“I first make a plan of what I am going to write,and then take from the note cabinet what I can use.”60

In his manuscript, Harrison spoke of machina with respect to his filing cabinet and named his invention ‘Ark of Studies’. In rhetorical culture, ‘ark’ had been a metaphor that, among many others, denoted the virtual store-house that orators stocked with vivid images of memorable topics (res) and words (verba). In Harrison’s manuscript, ‘ark’ instead became a synonym for ‘mechanical’ memory. In turn, in the distinction between natural and artificial memory, consciousness was compelled to leave its place and to shift to the op-posing side.

With respect to the Ark of Studies, for example, Johann Benedict Metzler did not use gratifying words; yet he nonetheless recommended numbering the hooks (aciculas) to which the paper slips should be attached and recording the matching of number and heading in a subject index. In this way, Metzler noted, scholars would not be compelled to leave empty spaces between entries and to recalibrate the entire content any time a new entry (a new commonplace) should be added.65

From 1676 onward, he follows an excerpting practice that directly refers to Jungius (via one of his students). Regarding Leibniz ’ s Excerpt Cabinet He wrote on slips of paper whatever occurred to him — in part when perusing books, in part during meditation or travel or out on walks — yet he did not let the paper slips (particularly the excerpts) cover each other in a mess; it was his habit to sort through them every now and then.

It seems, however, that he did add an innovative twist to the commonplace arcaconceptwhen he coupled the tradition with the spatial arrangement of plants in his botanical garden

Within this tradition, a loculuswas a ‘small place’ –physical or mental – and this most likely explains why Linnaeus used the term.71Furthermore,when referring to the space inhabited by one class in the cabinet, he used the word loculamentum,which meant ‘the lesser of the small places’. Each loculamentumwas signified by the numeric headthat denoted the botanical class of the contents.

For several examples of how commonplacing gave rise to filing systems during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,see Malcolm, ‘Thomas Harrison and his “Ark of Studies”’.

Although it is difficult at present to know the precise impact of such filing systems, it is clear thatLinnaeus’s design mirrored the ways in which he arranged heads in his notes and books. The inte-rior space of his cabinet was divided into two open-faced columns, which meant that it was a phys-ical instantiation of a bilateral table.

Figure 10. ‘Pharmacopoea”, frontispiece in Carolus Linnaeus, Materia Medica(1749). Wellcome Library,London.

Lauren-tius Normann (Lars Norman), the professor of logic and metaphysics at the University ofUppsala, used a kind of commonplace cabinet a full three decades before Linnaeus matriculatedthere as a student.

Like the spatial hierarchies presented in the Philosophia botanica, he wanted asimple form of linear order that allowed him to access his sheets quickly. Such a desire led himto reject the spatial divisions featured in many contemporary curiosity and medical cabinets, thatis, closed drawers that were stacked in multiple columns. This rejection was probably linked tothe fact that he had already seen a better way forward in the form of filing systems that werephysical instantiations of commonplace divisions used so often in books.