Category Archives: Contents
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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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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Additional Topics in Romantic Natural History
Amphibious Thinking The Anxiety of Species: Toward a Romantic Natural History Defining “Life”and “Death” Global Exploration and New Forms of Nature Erasmus Darwin and the Frankenstein Mistake Extinction as Metaphor The Frog-Fish of Surinam Geologist-Poets and Poet-Geologists Human “Monsters” and … Continue reading
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Tagged animals, literature, natural history, plants, science
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The Loves of Plants and Animals: Romantic Science and the Pleasures of Nature
[first published in “Romanticism and Ecology,” Romantic Circles Praxis Series (November 2001) [O]ur intellectual sympathies [rest] with . . . the miseries, or with the joys, of our fellow creatures. – Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia (1794) When Wordsworth notes his faith … Continue reading
The Anxiety of Species: Toward a Romantic Natural History
[first published in The Wordsworth Circle 28:3 (1997): 130-36] We sometimes think that the concept of mutable species burst on the world like a thunderclap with the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. So great was Darwin’s own … Continue reading
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Tagged Blake, Charles Darwin, ecology, Erasmus Darwin, natural history, poetry, Romanticism, Shelley
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Backgrounds: From Aristotle to Erasmus Darwin
For the ancients, mythology suggested powerful interconnections among the natural, the human, and the imaginary. Gods were like humans, humans were like animals, animals were like plants, plants were like humans, and vice versa. Spontaneous generation, parthenogenesis by fire, impregnation … Continue reading
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Tagged Aristotle, astronomy, Charles Darwin, Erasmus Darwin, myth, poetry, science
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Why a “Romantic” Natural History?
“Nature’s vast frame, the web of human things, Birth and the Grave, that are not as they were” (Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Alastor”, 1816: ll. 719-20) We often assume that Charles Darwin announced a new era in the scientific understanding of … Continue reading
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