Exporting French Nature

Abstract In 1819 a monumental collection of natural history was transported from Paris to Edinburgh. In 1820, the manual written by its owner, Louis Dufresne, one of the first to use the term taxidermy, was translated from French into English for the use of museums and travelers in the Anglophone world. Archival research and computational methods make it possible to chart the transportation of the collection and the translation and reception of the manual. This episode in the exportation of a highly refined, perfected, and rulebound version of the natural world gave the French a competitive advantage in the early nineteenth-century transnational market for natural history knowledge and specimens.