| In the Preface to A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), Samuel Johnson promises to include all “whole processes” of natural philosophy that he deems “pleasing or useful” in English books (B2V). A study of complete selections of quotations from five of Johnson's early Earth science sources, Thomas Burnet's Sacred Theory of the Earth (1690/91), John Woodward's Essay toward a Natural History of the Earth and Terrestrial Bodies (1695), Sir Matthew Hale's Primitive Origination of Mankind (1677), Nehemiah Grew's Cosmologia Sacra (1701) and John Keill's An Examination of Dr. Burnet's Theory of the Earth (1698), gathered using Anne McDermott's 1997 edition of the Dictionary on CD-Rom, reveals that Johnson carefully selected “whole processes” of natural philosophy. These quotations, arranged into complete word lists and located in original sources, have original wording and punctuation restored, illuminating Johnson's editing practices. Internal evidence allows determination of editions used by Johnson where no marked copy of the source exists.; These sources are all physico-theological arguments, a fruitful mode of reasoning for early science that relies on the truth of Scripture as confirmed by observations in Nature.; Johnson includes major late seventeenth-century theories of the Earth's origin and chronology, the Deluge and repopulation, maintaining a multiplicity of ideas about Earth history and processes. Johnson also selects quotations illuminating the character, education and practice of the natural philosopher, and the pleasures of the natural philosophic life.; Johnson's selections are thorough and deliberate throughout, not random in content. Johnson's quotations are not “mutilated” as he feared, but dispersed throughout the bulk of his two-volume folio work (Preface B2V). The early Earth science quotations in Johnson's Dictionary validate the physico-theological argument, representing an important stage in investigation that begins to reassign value to traditional sources of knowledge and authority and to incorporate observation, reason, discovery and experiment. |
