When you look through a microscope, you see a whole new world: Boundaries dissolve, new entities suddenly emerge, the homogeneous is revealed to be heterogeneous. This is a fascinating experience shared by scores of natural scientists around the globe today. 350 years ago, it was experienced for the first time by a group of naturalists trying to see more and more of nature. This project details the fascinating story of how the first generation of Royal Society microscopists used the newly invented microscope to discover the level of invisible things constituting living nature as we know it. By showing that early modern microscopy was a deeply philosophical enterprise that produced a novel conception of scale, Scaling Science offers a groundbreaking reconsideration of the role of scientific instruments in early modern science.

Orchard Laboratory:
Beekeeping, Plant Breeding, and the Enlightenment Discovery of Insect Pollination

The picture of the buzzing bee carrying pollen from flower to flower is one of the strongest images of ecology and the invisible relation between living organisms and their environment. The project examines how a group of Enlightenment beekeepers, plant breeders and gardeners made the first observations of insect pollination within what I term ‘orchard laboratories’. Whereas the Enlightenment is often portrayed as the age of classification separating nature into discrete kingdoms, this project tells a new history about the importance of invisible relations and the emergence of ecological thought.

Anatomy of Plants:
Techniques of Vegetable Observation in Early Modern England

From the first agrarian societies to the colonial exploitation of foreign species, humans have always relied on knowledge of plants, their generation and their properties. In the seventeenth century, these qualities increasingly came to be seen as the effects of the physical composition of the small or even invisible parts of plants, such as the structure of seeds, the fibers of stalks, or the number of stamens and pistils. In this project, I study how English natural historians such as Henry Power and Nehemiah Grew devised a range of new techniques to make the secret life of plants visible to the human eye.