Jupiter Botanicus
Title | Jupiter Botanicus PDF eBook |
Author | D. J. Mabberley |
Publisher | |
Pages | 514 |
Release | 1985 |
Genre | Science |
ISBN |
Clandestine Marriage
Title | Clandestine Marriage PDF eBook |
Author | Theresa M. Kelley |
Publisher | JHU Press |
Pages | 397 |
Release | 2012-11-15 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1421407604 |
Botany in the romantic era played a role in debates about life, nature, and knowledge, as evidenced in this ambitious, beautifully illustrated study. Winner, 2012 British Society for Literature and Science Book Prize Romanticism was a cultural and intellectual movement characterized by discovery, revolution, and the poetic as well as by the philosophical relationship between people and nature. Botany sits at the intersection where romantic scientific and literary discourses meet. Clandestine Marriage explores the meaning and methods of how plants were represented and reproduced in scientific, literary, artistic, and material cultures of the period. Theresa M. Kelley synthesizes romantic debates about taxonomy and morphology, the contemporary interest in books and magazines devoted to plant study and images, and writings by such authors as Mary Wollstonecraft and Anna Letitia Barbauld. Period botanical paintings of flowers are reproduced in vibrant color, bringing her argument and the romantics' passion for plants to life. In addition to exploring botanic thought and practice in the context of British romanticism, Kelley also looks to the German philosophical traditions of Kant, Hegel, and Goethe and to Charles Darwin’s reflections on orchids and plant pollination. Her interdisciplinary approach allows a deeper understanding of a time when exploration of the natural world was a culture-wide enchantment.
Jupiter Botanicus in the Bush
Title | Jupiter Botanicus in the Bush PDF eBook |
Author | Thomas George Vallance |
Publisher | |
Pages | 38 |
Release | 1990 |
Genre | |
ISBN |
Nature's Government
Title | Nature's Government PDF eBook |
Author | Richard Drayton |
Publisher | Yale University Press |
Pages | 388 |
Release | 2000-01-01 |
Genre | Science |
ISBN | 9780300059762 |
This daring attempt to juxtapose the histories of Britain, western science, and imperialism shows how colonial expansion, from the age of Alexander the Great to the 20th century, led to complex kinds of knowledge.
Imperial Nature
Title | Imperial Nature PDF eBook |
Author | Jim Endersby |
Publisher | University of Chicago Press |
Pages | 442 |
Release | 2020-05-21 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 022677399X |
Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817–1911) was an internationally renowned botanist, a close friend and early supporter of Charles Darwin, and one of the first—and most successful—British men of science to become a full-time professional. He was also, Jim Endersby argues, the perfect embodiment of Victorian science. A vivid picture of the complex interrelationships of scientific work and scientific ideas, Imperial Nature gracefully uses one individual’s career to illustrate the changing world of science in the Victorian era. By analyzing Hooker’s career, Endersby offers vivid insights into the everyday activities of nineteenth-century naturalists, considering matters as diverse as botanical illustration and microscopy, classification, and specimen transportation and storage, to reveal what they actually did, how they earned a living, and what drove their scientific theories. What emerges is a rare glimpse of Victorian scientific practices in action. By focusing on science’s material practices and one of its foremost practitioners, Endersby ably links concerns about empire, professionalism, and philosophical practices to the forging of a nineteenth-century scientific identity.
Middle World
Title | Middle World PDF eBook |
Author | M. Haw |
Publisher | Springer |
Pages | 203 |
Release | 2016-10-03 |
Genre | Science |
ISBN | 0230552315 |
Between the microscopic world of quarks and atoms, and the macroscopic (observable) one of pebbles and planets, there is another world, strangely neglected by science. It is inhabited by things like pollen, DNA and viruses. Physicist Mark Haw tells the story of how scientists finally saw the restless middle world, having ignored it for so long.
The Language of Mineralogy
Title | The Language of Mineralogy PDF eBook |
Author | Matthew D. Eddy |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 220 |
Release | 2016-12-05 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1351887149 |
Classification is an important part of science, yet the specific methods used to construct Enlightenment systems of natural history have proven to be the bête noir of studies of eighteenth-century culture. One reason that systematic classification has received so little attention is that natural history was an extremely diverse subject which appealed to a wide range of practitioners, including wealthy patrons, professionals, and educators. In order to show how the classification practices of a defined institutional setting enabled naturalists to create systems of natural history, this book focuses on developments at Edinburgh's medical school, one of Europe's leading medical programs. In particular, it concentrates on one of Scotland's most influential Enlightenment naturalists, Rev Dr John Walker, the professor of natural history at the school from 1779 to 1803. Walker was a traveller, cleric, author and advisor to extremely powerful aristocratic and government patrons, as well as teacher to hundreds of students, some of whom would go on to become influential industrialists, scientists, physicians and politicians. This book explains how Walker used his networks of patrons and early training in chemistry to become an eighteenth-century naturalist. Walker's mineralogy was based firmly in chemistry, an approach common in Edinburgh's medical school, but a connection that has been generally overlooked in the history of British geology. By explicitly connecting eighteenth-century geology to the chemistry being taught in medical settings, this book offers a dynamic new interpretation of the nascent earth sciences as they were practiced in Enlightenment Britain. Because of Walker's influence on his many students, the book also provides a unique insight into how many of Britain's leading Regency and Victorian intellectuals were taught to think about the composition and structure of the material world.