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“Not without Some Repugnancy, and a Fluctuating Mind”: Trembley’s Polyp and the Practice of Eighteenth-Century Taxonomy
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“Not without Some Repugnancy, and a Fluctuating Mind”: Trembley’s Polyp and the Practice of Eighteenth-Century Taxonomy
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Book Chapter
“Not without Some Repugnancy, and a Fluctuating Mind”: Trembley’s Polyp and the Practice of Eighteenth-Century Taxonomy
2012
Overview
This chapter focuses on a singular vermiform creature, the freshwater hydra or polyp. It provides a discussion of natural history writing to illustrate a kind of lyricism and aesthetic revaluation built into the articulation of empirical study. Discovered in 1740 by Abraham Trembley, the freshwater hydra or polyp displayed an astonishing variety of wormy behaviors, including the capacity to regenerate from cuttings as if it were a plant. Consequently, subsequent studies of Trembley’s investigations into the polyp emphasize this naturalist’s relative obscurity in the history of science against the polyp itself being a celebrated discovery. Trembley’s account of his investigations into the structure and behavior of this creature implores a way of aestheticizing the vermicular that fruitfully combines the more classic repulsion with an inventive appeal to mutability, indeterminacy, and the irrepressibility of the organic.
Publisher
University of Minnesota Press
Subject
ISBN
9780816673209, 0816673209
