Tag Archives: animals
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
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Tagged animals, bird, Coleridge, Darwin, gnat, natural history, plants
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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
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
Human “monsters” and reproductive mysteries
We often forget how recently humans have understood the basics of their own biological origins. Well into the nineteenth century, confusion abounded about the connection between human reproductiuon and other forms of animal reproduction, as well as the roles played … Continue reading
Humans as a Species of Animal
The complex issue of human races, and the relationship of the human race to the rest of the animal kingdom, was one of the most hotly contested topics in the history of natural history. Monogenesis claimed that all human beings … Continue reading
The Venus Fly-trap and the Great Chain of Being
The Venus fly-trap caused serious problems for the traditional theory of the Great Chain of Being. The idea of the Great Chain suggested that all of creation was arranged in a rigidly hierarchical system, with God at the top and … Continue reading
Polypus (hydra) and the boundary between plant and animal
The polypus, or hydra, generated much comment among natural historians because of its apparent existence on the boundary between plant and animal species, because of its unique reproductive behavior, and because of the forms of “sensation” it seemed to manifest. … Continue reading
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