Category Archives: More Topics
Baird’s Report to Dickinson College as Curator of Museum (1846)
Baird reported annually to the College on the status of the museum’s growing collection. His 1846 report lists recent acquisitions and looks forward to the day when Baird’s own remarkable bird collection will become part of the Dickinson College museum … Continue reading
Coleridge on Plants and Animals in Anima Poetae
Love, a myrtle wand, is transformed by the Aaron touch of jealousy into a serpent so vast as to swallow up every other stinging woe and make us mourn the exchange. (1) Human happiness, like the aloe, is a flower … Continue reading
Posted in More Topics
Tagged animals, bird, Coleridge, Darwin, gnat, natural history, plants
Leave a comment
Celestial Bodies
Telescopic images taken from Uranography; or, a Description of the Heavens (1844). Reproductions like these were among the first widely circulated images of celestial bodies beyond the earth. They created a sense among educated nonspecialists of the wonder, strangeness, and … Continue reading
Fontana on the Venom of the Viper
The work of Felix Fontana suggests complex connections among topics in Romantic natural history. In 1775, Fontana was appointed first director of the the Museum of Physics and Natural History, now known as the Zoological Museum (La Specola) in Florence. … Continue reading
Mammoths and Mastodons
Giant mastodon skeleton from Godman’s American Natural History (1836). Skeleton of a of mastodon drawn by Titian Peale II in January of 1821. Complete mastodon skeletons were rare, and they became treasures in museums and natural history collections. The Peale … Continue reading
Romantic Rhinos and Victorian Vipers: The Zoo as Nineteenth-Century Spectacle
by Ashton Nichols If you could have seen what it was like when I was a boy–half zoo and half museum, my father let us do anything we wanted. For a while we had a big tree in the … Continue reading
James King Davidson’s Journal
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 … Continue reading
Erasmus Darwin and the Frankenstein “Mistake”
Mary Shelley refers directly to Erasmus Darwin in the “Introduction” to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein. She says: Many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley, to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener. During … Continue reading
Posted in More Topics
Tagged Charles Darwin, Erasmus Darwin, Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Leave a comment
Oliver Goldsmith’s History of the Earth and Animated Nature
Engravings like these posed problems for the theory of separate creation for at least two reasons. They suggested that biological flora and fauna were much more diverse and widespread than had been previously imagined, and they pointed out remarkable similarities … Continue reading
Human taxonomy
While modern taxonomists no longer use Linnaeus’s precise system of classification, they have retained important elements of his bionomial nomenclature. A current taxonomical classification of human beings might look as follows: Kingdom . . . . Animalia Phylum . … Continue reading