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Three Eighteenth-Century Attempts to Map the Natural Order: Johann Herrmann – Georg Christoph Würtz – Paul Dietrich Giseke by Kees van Putten is a Arts and Humanities article available to read on EtoBox.

What is Three Eighteenth-Century Attempts to Map the Natural Order: Johann Herrmann – Georg Christoph Würtz – Paul Dietrich Giseke about?

## Abstract By the second half of the eighteenth century, the age-old concept of nature as a chain of being had been superseded by the idea that the order of nature was a two-dimensional whole. Carolus Linnaeus, for instance, stated that vegetal nature was ordered like a geographical map. Paul Dietrich Giseke, one of his followers, rendered this metaphor concrete by making a “genealogic-geographical map of the natural orders of plants.” Could mapping nature in this way help to produce a true image of it and thereby achieve a better understanding of nature’s order? I intend to answer this question by analyzing Giseke’s map along with two closely connected images of the order of nature, Johann Herrmann’s “Table of affinities between animals” and the hitherto unnoticed “geographical map” of medicines, designed by Georg Christoph Würtz. The article deals with the relation between these images, examines the respective advantages and drawbacks of their maps and situates them with respect to the models of the natural history of the time.

Who reads Three Eighteenth-Century Attempts to Map the Natural Order: Johann Herrmann – Georg Christoph Würtz – Paul Dietrich Giseke?

It is typically read by researchers, students, and practitioners in Arts and Humanities.

Author
Kees van Putten
Publisher
Brill (ISSN 1383-7427)
Published
2019
Language
EN
Field
Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

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