Word: naturalists
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...turning up at backwoods settlements, bearded, his pockets bulging, his underclothes gone. The latter he had used up for gun wads. His pockets contained bird skins, sheafs of notes, manuscript. He was the naturalist, John James Audubon, whose grandmanner personality made credentials unnecessary. He had a family down in Kentucky which he supported as best he could in the years when, at one with the wilderness as few men were before or after him, he was "unknown" in the U. S. He took his magnificent work to Edinburgh and was made a member of the Royal Academy. He executed...
...careful account of how Kentuckians, for practice, drove nails and snuffed candles with their bullets; how Daniel Boone "barked" squirrels, hitting the limb under their chins to stun, not mash them. Florida land-boomers may read how Mr. Audubon struggled through primeval subdivisions in a hurricane. The odd naturalist, "Monsieur de T.," slaying bats in his bedroom with Audubon's rare violin, bears witness to backwoods eccentricity and hospitality. Floods, prairies, a great pine swamp, the canebrakes of the Ohio, midwinter moose "yards" in Canada, squatters on the Mississippi, the death of a pirate on the Gulf of Mexico...
...settlers were reminded of Paul Bunyan's "minktums" and "tigermonks." Natural scientists suspected it was a cross between a lynx and a house cat. Nature lovers recalled that Naturalist Henry David Thoreau, in his book Walden mentioned a "winged cat." It was the pet of a farmer-neighbor, d scribed as "dark brownish grey color, with a white spot on her throat, and white feet, and had a large bushy tail like a fox; that in the winter the fur grew thick and flatted out along her sides, forming strips ten or twelve inches long...
Died. Carl Ethan Akeley, 62, explorer, naturalist, sculptor; in the Belgian Congo, of hemorrhage...
...bare outline is sufficient for Author Bradford's purpose: born in 1809 (the same day as Abraham Lincoln), son of a prosperous doctor, he attended Edinburgh and Cambridge Universities, gave up tentative plans for medicine and the clergy, obtained the post of naturalist on the cruiser Beagle, was gone five years observing and exploring, married his cousin (one of the pottery Wedgwoods) in 1839, conceived the principle of evolution of species through natural selection the same year, fathered ten sons and daughters, spent 20 years amassing proof for his hypothesis, published The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent...