- 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
Here is Chief Mouina of the Taeeh tribe (left), drawn by Captain David Porter in his Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean in the Years 1812, 1813, and 1814. Mouina is remarkable, among other things, for the naturalistic ornaments that decorate his battle dress: feathers from man-o-war birds and tropic birds in his hair, a huge war-conch at his waist, bone and ivory ornaments for his ears, and a whale tooth necklace, “the object of the greatest value at this as well as all the other islands of this group” (near the Marquesas). Global explorations from the time of Captain Cook onward were important not only because they introduced the Western world to new modes of human life, but also because of the countless new species of plants and animals that were “discovered,” classified, and transported back to Europe and America as a result of these voyages. Naturalists, whose goal was to record and collect the wide range of flora and fauna that were always encountered in new corners of the globe, accompanied many of these expeditions. Sydney Parkinson (with Captain Cook’s first voyage, 1768-71), Johann and George Forster (on Cook’s second voyage, 1772-75), Ferdinand Bauer (in Australia) and William Bartram (in North America) all contributed scientific observation, personal narratives, and remarkable visual artistry to the emerging discourse of the natural world. Natural history by this time included backyard flower-pressers and parish priests, but it was also practiced by members of journeys of exploration that circled the globe. In fact, it was a 22-year-old “failed” medical student with a stack of notebooks who would board HMS Beagle in 1831 and change humanity’s sense of “nature” forever: Charles Darwin.