Introduction

For The Swiss Naturalist Johann Jakob Scheuchzer (1672–1733), the scientific exploration of the Alps was a lifelong obsession. With the exception of the year 1708, he undertook annual four-week research trips to every region of Switzerland between 1702 and 1711. During his excursions, partly funded by the British Royal Society, Scheuchzer amassed a wealth of information about Alpine geology, flora, and fauna. Wherever he went, he conversed with the local population, collected rock and plant samples, measured the elevation of mountains, and took notes on meteorological conditions. His three-volume work Helvetiae Historia Naturalis/Die Natur-Historie des Schweitzerlandes (The Natural History of Switzerland), published between 1716 and 1718 in German, expands on the collected data Scheuchzer had published a decade earlier in the Beschreibung der Natur-Geschichten des Schweitzerlandes (Description of the Natural Histories of Switzerland, 1706–8). Whereas the title Natur-Historie demonstrates an allegiance to the traditional approach of collecting, classifying, and arranging knowledge from past sources as exemplified by Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis historia (Natural History), Scheuchzer augmented his mountain narrative with his own empirical observations of natural phenomena. Through the first half of the eighteenth century, his natural histories garnered wide acclaim from European intellectuals. Together with the later works of other Swiss authors such as Albrecht von Haller’s “Die Alpen” (The Alps, 1729), Salomon Gessner’s Idyllen (Idylls, 1756), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (Julie, or the New Heloise, 1761), they constituted a significant contribution to the enthusiastic reception of the Alpine landscape in the following decades.

For this compendium, we have translated the foreword to the first section, “Ordentliche Beschreibung der Natur-Geschichten des Schweitzerlandes” (A Systematic Description of the Natural Histories of Switzerland), and selections from the second section entitled “Von denen Schweitzerischen Gebirgen” (On the Swiss Mountains), included in the first volume of the Natur-Historie. In order to offer the reader a representative and cohesive overview of this voluminous and at times disjointed text, the translation of the subsections I through XXXVII is based on the selections in Richard Weiss’s 1934 anthology Die Entdeckung der Alpen (The Discovery of the Alps). While twentieth-century critics have dismissed the value of Scheuchzer’s scholarly oeuvre because of his residual adherence to Baroque superstitions—namely, his supposed belief in dragons—the translated excerpts elucidate his pivotal role in early modern mountain discourse.