section_path: Dissemination of ideas/Natural history
section_name: Natural history
paragraph_text: Natural history
  
  A genre that greatly rose in importance was that of scientific literature. Natural history in particular became increasingly popular among the upper classes. Works of natural history include René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur 's Histoire naturelle des insectes and Jacques Gautier d'Agoty 's La Myologie complète, ou description de tous les muscles du corps humain (1746). Outside Ancien Régime France, natural history was an important part of medicine and industry, encompassing the fields of botany, zoology, meteorology, hydrology, and mineralogy. Students in Enlightenment universities and academies were taught these subjects to prepare them for careers as diverse as medicine and theology. As shown by Matthew Daniel Eddy, natural history in this context was a very middle class pursuit and operated as a fertile trading zone for the interdisciplinary exchange of diverse scientific ideas.
  
  The target audience of natural history was French upper class, evidenced more by the specific discourse of the genre than by the generally high prices of its works. Naturalists catered to upper class desire for erudition: many texts had an explicit instructive purpose. However, natural history was often a political affair. As Emma Spary writes, the classifications used by naturalists "slipped between the natural world and the social... to establish not only the expertise of the naturalists over the natural, but also the dominance of the natural over the social." The idea of taste (le goût) was a social indicator: to truly be able to categorize nature, one had to have the proper taste, an ability of discretion shared by all members of the upper class. In this way, natural history spread many of the scientific developments of the time but also provided a new source of legitimacy for the dominant class. From this basis, naturalists could then develop their own social ideals based on their scientific works.