Afterword: Nehemiah Grew and the Anatomy of Plants: The Essential Tension

<p>The essential tension in Nehemiah Grew’s working methods in his <em>Anatomy of Plants</em> (1682) resulted in a flowering of scientific creativity. On the one hand, he utilised his intuition about the plants he studied in to understand them in their own right, and indeed to idealise them visually as structures of emotional sympathy and great geometric beauty.  On the other hand, Grew was a secretary of the Royal Society, a physician, and a museum cataloguer, and Baconian empirical inductivist, and he believed his work should have a practical, applied and economic use.  Although he shared several of these impulses with other early modern English virtuosi, Grew’s commitment to understanding the whole organism, from its smallest bits of matter to an emotional identification with his experimental subjects as sentient beings shows us the power in cultivating “a feeling for the organism” in scientific work. </p>