- 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
We often forget how recently humans have understood the basics of their own biological origins. Well into the nineteenth century, confusion abounded about the connection between human reproductiuon and other forms of animal reproduction, as well as the roles played by both parents in the origins of new individuals. Since Gregor Mendel’s genetic researches were not available to the scientific community until around 1900, even Charles Darwin had to admit only the fuzziest sense of how acquired characteristics might be passed on from parent to offspring. In addition, “monsters” and “freaks of nature” posed serious problems for any religious belief or scientific theory that demanded rigid consistency on the part of the natural system. Bird fanciers knew that pigeons could occasionally produce two-headed offspring, and horse breeders saw a few foals born with an extra leg, but the appearance o
f humans with confusing racial characteristics, much less conjoined twins or other developmental anomalies, caused fear and anxiety about the “souls” or the “purpose” of such beings. Few people wanted to believe that humans came into existence in the same way as chickens or lizards; even fewer wanted to admit that the process of “soul-making” was partly “genetic.” As a result, strange theories abounded: “freaks” were seen as divine punishment for the sins of the fathers (or mothers); the mother’s (or father’s) state of mind at the moment of conception was said to determine the sex or the personality of the child; mysterious “liquors” were described mixing in mysterious ways with a human egg, human homunculi (fully formed sperm creatures), or combinations of matter and “spirit” to produce a new human animal.