Natural Historians Research Articles

‘A Constant Prodigy?’ Empirical Views of an Unordinary Nature

PRODIGY - From the Latin 'prodigium, (i.e. contra Naturam)'1. 'A thing (generally) that comes to pass beyond the Altitude of man's imagination, and begets in him a miraculous contemplation, yea oftentimes horror and amazement...'2. 'A thing monstrous, marvellous, wonderful, and against the common current, or course of Nature; a sight unusual.'1'The land of England hath for these many years been accounted the Land of Wonders', an anonymous author declared in 1662.2 Indeed, numerous strange and unusual events had been reported in the preceding years. In 1646, a ball of sulfurous fire fell in Cambridgeshire, consuming an acre of grain. In 1659 hundreds claimed to see a black coffin flying between Leicester and Nottingham, while in 1661 came a report of the discovery of the body of a giant in Derbyshire whose skull held at least a bushel.3 Although Protestant England officially had no miracles, it was still a land of wonders and prodigies.4 A prodigy was an unusual event which 'deflects and declines from' what Francis Bacon had called the 'usual course' of nature.5 Celestial phenomena such as comets, eclipses and rainbows could all be prodigious, as could terrestrial events such as floods, hauntings and monstrous births. Prodigies generally divided into two varieties. Signal prodigies could be natural (earthquakes, meteors), preternatural (lightning strikes, apparitions) or supernatural (verging on miracles). Penal prodigies were judgments upon particular people or nations (plagues, military defeats) which could invite speculation and partisan interpretation.6 Because prodigies neither constituted everyday occurrences, nor necessarily required divine intervention, they held an uneasy and shifting middle ground between the mundane and the miraculous. Prodigies became a dilemma for both British science and crown after the Restoration as they threatened to overturn the new order imposed by recent religious and political settlements. These unnatural phenomena both defied efforts at organization by natural historians and offered the potential for radical political interpretation to challenge the status quo. Efforts to constrain the revolutionary possibilities of prodigies engaged the scientific and political realms in an attempt to bring regularity and stability to both worlds. Rather than naturalizing prodigies in order to neutralize their political power, seventeenth-century empiricism incorporated the study of prodigies into natural philosophy, viewing nature itself as potentially prodigious.The history of studying prodigies went back at least to Roman times, when historians like Suetonius believed such signs and portents forecast the fate of Caesars.7 In seventeenth-century England, it was still common to interpret prodigies as omens of the future, often foretelling disaster or expressing divine disapproval. Puritans especially held that prodigies were the 'immediate demonstrations and fore-runners of Gods high indignation'.8 The chaotic period from 1640 to 1660 was especially fertile ground for unusual sightings.9 Thus the beginning of the civil wars, the execution of Charles I and the death of Oliver Cromwell were all supposedly predicted by prodigies.10 In this tense climate such curiosities could also take on political significance. During the Interregnum, Royalists had seen portentous signs condemning regicide and heralding the return of the monarchy.11 After the Restoration returned Charles II to the throne, defeated republicans looked to these same prodigies for signs of God's disfavour with the new regime.12In the summer of 1660, just weeks after Charles II returned from the continent, an anonymous tract recorded the appearance of a plague of frogs in Gloucestershire. Some radicals quickly seized upon a portent with such obvious biblical precedents as an indication of God's disapproval of the new 'pharaoh'.13 Subsequently, sectarians in London began publishing accounts of other prodigious occurrences and interpreting them as omens for the future. …

Deep time travel

When I read Trewin’s introduction I was intrigued by the story line of time travelling in a bus to study prehistory. It brought to mind the book I used to read to my daughter: The Magic School Bus in the Time of the Dinosaurs by Joanna Cole (1995). After the first few pages it was evident that Trewin has written a book that will very much appeal to the adult reader. He has taken his favourite Scottish fossil localities, built a picture of each landscape and environment at the time the fossils were alive, and brought us on a fact-filled adventure to prehistoric Scotland. We discover the delights of collecting at these classic fossil localities, and are entertained by the sounds, smells and feel of the living fossils from the Devonian to the Jurassic. This book will appeal to the same audience that enjoy Hugh Miller, the famous nineteenth century natural history writer and populariser of palaeontology who wrote The Old Red Sandstone; or,New Walks in an Old Field (1841). Sir Roderick Impey Murchison – the director general of the British Geological Survey in the mid nineteenth century - wrote that Miller’s book “to a beginner, is worth a thousand didactic treatises”. I believe that the same is true of Trewin’s book. Trewin bases his knowledge on facts extracted from publications dating back over 150 years as well as his own researches into the Rhynie Chert, Devonian fishes, as well as Carboniferous, Permian, and Jurassic fossils and palaeoenvironments. It is also apt that Miller and Trewin were both inspired by the fishes of the Devonian Period of the north of Scotland in their pursuit of palaeontological understanding.

‘An aid to mental health’: natural history, alienists and therapeutics in Victorian Scotland

In the nineteenth century natural history was widely regarded as a rational and ‘distracting’ pursuit that countered the ill-effects, physical and mental, of urban life. This familiar argument was not only made by members of naturalists’ societies but was also borrowed and adapted by alienists concerned with the moral treatment of the insane. This paper examines the work of five long-serving superintendents in Victorian Scotland and uncovers the connections made between an interest in natural history and the management of mental disease. In addition to recovering a significant influence on the conduct of several alienists the paper explores arguments made outside the asylum walls in favour of natural history as an aid to mental health. Investigating the promotion of natural history as a therapeutic recreation in Scotland and elsewhere reveals more fully the moral and cultural significance attached to natural history pursuits in the nineteenth century.

The Significance of Temminck’s Work on Biogeography: Early Nineteenth Century Natural History in Leiden, The Netherlands

C.J. Temminck, director of the Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie (now the National Museum of Natural History in Leiden) and a renowned ornithologist, gained his contemporary's respect thanks to the description of many new species and to his detailed monographs on birds. He also published a small number of works on biogeography describing the fauna of the Dutch colonies in South East Asia and Japan. These works are remarkable for two reasons. First, in them Temminck accurately described the species composition of poorly explored regions, like the Sunda Islands and Japan. Secondly, he formulated a new law on the geographical distribution of animals around the globe, based on the parallels he observed between the fauna from Europe, Asia and Japan. The underlying ideas that lead Temminck to this law were the type-concept, which he understood as the ideal morphological plan behind animal form, the unchanging character of the species and a strong belief in nature's divine design. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the type- and the species-concept, the origin and fixity of the species and the meaning of variations aroused heated discussions. When put in the context of his time, Temminck emerges as a scientist whose work was driven by the dominating scientific philosophy of the time in which he lived, under the influence of late eighteenth century natural history and of French empiricists, in particular, the great zoologist and paleontologist Georges Cuvier. Temminck's detailed descriptions of the Dutch East Indian fauna helped the great naturalists after him to understand nature's patterns and to propose comprehensive theories that explain its diversity.

Big Bone Lick: the cradle of American paleontology

On March 7, 1808, President Thomas Jefferson received a long-awaited shipment of approximately 300 fossils from William Clark, who had just completed his westward expedition with Meriwether Lewis. The fossils were unearthed at Big Bone Lick in northern Kentucky, and over the years they had gained the interest of such prominent figures as Daniel Boone, George Washington, and Benjamin Franklin. Jefferson's receipt of the fossils was the realization of more than twenty years of the philosopherstatesman's interest in the site and its natural treasures. Big Bone Lick: The Cradle of American Paleontology recounts the rich history of the fossil site that gave the world the first evidence of the extinction of several mammalian species, including the American mastodon. Big Bone Lick has played many roles: nutrient source, hallowed ground, salt mine, health spa, and a trove of archaeological riches and paleontological wonders. Natural historian Stanley Hedeen presents a comprehensive and accessible narrative of Big Bone Lick from its geological formation forward, explaining why the site attracted first animals, then Native peoples of the region, European explorers and scientists, and eventually American pioneers and presidents. Big Bone Lick is a history of both a place and a scientific discipline: it explores the infancy and adolescence of paleontology from its humble and sometimes humorous beginnings. Hedeen combines elements of history, geology, politics, and biology to make Big Bone Lick an entertaining story as well as a valuable historical resource.

The Evolution of Evolutionary Thinking in Chile

The scientific study of evolution in Chile has experienced periods of diversification and stasis, depending upon the social and political context at different times. In the eighteenth century, most of the natural history research consisted of systematics and taxonomy and, as in most of South America, this task was performed mainly by natural historian theologists. Later, the immigration of European scientists to Chile after independence from Spain in 1810 improved substantially its knowledge of the local biota and stimulated the diversification of naturalists in the country. Research in modern biology and the teaching of genetics in Chile can be traced back to Giovanni Noe, an Italian zoologist who had a profound impact in the first third of the twentieth century. In the 1960s–70s, Danko Brncic, a population geneticist educated in the tradition of Dobzhansky and the modern synthesis, led the most important diversification process in the study of evolutionary biology in the country. However, the military coup in 1973 brought this radiation to a sudden stop and produced a stasis period associated with the subsequent 17-year dictatorship. Evolutionary biology recovered its status after the re-establishment of democracy, and it is currently experiencing an exciting and renewed diversification period that has led to the foundation of the Chilean Society of Evolutionary Biology, the only scientific society for the study of evolution in Latin America. One of the missions of the Society is to bridge the gap between scientists and science educators in order to improve the teaching of evolution at different levels both in secular and religious schools. Even though the Roman Catholic Church has been a pivotal institution in the development of Chilean society, debate on evolutionism—creationism issues has been largely absent both in public and academic discussions. The influence of religion on science education has been sporadic, and mostly related to omission rather than tergiversation of scientific information in biology textbooks. Currently, schools are obliged by law to teach the basics of evolution in K-12 and K-16 levels (or their local equivalents). Because of this, there is little at present that suggests an organized creationist or intelligent design movement surge in the near future. Nevertheless, the high percentage of religiosity in Chile, together with the observation that the moral values of Chilean society are among the most conservative in the world, provide good reasons to remain vigilant.

Remodeling the nation: the architecture of American identity, 1776-1858

In this interdisciplinary study, Faherty argues that throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Americans conceptualized their still unsettled political and social states through metaphors of home building. During this period, a pervasive concern with the design and furnishing of houses helped writers to manage previous encounters with settlements, both native and European, and to imagine and remodel a new national ideal. By aligning the period's architectural concerns (registered in both the interior and exterior of houses) with concurrent debates about the need to create a national identity in the wake of the American Revolution, Faherty registers how representations of the were a crucial locus for debating broadly shared concerns about the anxieties of nation building.Topics include Abraham Lincoln's use of architectural motifs in his 1858 senatorial campaign (the house divided against itself speech); the arguments about domestic identity embodied in the designs of Mount Vernon and Monticello; the lingering import of colonial and indigenous settlements on post-revolutionary culture as registered in the work of William Bartram and Lewis and Clark; Charles Brockden Brown's representations of the multivalent legacies of Pennsylvania's architectural landscapes; Washington Irving's attempts to preserve and remodel national architectural and literary practices by underscoring the manufactured nature of European cultural production; the shifting importance of the and American attitudes toward nature in the work of three generations of the Cooper family; and the gendering of domestic space in the work of Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. Richly informed by contemporary work in literary studies, history, art history, and cultural criticism, Remodeling the Nation ranges incisively across the work of political theorists, social critics, novelists, poets, natural historians, landscape artists, travel writers, and authors of architectural and domestic treatises.

Voyages, Encounters, and Agency in Oceania: Captain Cook and Indigenous People

AbstractBeginning with a brief historiographic survey of the prolific literature on European voyages of exploration in Oceania, in particular those of James Cook, this article considers how embodied encounters helped shape the written and visual representations of indigenous Oceanian people by Cook and his naturalists and artists in New Holland (Australia), the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) and Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania). I treat encounters as situated and permeable: not as a generalised clash of incommensurate cultures but as ambiguous intersections of multiple personal agencies, both indigenous and foreign. This approach suggests an indirect liaison between particular local actors and the expanding stock of empirical information provided by travellers and drawn on by metropolitan natural historians to illustrate their deductions about mankind. I suggest that voyagers’ representations of Oceanian people should be read not merely as reflections of received knowledge derived from dominant metropolitan discourses or literary and artistic conventions but also as personal productions generated in the flux, stress, high emotion and uncertainty of meetings with actual people in the vulnerable settings of voyages under sail. Such representations were often significantly, if obliquely affected by local agency.

Early twentieth-century collection of extinct mammals from northern Siberia: the provenance of Bassett Digby's contributions to the Natural History Museum, London, and the British Museum

The origin of the biggest of two relatively rare woolly rhinoceros horns in the collections of the Natural History Museum, London, was a mystery despite its extensive use in education. The aged label had dropped off. In 2003, research on natural historian, traveller, author and foreign correspondent Bassett Digby led to the re-attachment of the yellowed label with small spidery writing that provides the horn's serial number, collector's name and geographical origin. This paper connects provenance to this sparse information. The provenance also applies to other Siberian items Digby supplied: a tusk from an immature mammoth, tusk fragments of various colours, botanical specimens, and ethnological artefacts.

The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750–1900 (review)

Reviewed by: The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750–1900 Eran Shalev (bio) The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750–1900. By Caroline Winterer. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007. Pp. 264. Illustrations. Cloth, $35.00.) Caroline Winterer lucidly and skillfully expounds the various forms and patterns that American feminine classicism took between 1750 and 1900 and shows how the roles that the classical world played in women's public and private lives changed over that century and a half. She demonstrates how feminine classicism in America evolved during that seminal period in two large parallel arcs: from a disposition to Roman republicanism to an interest in Greek democracy (thereby closely following the general trend of masculine American neoclassicism), and from a mode (however limited) of political participation during the revolutionary period to a language of reclusive, internal self-perfection and cultivation by the late nineteenth century. One wonders why we have waited so long for a book on feminine classicism, since we have witnessed over the past few decades notable contributions to our understanding of the classics' role in early America, from Reinhold Meyer's Classica Americana (1984), to Carl Richard's The Founders and the Classics (1994), and Winterer's earlier book, The Culture of Classicism (2002). We learned from those seminal studies about the various timings and forms in which classical antiquity affected early Americans, and the processes whereby it lost its grip as a leading paradigm in the intellectual life of the United States. The picture that Winterer now provides us in The Mirror of Antiquity deeply enriches current understanding as we can no longer see the discourse of and through the worlds of Greece and Rome in America as merely political, public, or masculine, or as an exclusively elite, white, and male endeavor. Winterer demonstrates in a remarkable and nuanced monograph how colonial, revolutionary, early republic, antebellum, and Gilded-Age American women, each in their own distinct and ingenious ways, operated through and made use of this long-gone world in ever-changing circumstances. Classical antiquity has dominated Western minds ever since the [End Page 154] collapse of the Roman Empire, especially since the revival of classical wisdom and learning in the era we have come to call the Renaissance. Subsequently, the ancients were present in the New World since the Discovery by setting scientific and intellectual benchmarks and providing moral and political support to diverse Europeans, from conquistadores to missionaries, from natural historians to imperial administrators. But until now we have understood this fascinating intellectual cosmos largely as a men's world. Early American historians have documented how jurists, politicians, artists, and polemicists operated seamlessly in an antiquarian culture that preferred the public to the private, the civic to the domestic. No more. Winterer demonstrates how through a variety of discourses, from the political to material consumption and aesthetic preferences and literary inclinations, women gained entry into this masculine sphere and made their presence noticed. She observes, "women, no less than men, were responsible for America's spectacular resurrection of classical antiquity during the period of nation formation" (2). Winterer begins her analysis at mid-eighteenth century, which she and other historians have identified as a time of increasing popularity, accessibility, and penetration of the classics. The context of this dramatic popularization was the rising prosperity, commercialism, and aspirations for gentility across a broad swath of Americans; these processes were closely linked to the powerful current that historian Jack Greene described as cultural convergence, reinforced by Timothy Breen's recent identification of a new consumer culture during the late eighteenth century.1 New cultural aspirations supported by the proliferation of print and the expansion of the public sphere exposed numerous middling Americans across the colonies to mores and spheres of knowledge traditionally out of their cultural reach. Among those areas was the world of antiquity, and the new beneficiaries were elite colonial women who "began in growing numbers to immerse themselves in the wondrous literary and material vestiges of classical antiquity" (12). Generally excluded from institutionalized learning and barred from professional or public roles, "they found other means by which to avail themselves of classical learning...

In the Blast Zone: Catastrophe and Renewal on Mount St. Helens by Charles Goodrich, Kathleen Dean Moore, Frederick J. Swanson

Brophy: a broad PacificNorthwest beach and an endless sea subsume a band of Indianswho are slaughteringawhale, allwhile a two-masted American vessel and a steamship loom in the background, auguring inevitableeconomic and cultural transformations. William Lang argues in "An Insatiable Hunger: The Consuming Myth of theNorth west" thatBrophy's paintings forceus toboth stand in awe of the abundance of the region and to de-mythologize it and acknowledge the impact of human capriciousness. "Wealth came from the guts of the earth,"hewrites? an unsustainable situation that irrevocably changed the land (p. 46). But Lang also tells us thatwhat Northwesterners do most now is consume,not produce, which isfittingbecause they now must confront the consequences of theirdesires. Brophy, too, sees thisparadoxical situation as itunfolds and presents ittous on a canvas inprovocative and intriguingfashion. Andrew P. Duffin Western Kentucky University in scientificunderstanding. Yet what can we learn of thehuman dimension? thepsycho logical, social, and philosophical relationships between people and landscapes experiencing violent natural disturbances? This is theques tion explored by the collected essays of In the Blast Zone. The book emerged from a 2005 camping tripon theflanks ofMount St.Helens, coor dinated by Oregon State University's Spring Creek Project for Ideas,Nature, and the Writ ten Word. The tripbrought together a diverse collection of scientists, philosophers, poets, natural historians, and novelists to explore the blast zone and reflecton theirobservations of, and reactions to,thedramatically changed and recovering landscape. The participants,which included over twentyprominent writers and scientists,thencomposed brief essaysor poems now collected in thebook. A key theme is exploring themeaning behind words such as disaster, recovery, catastrophe, renewal, and destruction. Ques tions raised by the authors include: What significance do such terms carry in an ever changing landscape? In an ecosystem thatnot only responds to,but inmany ways thrives upon, violent change? Are these termspurely human constructs,and ifso,what does thistell us about ourselves?Many differentresponses to these questions are offered in the book. The authors' observations of the blast zone, for example, show that natural ecosystems are surprisingly resilient towhat we consider to be cataclysm and that the post-eruption ecosystem is equally, or even more, diverse and productive as theforestitsupplanted. Kathleen Dean Moore reflects, "Here on the volcano, I no longer understand the differencebetween destruction and creation" (p. 25). The essays offer impressive depth given their brevity. They go beyond the relatively simple ? but powerful ? story of natural resilience, exploring the volcano's effecton notions of human attachment to landscape, perceptions of lifeand death, how we relate to IN THE BLASTZONE: CATASTROPHE AND RENEWAL ON MOUNT ST.HELENS editedbyCharlesGoodrich,KathleenDean Moore, and Frederick J.Swanson Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2008. Illustrations, maps, bibliography. 128pages. $15.95 paper. The 1980 eruption ofMount St.Helens made international headlines for its violence, its stark transformation of a forest landscape, and itsdirect impact on human life, A historic event such as this is rare in a human lifetime ? rare even among generations ? and may profoundly impactour thinkingabout natural processes and the landscape inwhich we live. The volcano's blast zone has been a vast natural laboratory forscientistsstudying the workings of an ecosystem seemingly resetto"zero;" these studies have led to paradigm-busting leaps Reviews 633 theecosystems onwhich we depend, and ulti mately our place in theuniverse. The descrip tivewritings reflect the conflicting thoughts one must disentangle when experiencing the blast zone, from "returning to a bombed-out house," to "a landscape of great complexity and richness ... with extraordinary levels of biological diversity" (Christine Colasurdo, p. 78; Jerry Franklin p. 67). For thisreason, Iwas compelled to put the book down after each chapter toallowmyself time toabsorb the ideas contained within. Even though the smooth prose lends to a fast read, one would do well to read thisbook inpieces. It should be noted that this isnot a book providing a detailed blow-by-blow account of the eruption itself,save for a short primer in the introduction.Readers seeking information (_j?veyour special event a place in history at the Oregon jjistorica! CJodetul 3 Located in the heart of Portland's cultural district, the Oregon Historical Society offers two indoor and two outdoor venues capable of accommodating a varietyof special events. The...

2007 American Society of Naturalists Awards

2007 American Society of Naturalists Awards

Questioning Thunderstones and Arrowheads: The Problem of Recognizing and Interpreting Stone Artifacts in the Seventeenth Century

AbstractFlint arrowheads, spearheads, and axe heads made by prehistoric Europeans were generally considered before the eighteenth century to be a naturally produced stone that formed in storm clouds and fell with lightning. These stones were called ceraunia, or thunderstones, and it was not until the sixteenth century that their status as a natural phenomenon was challenged. During the seventeenth century natural historians and antiquaries began to suggest that these ceraunia were not thunderstones but ancient human artifacts. I argue that natural history museums, European contact with the stone-tool using peoples in the New World, and the close relationship between natural history and antiquarianism were critical to this reinterpretation of ceraunia. Once these objects were recognized to be ancient artifacts they could be used to investigate the earliest periods of human history from sources other than texts.

Anthony Molho, Diogo Ramada Curto, and Niki Koniordos, eds. Finding Europe: Discourses on Margins, Communities, Images ca. 13th–ca. 18th Centuries. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007. x + 407 pp. index. illus. $89.95. ISBN: 978–1–84545–20807.

Anthony Molho, Diogo Ramada Curto, and Niki Koniordos, eds. Finding Europe: Discourses on Margins, Communities, Images ca. 13th–ca. 18th Centuries. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007. x + 407 pp. index. illus. $89.95. ISBN: 978–1–84545–20807. - Volume 61 Issue 3

Thoroughly Post-Victorian, Pre-Modern Beatrix

Thoroughly Post-Victorian, Pre-Modern Beatrix Katherine R. Chandler (bio) Beatrix Potter's first "little book," The Tale of Peter Rabbit, was initially printed in 1901, the year Queen Victoria died. Victorian literary conventions were still in evidence at the turn of the century, and qualities in Potter's work derive from the Victorian culture in which she was immersed for the first half of her life. Such conventions evident in her tales contribute to her works' distinctive quality. There is, especially to us, a nineteenth-century quaintness to her children's tales, and since her books present a comparatively muted quality, contemporary readers often perceive of Potter's tales as merely charming stories for nursery children. With the tales' old-fashioned characteristics so apparent, readers may not think to agree with Humphrey Carpenter's assertion that Potter "belongs to the modern age rather than the Victorian" (296). Of course, Potter's prose is not wholly modern in style, nor does it dramatize disaffection, decadence, or despair, nor are her narrative techniques as radically experimental as is stream of consciousness. Yet Carpenter's conclusion is worth testing because Potter's contribution to the development of modern literature remains, for the most part, unacknowledged. When comparing her little books with the revolutionary ideas and styles of literature that began to appear around World War I, we find that, in numerous ways, Potter's unobtrusive, seemingly non-revolutionary children's books are texts that quietly challenge Victorian mores and literary styles. They are, actually, harbingers of modernism. Since Ezra Pound's most famous manifesto of modernism includes the charge to "make it new," Potter's "newness" must be highlighted—a quality she herself did not trumpet. Features in Beatrix Potter's little books do anticipate [End Page 287] what, during her lifetime, emerged as "modernism"; however, since her divergence from Victorian literary conventions are subtle, and they appear in a genre that is not considered "radical," they are less noticeable than reactions against Victorianism by contemporaries like Pound or subsequentmodernists like James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, or other writers of modernist literature for adults. Potter accomplished her "revolution" in genre, illustration, form, and prose much as Lewis Carroll did: quietly (Eaton 194). Indeed, part of the appeal and uniqueness of Beatrix Potter's little books is the merging of the Victorian with the modern. In one sense, this amalgamation contributes to the modernity of her works through the irony of rejecting traditional rhetoric and values via a seemingly traditional, utterly innocuous façade. The "new" quality of Potter's books primarily lay in the fact that they spoke directly to children and granted young readers an opportunity to explore their world and resist the confines of strict obedience. Her tales exhibit features that anticipate directions many writers of the modern era would, with great intensity, explore. Potter accomplishes this in multiple ways: she modifies genre, liberates highly wrought illustration from fussiness, simplifies book format, hones writing to sparse precision, celebrates anti-heroes, fashions ironic narrators, surprises with unconventional conclusions, and rejects cultural values of the Victorian age. Potter's appealing artwork is the feature that first draws readers into her stories and demonstrates a lingering influence of the nineteenth century. True to her Victorian naturalist leanings, Potter depicts her animals' physical characteristics accurately rather than as stylized creations, evoking the nineteenth-century enthusiasm for natural history. Even combining the realistic with the imaginative—accurately depicted rabbits wearing jackets—does not radically break with the previous century's literary or visual trends in children's literature. Potter's interest in the natural world extended far beyond the governess-overseen lessons she received in her family's third-floor nursery during the final quarter of the Victorian era; as we now know, Potter studied fungi seriously enough to be considered a mycologist in terms of her depth of understanding and original research. While her scientific studies were quashed in the 1890s by male experts of the royal academies, botanical gardens, and natural history societies, her artwork's fidelity to precise representation of the living world remained. "Her characters are entirely animal," Nicholas Tucker states, "as befits a skilled natural historian, both in their...

Elbroch, M.2006. Animal Skulls. A Guide to North American Species. Stackpole Books, Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, 727 pp. ISBN 978-0-8117-3309-0, price (paper), $44.95

M. Elbroch 2006. Animal Skulls. A Guide to North American Species. Stackpole Books, Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, 727 pp. ISBN 978-0-8117-3309-0, price (paper), $44.95. This book, authored by the intrepid natural historian and master wildlife tracker, Mark Elbroch, is a celebration of the vertebrate skull. As emphasized in the Introduction to this attractive and well-crafted book, the human mind—encased in its own protective skull—is endlessly fascinated by the skulls of fellow vertebrates. Although we may not understand why, the allure of animal skulls is very real, and this book feeds the human desire to know more about them. Animal Skulls is a unique reference and identification guide to skulls of 275 vertebrate species of North America. The book is extremely well illustrated with 1,434 black-and-white drawings and 123 color photographs. Some of the photographs are especially creative, including the cougar ( Puma concolor ) photo on page 42 superimposed with a semitransparent image of its skull. Topics in Animal Skulls are presented in a logical order. The Introduction includes a section entitled Importance of Collections , which is a powerful statement on the vital role of collections as repositories for biodiversity. The Bones of the Skull (Chapter 1) provides skull vocabulary, reference diagrams of skulls, and defines standard measurements used by scientists to describe the skull. The beautifully illustrated skulls and careful use of color to identify particular bones make this chapter especially useful to the lay naturalist. Chapter 2 focuses sequentially on teeth, jaws, the senses (as interpreted from cranial morphology), skull variation, and ways to determine age and sex of the skull's owner. Chapter 3 ( Tracking Across the Surface of Animal Skulls ) provides an unusual …

Franz Boas: cultural history for the present, or obsolete natural history?

Recently, some neo‐Boasian anthropologists have portrayed Boas as an anthropologist with a deep sense of history, of the individual, and of agency. Focusing on Boas's ethnographic practice rather than his theoretical and programmatic statements, I first find an ‘atomistic’ (opposite of holistic) ethnographer, and a deep convergence between this atomism and Linnaean‐type natural history. In Foucault and Jacob's interpretation of natural history, this means studying socio‐cultural phenomena through their external manifestations, and removes historicity, and even individual cultures, from Boas's ethnography. Reviewing possible counter‐evidence from the holistic Boas (his work on style, meaning, the ‘genius of a people,’ texts, secondary explanations, and psychology), I retrieve the same natural historian, and the same atomism. All these facets of his practice thus appear as surface manifestations of this underlying épistémè, which provides a single interpretative framework making it possible to integrate most of his ethnographic work. Overall, this worldview leaves little, or no, room for individuals and their agency.

John C. Avise — Recipient of 2006 Molecular Ecology Prize

John C. Avise — Recipient of 2006 Molecular Ecology Prize

The nature of Paleolithic art

cave paintings and other preserved remnants of Paleolithic peoples shed light on a world little known to us, one so deeply embedded in time that information about it seems unrecoverable. While art historians have wrestled with these images and objects, very few scientists have weighed in on Paleolithic art as artifacts of a complex, living society. R. Dale Guthrie is one of the first to do so, and his monumental volume The Nature of Paleolithic Art is a landmark study that will change the shape of our understanding of these marvelous images. With a natural historian's keen eye for observation, and as one who has spent a lifetime using bones and other excavated materials to piece together past human behavior and environments, Guthrie demonstrates that Paleolithic art is a mode of expression we can comprehend to a remarkable degree and that the perspective of natural history is integral to that comprehension. He employs a mix of ethology, evolutionary biology, and human universals to access these distant cultures and their art and artifacts. Guthrie uses innovative forensic techniques to reveal new information; estimating, for example, the ages and sexes of some of the artists, he establishes that Paleolithic art was not just the creation of male shamans. With more than 3,000 images, The Nature of Paleolithic Art offers the most comprehensive representation of Paleolithic art ever published and a radical (and controversial) new way of interpreting it. variety and content of these images most of which have never been available or easily accessible to nonspecialists or even researchers will astonish you. This wonderfully written work of natural history, of observation and evidence, tells the great story of our deepest past.

The value of evidence about past abundance: marine fauna of the Gulf of California through the eyes of 16th to 19th century travellers

AbstractEyewitness accounts written by early travellers to ‘the new worlds’ provide valuable insights into how seascapes once looked. Although this kind of information has been widely used to chart human impacts on terrestrial ecosystems, it has been greatly overlooked in the marine realm. Here we present a synthesis of 16th to 19th century travellers’ descriptions of the Gulf of California and its marine wildlife. The diaries written by conquerors, pirates, missionaries and naturalists described a place in which whales were ‘innumerable,’ turtles were ‘covering the sea’ and large fish were so abundant that they could be taken by hand. Beds of pearl oysters that are described had disappeared by 1940 and only historical documents reveal the existence of large, widespread, deep pearl oyster reefs, whose ecology and past functions we know little about. Disqualifying the testimonies of early visitors to a region as ‘anecdotal’ is dangerous; it may lead to setting inappropriate management targets that could lead to the extinction of species that are rare today but were once much more abundant. Moreover, it represents unfair historical judgement on the work of early natural historians, scholars and scientists. We suggest that the review and analytical synthesis of reports made by early travellers should become part of the pre‐requisites for deciding how to manage marine ecosystems today.