Word: linnaeus
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...