  
Mollusks, insects, and fish from Goldsmith's Animated Nature |
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Mollusks, insects, and fish from Goldsmith's Animated Nature |
| Oliver Goldsmith's An History of the Earth
and Animated Nature has been described as everything from "hackwork"
to his "most substantial literary legacy" (Wardle, 1957). The first edition
(in eight volumes) appeared in London in 1774. The work sought to draw
together virtually all that was known about the planet earth, its plants
and animals, and even its human inhabitants described from a biological
perspective. Although Goldsmith drew almost all of his information from
the work of other naturalists, he set out with a very Romantic goal in
mind. He had first planned to translate Pliny's Natural History
and then, after reading Buffon,
he decided that "the best imitation of the ancients was to write from our
own feelings and to imitate nature." The linking of emotion and mimetic
imitation to the natural world echoed precisely the claims poets would
be making for the next century. Goldsmith's Animated Nature went
through over twenty editions into the Victorian era; though it can be criticized
on technical grounds, the work became the source of what countless individuals
in the English-speaking world knew about the natural world around them.
Goldsmith wrote with clarity and precision; for example, he admitted one
of the most common confusions in natural history of the period in his discussion
of the "border" between plants and animals:
it frequently puzzles the naturalist to tell exactly where animal life begins, and vegetable terminates; nor, indeed, is it easy to resolve, whether some objects offered to view be of the lowest of the animal, or the highest of the vegetable races. The sensitive plant, that moves at the touch, seems to have as much perception as the fresh water polypus, that is possessed of a still slower share of motion. Besides, the sensitive plant will not re-produce upon cutting it in pieces, which the polypus is known to do; so that the vegetable production seems to have the superiority. Goldsmith weighed in on the side of those who believed that all human varieties derived from a single species, admitting however that great changes seemed able to occur in individual members of a species, including our own. His entire discussion of humans takes place, significantly, in a section of his work entitled "An History of Animals": If we look round the world, there seem to be not above six distinct varieties in the human species, each of which is strongly marked, and speaks the kind seldom to have mixed with any other. But there is nothing in the shape, nothing in the faculties, that shows their coming from different originals; and the varieties of climate, of nourishment, and custom, are sufficient to produce every change. Dr. Johnson wrote an epitaph in Westminster Abbey that affirms natural history's importance in Goldsmith's canon: "To the Memory of Oliver Goldsmith, poet, naturalist and historian." (A.N.) |
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Goldsmith on humans as a single species of "animal" Goldsmith's poetry
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