Inventing
Inventing
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发表时间：
2006
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通讯作者：
M. Orloff
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作者：
M. Orloff
1643年，在波罗的海沿岸，一位默默无闻的作家出版了一本小书，介绍了生长在他家乡附近的植物。尼古拉斯·奥尔哈芬的论文篇幅很小，但它讨论了作者认为是一个重要问题的问题，这个问题远远超出了它的直接背景，但泽（今天的格但斯克）的商业城镇。Oelhafen抱怨说，为什么在他那个时代，有那么多人对“奇怪的”自然物体着迷，“从遥远的地方花了很大的代价”，而他们却“踩在脚下”那些在家里找到的东西？他斥责他们的“忘恩负义”，他痛苦地说：“与此同时，那些生长在我们自己的阳光下，在我们自己的土壤里的东西。. .如果他们没有完全被忽视和蔑视，无论如何，他们被认为比海藻还卑鄙！[1]在这本书中，Oelhafen试图重新向他的读者介绍他们自己的乡村的丰富性和多样性，他详细列出了数百种当地植物的清单，并注明了在哪里可以找到它们。他希望通过这样的记录，他可以帮助纠正同胞的无知，同时在更大的世界中重建一种平衡与和谐。通过采取这一步骤，Oelhafen加入了一个更大的企业。因为在近代早期的欧洲，他的许多同时代人--在意大利、法国、英国、荷兰和神圣罗马帝国的分散领土--也开始通过记录他们自己的地方自然世界来为“自然史”做出贡献。自然史包括对岩石、植物、动物和任何其他可以被认为是“自然”的现象的研究，这是一种可以追溯到希腊罗马时代的古老谱系学。
In the year 1643, on the shores of the Baltic, an obscure author published a small book on the plants to be found growing near his home town. Nicolaus Oelhafen’s treatise was tiny, but it discussed what its author felt was a significant problem, one which extended far beyond its immediate setting, the merchant town of Danzig (today’s Gdańsk). Why, Oelhafen complained, were so many people in his day fascinated by “strange” natural objects, “brought from faraway regions at great expense,” while they “trod underfoot” those to be found at home? Rebuking them for their “ingratitude,” he bitterly remarked that “Meanwhile, those things which grow under our own sun, in our own soil . . . if they don’t lie entirely neglected and in contempt, are at any rate held to be viler than seaweed”!1 In his book, Oelhafen attempted to reintroduce his readers to the richness and variety of their own easily accessible countryside by compiling a detailed inventory of hundreds of local plant species, together with notes on where they could be found. By thus documenting local nature, he hoped, he could help to remedy his compatriots’ ignorance while reestablishing a sort of balance and harmony in the greater world. By taking this step, Oelhafen joined himself to a much larger enterprise. For across early modern Europe, many of his contemporaries – in such areas as Italy, France, England, the Netherlands, and the scattered territories of the Holy Roman Empire – were also beginning to contribute to “natural history,” as they saw it, by documenting their own local natural worlds. Natural history, which comprised the study of rocks, plants, animals, and any other phenomena that might conceivably be described as “natural,” was a pursuit with a venerable genealogy dating back to Greco-Roman antiquity.2