Introduction. Natural Science in the New World

For much of Canadian history, most of the science that took place in Canada took place within the bounds of natural history, and it was primarily the study of natural history that inserted Canada into the consciousness of Europe.Long before science was institutionalized in Canada, early naturalist-explorers scoured the landscape, studying minerals, plants and animals, as well as human artifacts, in quest of commercial, scientific, or military uses.Stories and samples of diamonds, gold, copper, and other metals, or the 'vegetable gold' of ginseng or even mast trees, provoked royal and commercial support for further voyages of exploration and conquest.Back in the metropolis, whether Paris, London, or Madrid, disputes over the exact nature of these mineral or botanical specimens reflected the controversies between alchemists, doctors, herbalists and natural philosophers, and revealed the fault lines of the scientific revolution.The minerals, plants, animal skins and parts, curiosities, even live specimens, including those unfortunate Aboriginals imported to European courts in the early years of exploration, provoked debate and controversy in Europe not only about the nature of the New World, but also about how the natural world was known.Linnaeus, in a famous aphorism ('America, 1492'), asserted the significance of the discovery of the New World that, in essence, made everything new, and it was the flood of new specimens and new observations that forced European naturalists to revise their speculations on the classification of nature.The newly emergent discipline of natural history was, according to Victoria Dickenson et Elsbeth Heaman Paula Findlen, "perhaps the most widely discussed and hotly debated discipline among Renaissance natural philosophers." 1 Thus, the discovery of Canada and the development of natural history occurred simultaneously, and the two reinforced one another.The descriptions and objects brought back from Canada by the Corte-Real brothers, by Jacques Cartier and his chronicler André Thevet, among others, helped to fuel the renewed investigations into the natural world that so characterized sixteenth-century European scholarship.Scholars and naturalists developed rigorous new techniques for describing and classifying nature, at the same time that they also developed networks of commercial exchange that further encouraged the search for natural specimens.The greater attention to natural objects themselves, the new illustrations of those objects, and the extended networks of scholarly exchange, were the factors that better enabled explorers and settlers in Canada to undertake observations.A Jesuit missionary in China, Pierre Jartoux, had recently provided a detailed and illustrated account of ginseng, which he noted was highly sought-after as a remedy.The Jesuit Joseph-François Lafitau, had not been very long in Canada before he recruited Aboriginal informants to help him locate ginseng in the New World, and his 1718 treatise on North American ginseng initiated a lucrative trade to China. 2 Though the two plants were not identical, Lafitau believed that they were, since they resembled each other and both Chinese and Iroquois peoples used the plants for healing.By the seventeenth century, a number of Canadian plant specimens, transplanted to European botanical gardens or preserved in collections, were already well known to European experts.Canadian flora became increasingly represented both in exhaustive international surveys and in local regional studies.A series of Canadian plants was included in an ambitious encyclopedic index of more than six thousand plants described by Caspar Bauhin and published in 1623.Twelve years later, Jacques Philippe Cornut, a physician, published Historia Plantarum Canadensium, which described eighty-six plants (only some of them Canadian), that he had studied at the herb garden of the Paris Faculty of Medicine.Many were illustrated with copper plate engravings.3 In the 1690s, the French state commissioned a French physician stationed in Quebec, Michel

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