Word: naturalist
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...readers like to read about science. Books-about-science by such popularizers as Eddington, Jeans, Russell, Sullivan and Wells are widely read, sometimes even become bestsellers. That books-about-scientists might also have a popular appeal was proved by Paul de Kruif's Microbe Hunters. Last week Author-Naturalist Donald Culross Peattie took a leaf from de Kruif's notebook, published a book on the Great Naturalists, from Aristotle to Fabre. Smart Publisher Schuster wrote the incoherently enthusiastic blurb himself, said he meant every word of it. Excerpt: "The sound of wings is in this book, the murmur...
...years it was almost never out of his mind or off his tongue. The American Museum agreed to provide space if the exhibits were forthcoming. In 1925, hear ing that George Eastman was going to Africa to hunt, the naturalist went to the rich Kodakman and said: "Mr. Eastman, I've got to have $1,000,000." Eastman offered to pay all the expenses of an expedition, to give $100,000 besides for transportation and reconstruction of material. Carl Akeley's dream was beginning to come true. Next year he died of fever in Africa, was buried...
...four years before he saw England again. Besides his job as ship's doctor he had the un-naval post of naturalist, and intended to keep a weather eye out for Mollusca, Acalephae, Cirripedia, epizoa, Radiata and such. He rigged up a home-made tow-net to snare his specimens, soon ran afoul of the navigation officers, who complained that the net slowed the ship's way, took to dumping his catch overboard when his back was turned. As the long voyage wore on, Huxley found that such setbacks, like the difficulty of peering through his microscope...
...left no possible dwelling place for the splendid unicorn, he was reluctantly relegated to the limbo of legend. But there were stories that cattle and other animals had been made to grow a single big horn by cutting their scalps and manipulating their horn buds. In 1827 famed Naturalist Georges Cuvier said that this was impossible, since the horn buds were integral parts of the animal's skull, and the frontal part of the skull was divided by a suture where it would be impossible for transplanted horns to grow...
...cannot be reconciled with the world's madness, is too extreme and implausible to be trusted. Such criticisms the author answers in an epilog, employing the old device of a dialog between the author and one of the characters who objects to his role in the book. A naturalist in philosophy, George Santayana is no naturalistic novelist, concerns himself little with realistic details. Instead, he has attempted to express the "poetic truth," rather than the literal truth about his people...