- 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
James King Davidson was a senior at Dickinson College in 1829. Born in Franklin County, Pennsylvania, in 1810, he went on to receive his M.D. from the Jefferson Medical College. A notebook of his, now part of Dickinson College’s Special Collections, is a remarkable record of the “natural” knowledge expected of an undergraduate in the early nineteenth century. Included in it are many of his own hand-sketched drawings of flowers and plants, notes on world and natural history, as well as numerous observations on astronomy, geology, geography, and phrenology. He even records recent developments in animal “electricity” (below).

Anthemis cotula (Wild Chamomile or May Weed)
A selection from Davidson’s notes on natural history:
It is well known that some plants are luminous; and also that parts of plants in an incipient state of decomposition shine more or less. Potatoes kept in cellars in a growing state and therefore useless as food sometimes become so luminous that we can read by them the print of a book in the dark. The dictamus albansspreads around it, in dry summer evenings, an atmosphere which on the approach of a [taper?] inflames with a bright blue flame. Other plants give out a sparkling light probably of an electrical nature.
Extract from the National Gazette of April 12, 1825 quoted by Davidson:
“A new theory for explaining muscular powers has been recently advanced in Europe by Dr. Prevant and Mr. Dumas. It has excited considerable attention on the Continent and is built on the newly discovered laws of electric magnetic attraction. The conclusion to which these physiologists have been led by their observations and experiments is, that muscular contractions are the result of an attraction between the nervous filaments distributed to the muscle fibres, consequent on the transmission of currents of electricity through these nervous filaments–“