Word: linnaeus
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...Gould points out in an excellent catalog essay, the first two volumes of his work Cosmos were seen by their 19th century public as the last word on nature and its origins. Humboldt's ideas were what Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species overthrew. For Humboldt, like Linnaeus before him, saw the natural world as a pyramid of unity, "one great whole animated by the breath of life" -- cooperative within its prodigious variety, with more room for God than allowed by Darwin's harsher scheme of battle and chance variation. The artist must see like a scientist...
...universal, the sobering fact to the examinating myth, required both courage and self-denial," Boorstin praises Herodotus and Thucydides, the pathbreaking Greek historians. He demonstrates such courage and self-denial: The Discoverers is chock-full of particulars and laced with sobering facts. We see how the botanist Linnaeus originated the idea of species by looking at the sex organs of plants (and how he inspired Charles Darwin's grandfather to write lyric poems about plants' amours). We learn how fastidious anatomists preserved for centuries their ignorance about the true form of the human body by relegating the unsavory dissection...
Barrett's statistics and conclusions are bound to stir up debate, but they are, without doubt, the best available estimates, combined with impressively detailed rundowns on most of Christianity's 20,000 subgroups. All this establishes the Anglican missionary as the Linnaeus of religious taxonomy. In fact, the book was so eagerly awaited in church circles that ecclesiastics began to visit Barrett's modest, cluttered offices in Nairobi for years before completion to find out how the numbers were running. A few men of God could not resist the temptation to filch advance copies. Now that...
...Sporting News about a term in horse-racing, or pugilism; or the inventor of the word hooligan ... to the Mayor of Yarmouth about the word bloater in the herring fishery." Once he wrote to the Linnaean Society for help with the word aphis - first used by Linnaeus for green fly; his inquiry made its scholarly rounds until someone in desperation thought to ask the best wordman he knew - Dr. Murray...
...Compleat Naturalist: A Life of Linnaeus by Wilfrid Blunt. 256 pages. Viking. $14.95. The study of 18th century science can be an ennobling exercise. Outstanding men rose to survey and catalogue Nature's radiant data into logical systems. In Sweden, Carl Linne -Linnaeus to the world-collected, named and scientifically organized plants for the first time in history. Wilfrid Blunt's richly decorated biography admirably illustrates how Linnaeus' single mindedness and plodding devotion to stamens and pistils laid the foundation of modern botany...