Word: botanists
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Builder & Botanist. Author Hahn supports the theory that the British Empire was much more a collection of happy accidents (happy for the British) than the resuit of a long-range policy. But, like all previous biographers, she "has .no doubt about the empire-building ambitions of Raffles himself. "[He] saw the [East India] Company ... a part ... of the great divine plan of empire. He never doubted the final Tightness of empire; he merely doubted the Company's interpretation ... of Divinity's intentions. . . . He dreamed of a great British Empire in the Indies, with Java as the center...
...While his fellow nabobs made their fortunes in spices and property, or sank into fatty degeneracy under the stewing sun, Raffles immersed himself in tireless study of his surroundings-establishing a tradition of government research that has made Indonesia one of the best documented areas of the British Empire. Botanist, cartographer, linguist, historian, Raffles tramped the jungles of Sumatra, Java, Batavia-areas wrested from the Dutch by Napoleon and, in turn, taken from the French by the British Navy, Army, and young Raffles. When, after six years of labor, the young clerk thought he had attained his principal ambition...
Irving traveled through the West with two Europeans. Count Albert-Alexandre de Pourtalès, 19, had been sent away from Switzerland to sow his wild oats in some other country. His tutor was Charles Joseph Latrobe, nephew of the architect of the Capitol, a botanist, geologist, musician, artist. With these companions Irving joined a Government expedition bound for Fort Gibson in the Indian Territory (near the present site of Tulsa, Oklahoma). Irving wrote Tour on the Prairies as a result of the trip, after filling five notebooks with his observations. The Western Journals of Washington Irving prints the notebooks...
...increasingly and almost ruinously engaged by intellectual curiosity about the physical world. Leonardo ended by turning from art to science. His very painting was a scientific search-the plants and rocks in the background of the Portrait of Ginevra de' Bend seem to have been executed by a botanist and a geologist. As he began to satisfy himself with technical improvements in such matters as perspective and chiaroscuro, he gradually lost interest in tirt for art's sake...
...Cell Theory (that cells are the basic units of living matter) is commonly supposed to have been formulated first by the German Theodor Schwann in 1839. Actually it had been advanced nearly 200 years earlier, by British Botanist Robert Hooke, and many others preceded Schwann...