plant and the polyp, and unresolved theories about the function of the egg and sperm and the nature of the human embryo. The second half addresses the classification of the infant products of the fictional experiments and of the natural philosophers that present them. In the first case, it draws links between the cultivation systems advocated in these texts and the iatromechanical theories of Stephen Hales and George Cheyne. In the second case, it parallels the natural philosophers’ violence and immodesty with Abraham Trembley’s and Henry Baker’s experiments in the artificial reproduction of polyps.