Monthly Archives: June 2011
In the Poetry Lab with Dr. Frankenstein
Science and literature. They don’t have anything to do with each other, do they. Science: that’s heavyweight; that’s for rationalists, clear thinkers with a graphing calculator and the scientific method. Literature: that’s lightweight; that’s for idealists, romantic dreamers with stars … Continue reading
Amphibious Thinking
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, … Continue reading
Global Exploration and New Forms of Nature
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 … Continue reading
Rhinoceroses, Elephants, Crocodiles and other “Monsters”
Rhinoceroses caused a stir when they were exhibited in Europe and America. The menagerie in the Tower of London closed in 1834, but English monarchs had been collecting a wide variety of wild animals since the Middle Ages. By the … Continue reading
Geologist-Poets
Once the hammers of geologists began turning up startlingly clear fossils like the one shown here, it became much harder for scientists, naturalists, and the general public to sustain the idea of a neatly organized creation that had popped up … Continue reading
Reconciling the Fossil Record
These images taken from Heck’s Iconographic Encyclopedia (1851) reveal precisely how the fossil record by mid-century led naturalists and the general public to imagine prehistoric life. A fantastic, almost surreal, image of primordial seas in the center of this illustration–full of aquatic … Continue reading
Dorothy Wordsworth
Dorothy Wordsworth (1751-1855) was an engaged and engaging naturalist in her own right. Here she describes the spring flowers that would become the subject for perhaps her brother William‘s most famous poem: “When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow … Continue reading
Temple of Nature (1803)
Frontispiece from Erasmus Darwin’s The Temple of Nature (1803). The image suggests the goddess of poetry pulling aside the veil to reveal the many-breasted Artemis of Ephesus, goddess of wild nature. Anthropologists have recently claimed that Artemis’s chest was … Continue reading
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Tagged Erasmus Darwin, evolution, poetry, science
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Darwin’s Evolution: A New Gallery of Images
Darwin’s Evolution: Image Gallery Introduction: From Aristotle to Erasmus Darwin . . . Pliny the Elder died on Vesuvius (N.I.H.) Darwin’s Fly-trap (Botanic Garden, 1794, author copy) I. The Natural Historians: Linnaeus, Merian, Buffon, Cuvier, Catesby, … Continue reading
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Tagged Charles Darwin, imagery
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A Romantic Natural History Timeline: 1750-1859
1750: Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”; Johann Tobias Mayer, Map of the Moon 1751: Linnaeus, Philosophia Botanica 1752: Thomas Chatterton b. (d.1770); Benjamin Franklin invents lightning conductor 1753: Linnaeus, Species Plantorum; charter granted to British Museum 1755: … Continue reading
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Tagged natural history, poetry, prose, Romanticism, science
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