Thomas Hallock at the LARB:
When, and why, did we humans begin to set ourselves apart from this shared ancestry? The answer is, of course, modernity, which takes us back to the early 17th century—and to the goliath grouper. The earliest European description appears in the 1648 Historia Naturalis Brasiliae, an encyclopedia of American wonders by the German-born natural philosopher Georg Marggraf and his collaborator Willem Piso. Equal parts gorgeous and strange, their lavishly illustrated volume was a product of violence waged on a planetary scale. Marggraf, who traveled to Brazil under the patronage of the Dutch West India Company, represented the research wing of a commercial operation that extracted slave labor from Africa to grow sugar in the Americas, generating an ill-gained return for investors in the Netherlands.
Possessed of a keen eye for detail, Marggraf and Piso cast Brazilian exotics (leopards, grouper, sloth) as products for collection or potential commerce. They rendered nature through a static exterior, in sentences without verbs: “Branchias in ambitu rotundas, medio autem in triangulum definentes” (gills round in circumference but defining a triangle in the middle).
more here.
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