the Physiocrats' beliefs were evidence of this, but so too were the first efforts to create an agronomy; then, half way between husbandry and theory, a curiosity with regard to exotic plants and animals, which attempts were made to acclimatize, and of which the great voyages of inquiry or exploration that of Tournefort to the Middle East, for example, or that of Adanson to Senegal brought back descriptions, engravings, and specimens; and then, above all, the ethical valorization of nature, together with the whole of that movement, ambiguous in its principle, by means of which