Science Saturday: Spectacle de la Nature
Today we present images from Spectacle de la Nature or Nature Display’d. Being Discourses on Such Particulars of Natural History as were Thought Most Proper to Excite the Curiosity, and Form the Minds of Youth. It is the English translation of Noël Antoine Pluche’s Le Spectacle de la Nature. This popular work of natural history was first published in French from 1732-1750 in eight volumes, and was translated into many languages across Europe. This is the second English edition, translated by Samuel Humphreys and printed in 1735 in London for J. Pemberton at the Golden Buck, Fleet Street; R. Francklin in Covent Garden, and Charles Davis in Paternoster Row. At the back of the book after the index is a list of other books printed for these booksellers, including advertisements for cookbooks.
Noël Antoine Pluche (born 1688, died 1761) was a French priest and teacher of humanities and rhetoric. Pluche’s Spectacle de la Nature was intended as a pedagogical set of books for children. It is framed as a dialogue of polite conversation between three people: a Count, a Chevalier, and a Prior. They are on a walk together, discussing the wonders of the natural world, including explanations of insects, birds, fish, and plants. It touts the virtues of direct observation. The Chevalier, or knight, at one point explains that nature is “a thousand times more engaging than all the glitter and gildings of Paris.” When using a magnifying glass, the Chevalier says that “the little head of a fly is covered with flowers and diamonds; the wing of gnat, which at the first view looks like a small white rag, and seems destitute of all manner of beauty, appears, when you consider it attentively, as smooth as ice itself, and glows like a rainbow.”
Spectacle de la Nature is illustrated with copper-plate engravings by the English engraver Andrew Motte. The butterfly image is based on the art of Maria Sibylla Merian, a German naturalist and scientific illustrator known for her direct observations of the metamorphosis of insects in Surinam.
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–Sarah, Special Collections Graduate Intern