Tag Archives: exploration
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
Mimosa
Percy Shelley’s poem “The Sensitive Plant” is based on a natural history specimen, a member of the mimosa family. In Shelley’s poem the plant is personified in a powerfully anthropomorphic way: A Sensitive Plant in a garden grew, And the … Continue reading