Nature au naturel in Late-Seventeenth-Century France

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Nature au naturel in late-seventeenth-century France On 15 January 1697, Father Charles Plumier (1646-1704) found himself 4,800 miles from his native France, stooping over the seven-foot-long dead body of an American crocodile. 1 The animal was captured on the marshy banks of a freshwater lake nestling among foothills, probably by a young black slave whom the friar had taken with him the year before to help him with his work. French colonizers knew the lake by the name that the aboriginal Taíno Indians had given it, Miragoâne. The place was a half-day walk from the coastal town of Petit-Goave, north of the Tiburon Peninsula, in the western part of the island of Hispaniola. The animal was '6 [French] feet [pieds] and 4 inches [pouces]' or about two meters long. Plumier not only anatomized it, but took detailed handwritten notes: 'One foot from the end of the muzzle A to the end of the occiput B. From the end of the occiput B, 8 inches minus 3 lines [lignes] to the scapulae C. From the scapulae C to the beginning of the tail D, 1 foot 7 inches ½. From D to E, a bit more than 3 feet.' 2 The capital letters connect the textual explanation to certain parts of the astonishingly detailed pen-and-ink drawing that occupies most of the same loose sheet. This was the first of the twenty unbound, folio-format pages in which Plumier dissected, through images and text, an American crocodile.