Rise and Development of the Modern Natural History ---- Approaches from the Texts and the Plates

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The present study attempts to show, from the following four angles, how the people recognized the natural history's claims to nobility, founded on its connection with the ancient art of memory and the Encyclopedie, thus allowing to be counted among the liberal arts at the beginning of the 18^<th> century.1)Elucidation of the idea system.Under the influence of the ancient art of memory, Buffon, Diderot and other naturalists introduced the image of nature as a map, a tree or a network, images that came to dominate the whole 18^<th> century.2)Elucidation of the intertextualityThe intertextuality is one of the most important idea of Enlightenment. This part studies the systematic relationship of the natural history to other contemporary cultural products like the Encyclopedie by comparing their respective approaches. We thus concider in somme detail the problems connected with citation, copy, plagiarism, rewriting.3)Elucidation of the formation of the illustrated books of the natural historyThe development of English and French engraving and, more widely, of a visual culture in 18th-century, is a remarkable manifestation of the new epistemology which, under the influence of the natural philosophers, transformed the way the people perceived the nature. Many illustrated books of the natural history mirror this epistemological intention : nature only presents individual differences, thus opening the door to the recognition of variety.4)Elucidation related to the widespread influence of the natural history on his posterityThe last part of this study considers some of the new technical and scientific possibilities available to the people during the 19th-century. Among these were the the birth of biology and the invention of the photograph method which accelerated the decline of the natural history.