- Contents
- Why a “Romantic” Natural History?
- Backgrounds: From Aristotle to Erasmus Darwin
- The Anxiety of Species: Toward a Romantic Natural History
- The Loves of Plants and Animals: Romantic Science and the Pleasures of Nature
- Additional Topics in Romantic Natural History
- Darwin’s Evolution: A New Gallery of Images
- A Romantic Natural History Timeline: 1750-1859
- Natural Historians
- Spencer F. Baird
- Henry David Thoreau
- Charles Darwin
- Louis Agassiz
- John D. Godman
- Adam Sedgwick
- Geoffray St. Hilaire
- William Smith
- Georges Cuvier
- Alexander von Humboldt
- Benjamin Rush
- Jean Lamarck
- William Paley
- Thomas Jefferson
- William Bartram
- Joseph Priestley
- Erasmus Darwin
- Oliver Goldsmith
- Gilbert White
- George-Louis Buffon
- Carolus Linnaeus
- Literary Figures
- Letitia Landon
- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
- John Keats
- John Clare
- Felicia Hemans
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
- Lord Byron
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- William Wordsworth
- Ann Radcliffe
- Robert Burns
- William Blake
- Charlotte Smith
- Anna Laetitia Barbauld
- William Cowper
- Thomas Warton
- Christopher Smart
- Thomas Gray
- Thomas Beddoes
- James Thomson
- Alfred Lord Tennyson
- Robert Browning
- John Dyer
- Topics
- Temple of Nature (1803)
- Dorothy Wordsworth
- Fossils
- Geologist Poets
- Rhinos, Crocs and other Monsters
- Global Exploration
- Amphibious Thinking
- Poetry Lab with Dr. Frankenstein
- Galvani’s Electric Romanticism
- Frog Fish from Surinam
- Boundary between Plant and Animal
- Mimosa: The Sensitive Plant
- The Venus Fly Trap and the Great Chain of Being
- Humans as a species of Animal
- Monkeys, Men and Apes
- Jardine’s Natural History of Monkeys
- Human Monsters and Reproductive Mysteries
- Human Taxonomy
- Goldsmith’s History of Earth and Animated Nature
- Erasmus Darwin and the Frankenstein Mistake
- James King Davidson’s Journal
- Zoos as a 19th Century Spectacle
- Mammoths and Mastodons
- Fontana on the Venom of the Viper
- Celestial Bodies
- Coleridge on Plants and Animals
- Baird Report as Curator of Museum
- Artists & Illustrators
- Bibliography
- Tags
Amphibians, like those at left from Goldsmith‘s Animated Nature proved particularly ambiguous to naturalists and the general public. Here were creatures that reproduced from eggs and milt, but then grew through several remarkably various stages: some tadpoles into water dwelling-frogs, other tadpoles into land-dwelling toads, strange gilled-creatures that sometimes lost their gills and sometimes did not, salamanders that could regrow entire limbs and tails if they were cut off. The Surinam toad (middle left) had young that gestated in the tiny pockets on the mother’s back, after the eggs were pushed in by the male, and then they emerged like so many terrifying alien parasites. Galvani used frogs for his early experiments with animal “electricity.” The terrors of dead frog legs twitching would eventually emerge in Dr. Frankenstein’s shuddering, nameless monster. It has become clear in recent decades that amphibians are among the most important of the canaries-in-the-mine, so-called “warning” species whose delicate constitutions indicate when specific environments–or precise Darwinian niches–are in danger, either from toxins in the system (chemical, atmospheric, genetic) or from pressures (population, ecosystem balances) that had never been understood prior to the development of modern ecological biology. When frogs start to show up with extra legs, or salamanders with no eyes or no tails, it is clear that something is wrong in a living system that can otherwise appear healthy. Amphibians are also important because their regenerative capacities–they can regrow entire limbs down to the fingers–hold promise for research into developmental biology higher up the evolutionary scale (homo sapiens, for example).