Monthly Archives: June 2011

Jennifer Lindbeck, Class of ’98, Dickinson College   Joseph Priestley, best known for his work as a chemist and for his discovery of oxygen, was born on March 13, 1733. He received his early education from Bately Grammar School and … Continue reading →

William Bartram had perhaps as much direct impact on the Romantic poets as any other eighteenth-century naturalist. His influence is evident in works by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Dorothy Wordsworth, Shelley and others. His Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East … Continue reading →

[Left: Rembrandt Peale’s 1805 portrait (copy by Joanna Neroda)]   Thomas Jefferson is not thought of first and foremost as a natural historian, but his Notes on the State of Virginia (1787) proved to be an important source for European and … Continue reading →

William Paley was the originator of the theory now known as “creationism,” the idea that the world as we experience it was created by the Judeo-Christian God in an act of divine fiat, and act which is described in detail … Continue reading →

[N]ature has in favorable times, places, and climates multiplied her first germs of animality, given place to developments of their organizations, [. . .] and increased and diversified their organs. Then [. . ] aided by much time and by a slow but … Continue reading →

Alexander von Humboldt was a natural historian, geographer and explorer who was the first European to travel widely in Central and South America with the intention of describing the flora and fauna of this hitherto unrecorded region. He was also … Continue reading →

Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle.                                 …–Charles Darwin, 1882 Georges … Continue reading →

William Smith is a remarkable figure in the history of natural science because of the significance of his discoveries and the slow pace of the acceptance of his ideas. He is know known as the “Father of English Geology,” yet … Continue reading →

The external world is all-powerful in alteration of the form of organized bodies . . . these [modifications] are inherited, and they influence all the rest of the organization of the animal, because if these modifications lead to injurious effects, … Continue reading →