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8 Chapter One published a catalogue drawn up by his naturalist son Jan, which listed the objects on 142 pages of two closely printed columns, organized roughly into stones and minerals, plants, animals, and artificialia. 10 It included an amazing number of coins and medals; a strange, small Chinese image stamped in silver; a gold Japanese idol; a gold representation of Gustavus Adolphus; an artificial mouse with copper wheels and iron springs that could walk about; a Turkish almanac with colored letters; a Chinese almanac; silver from Mexico; bloodstones; pumice from Iceland; a sample of a “miraculous earth” called “fixed milk of the Virgin Mary”; three eagle-stones (said to be collected from eagle’s nests, and of great medical efficacy); seventy corals; a branch of a tree called Rose of Jericho; two birds of paradise (“with feet,” contradicting the common legend that they did not have any); edible swallows’ nests; seven crabs from the Moluccas; a stone from Portugal that cured fevers (lapis antifebrilis); an Indian millipede; a sea star; some insects; a unicorn horn six feet, three inches long; and more and more. 11 Clearly the curiosity of both Lastanosa and the elder Swammerdam had similar roots. But the Dutch apothecary collected naturalia both much more extensively and much more exactingly than the aristocrat. He possessed, for instance, one thousand nine hundred shells. If Lastanosa was not an expert on naturalia himself, he no doubt relied on agents to collect for him. It would be very interesting to know more about who they were, and where they traveled. Huesca is a long way from the main city port dealing with the colonies, Seville, or even from the important port city of Valencia. Presumably Lastanosa maintained good connections with Italy, where he certainly was in contact with Kircher-who of course had a keen interest in natural history. 12 The exhibition on Lastanosa mentioned that he had thirteen correspondents in eleven cities outside Spain. But can we compare his network with Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580-1637), from Aix-en-Provence--not so far away? Unlike Lastanosa, Peiresc cultivated the study of nature by becoming a painstaking investigator in his own right. And although he had more contacts in Catholic regions than elsewhere, Peiresc’s network stretched all over Europe, with tens, even hundreds of correspondents. 13 Moreover, while Peiresc began with similar interests to those of Lastanosa in combining moral and natural philosophy through collecting and studying alchemy, by the 1630s, Peiresc was moving into new and dangerous philosophical territory by supporting the work of Pierre Gassendi on Epicureanism, for instance. We can also compare Lastanosa to another Frenchman of his own generation known to have been interested in science, Henri Louis Habert
Lastanosa as an Example of His Time: Natural History and Medicine de Montmor (c.1600-1679). Montmor, too, came from a wealthy family, in his case one related to the greatest families in France. Like Lastanosa, too, Montmor received an excellent classical education, and he became a great patron of scientists and philosophers, providing his clients with “an infinity” of machines and instruments with which he had stimulated his own curiosity in the teasing out of details in nature for thirty years. In the late 1650s, Samuel Sorbière prepared a plan for the organization of meetings in the form of nine articles, with the goals of the meetings to avoid “the vain exercise of the mind on useless subtleties; rather, one should always propose the clearest knowledge of the works of God and the advancement of the conveniences of life, in the arts and sciences that best serve to establish them.” For such reasons, the Académie Montmor is sometimes called the forerunner of the Académie royale des sciences. 14 Whatever Lastanosa’s achievements may be, then, he cannot compare with great French patrons such as Peiresc or Montmor (or with Dutch ones like Constantijn Huygens) for encouraging the new philosophy. Finally, Lastanosa also seems to have avoided one of the implications becoming clear in the new philosophy of his day. The investigations of people involved with medicine were not only very important for focusing attention on the material details of nature, but sometimes for leading them to support ideas that bordered on philosophical materialism. For instance, in alchemy the idea that had been at its center--that the material substances supporting bodily life are expressions of deeper, immaterial forces which are interconnected by webs of sympathy and antipathy, and properly discerned through allegory--was being challenged by the middle of the 17th century, as materialistic alternatives being developed. Paracelsus and most of his followers, such as Oswald Croll, made much use of symbolism and explanations based on divine mysteries, not unlike the Baroque “typology” discussed by Canizares. 15 But even in the later 16th century, some writers were doing their best to strip spiritualist explanations away from the careful descriptive work of understanding chemical processes. In the work of the Dutch physician, technician, and philosopher Isaac Beeckman, for instance, one can see his appropriation of “atomism” to explain such things. 16 Many early 17th-century philosophers were deeply impressed by the power given by such concepts to explain chemical transformations without the need to invoke immaterial powers. The philosophical debates remained deep in controversy, but one of their consequences was to raise further skeptical questions about spiritualist explanations for chemical transformations. 17 In other parts of the medical sciences, similar processes were at work. The case of William Harvey is an interesting example: he had travelled to 9
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