Word: naturalists
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Lotto liked to inject unexpected naturalist details into religious scenes, but once there, they don't rupture the sacred moment; they enhance it. Thus in his Adoration of the Shepherds, circa 1534, one of the shepherds is showing the baby Christ a lamb, whose head the child grabs at, nearly sticking his thumb in its eye, with infantile curiosity. This looks like the most natural of gestures, but it makes a fluent symbolic point as well, since one is expected to read it as Christ embracing the image of his future self-sacrifice, the Paschal Lamb...
...unfortunate "murder" of rhinos by orphaned elephants (and vice versa) is nothing new. The Roman naturalist Pliny observed that one of the great "antipathies of nature" exists between the rhinoceros and its natural enemy, the elephant. Pliny recounts how the rhinoceros sharpens its horn against a rock and charges the elephant full tilt, aiming "straight at the belly, which he knows to be more tender than the rest." In the 1830s, explorer James Edward Alexander described the following interaction between these two enemies: "When the elephant and the rhinoceros come together and are mutually enraged, the rhinoceros, avoiding the blow...
Emotional intimacy came late to Carson as well. Lear's account delicately suggests that Carson discovered great passion only at 46, and with a married woman at that. Carson poured a lifetime's pent-up feelings into her letters and encounters with Dorothy Freeman, an amateur naturalist and Maine neighbor, who became her "white hyacinth for the soul." The two women recognized that, as Carson wrote, "our brand of 'craziness' would be a little hard for anyone but us to understand." Indeed, as Carson's cancer intensified, Freeman was sufficiently worried about the "implication" of their letters to beg Carson...
When on board H.M.S. Beagle, as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent. These facts seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of species--that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers. On my return home, it occurred to me, in 1837, that something might perhaps be made out on this question by patiently accumulating and reflecting an all sorts of facts which could possibly...
Darwin began as a gentleman naturalist. It was in, and for, the working out of his great idea that he became a specialist in zoology, taxonomy, geology, paleontology, animal breeding, plant breeding, embryology, animal behavior, human behavior, sociology and ecology (a discipline he essentially created). Einstein, too, was guided in his scientific work by a single vision. So was Edward Gibbon, who described the guiding idea of his multivolume historical and literary masterpiece, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in a single short sentence: "I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion." These examples suggest that someone...