The Axemaker's Gift a Double Edged History of Human Culture by James Burke & Robert Ornstein

Author:James Burke & Robert Ornstein [Burke, James & Ornstein, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780399140884
Amazon: 0399140883
Publisher: G. P. Putnam's Sons A Grosset/Putnam Book
Published: 1995-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

7. ROOT AND BRANCH

In 1760 a tulip bulb called “Georgie” was stolen from Samuel Sicklemore, in Ipswich, England. It had been the result of so much painstaking research that the local Society of Florists offered a reward equivalent in modern money to about $150.00 for a single bulb.

Around the same time, Capability Brown, the country’s great landscape gardener and self-publicist, was boasting about what he did to the land surrounding a great house, describing it as a literary composition with nature, “setting a comma here, a full-stop there.” Brown’s contemporary, the poet and satirist Alexander Pope, likened the work more to art: “All gardening is landscape painting— you may distance things by darkening them and by narrowing towards the end in the same manner as they do in painting.”

In a single generation since the Scientific Revolution had culminated with Newton, science and technology were already giving us a radically new view of nature by suggesting that it could be “improved.” As the full force of the scientific revolution began to take effect, the cutting edge of innovation became sharper and more finely honed than ever before. The new axemaker gifts developed in the Royal Society laboratories were spreading into society, giving governments and institutions the power to change the world with unexpected speed and in unprecedented detail.

By the eighteenth century, technology was able to move from creating artificial phenomena in Royal Society instruments to generating artificial forms of nature in field and garden. It would then move on to harness nature itself so as to provide an entirely new kind of power that would bring radical change to the community, first and most influentially in England, which at this time was more open to change than the rest of Europe, thanks to the constitutional nature of the monarchy and the existence of a strong middle class.

At this time, society everywhere was primarily agricultural and life on the land had altered little since the first Levantine settlements twelve thousand years ago. The early Mediterranean scratch plough had given way to the late-Roman northern-European wheeled version, with a coulter that cut the sod and to some extent turned it over, creating furrows that made heavy soils easier to drain. Some advances also had been made in the use of manure for fertilizer, and since the early Middle Ages the collar had harnessed the pulling power of the horse. But, apart from these minor advances, little had changed.

For centuries, most inhabitants of agriculturally based economies had lived their lives by rote, at nature’s command. The typical midseventeenth-century English village comprised about ninety families, with 1,300 acres to farm among them. The smallest family land-holding generally consisted of four fields, each made up of a large number of long, narrow strips with no fences between them and some meadowland in common ownership. Total village holdings might vary between one and a hundred acres, but the average was close to fifty-five, made up of eighty-eight strips (not necessarily together) and twelve acres of meadow. Each

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