Reordering the World: Note-Taking and Natural History during the Late Scottish Enlightenment

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The history of systematic natural history has traditionally given priority to the hierarchical picture of the world intimated by the canon of texts used by evolutionary historians. This project offers a fresh view that complicates the picture painted by such sources. In particular, I challenge the notion that late Enlightenment naturalists viewed the world through a set of fixed categories overtly linked to concepts like the 'chain of being' or 'species'. More specifically, I concentrate on the prelude to order, that is, the sorting, extracting, and insertion of words and definitions evinced in manuscript notes and educational settings (especially schools and universities). These ubiquitous practices were malleable and, crucially, they were reinforced on a day-to-day basis in classrooms, libraries, lecture theatres, studies, and museums, as well as in natural settings. Viewed from this perspective, I use notebooks to argue that conceptions of 'mind', 'body' and 'world' were flexible in a manner that gives new meaning and relevance to the dynamic nature of knowledge formation during the late Enlightenment.