VII. On the Scelidothere (Scelidotherium leptocephalum, Owen)

1857 ◽  
Vol 147 ◽  
pp. 101-110 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
British Museum ◽  
The Other ◽  
Extinct Species ◽  
Northern Patagonia ◽  
History Of ◽  
Peculiar Character ◽  
Osseous System

The extinct species of large terrestrial Sloth, indicated by the above name, was first made known by portions of its fossil skeleton discovered by Charles Darwin, Esq., F. R. S., at Punta Alta, Northern Patagonia, which were described by me in the chapters of the Appendix to the ‘Natural History of the Voyage of H. M. S. Beagle,’ treating of the “Fossil Mammalia” collected during that voyage. The subsequent acquisition by the British Museum of the collection of Fossil Mammalia brought from the pleistocene beds, Buenos Ayres, by M. Bravard, has given further evidence of the generic distinction of the Scelidothere from the other Gravigrades of the Bruta phylophaga , and has supplied important characters of the osseous system, and especially of the skull, which the fragments from the hard consolidated gravel of Punta Alta did not afford. The best portion of the cranium from the latter locality wanted the facial part anterior to the orbit, and the greater part of the upper walls; sufficient, however, remained to indicate the peculiar character of its slender proportions, and hence the name leptocephalum proposed for the species.

scholarly journals I. On the scelidothere ( scelidotherium, leptocephalum , Owen), a large extinct terrestrial sloth

1857 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 312-314
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
British Museum ◽  
Extinct Species ◽  
Northern Patagonia ◽  
History Of ◽  
Osseous System

The extinct species of large terrestrial Sloth, indicated by the above name, was first made known by portions of its fossil skeleton having been discovered by Charles Darwin, Esq., F. R. S., at Punta Alta, Northern Patagonia. These portions were described by the author in the Appendix to the 'Natural History of the Voyage of H. M. S. Beagle'. The subsequent acquisition by the British Museum of the collection of Fossil Mammalia brought from Buenos Ayres by M. Bravard, has given further evidence of the generic distinction of the Scelidothere, and has supplied important characters of the osseous system, and especially of the skull, which the fragments from the hard consolidated gravel of Punta Alta did not afford.

INTRODUCTION: WHY VICTORIAN NATURAL HISTORY?

2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 539-549 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara T. Gates
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
British Museum ◽  
The Other ◽  
Mary Kingsley ◽  
Charles Lyell ◽  
Gender Barriers ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Joseph Hooker

VICTORIANS WERE IN LOVE WITHnatural history. David Allen describes their passion as a series of crazes – over geology, over shells, and over ferns, as in pteridomania (mania over ferns) – to cite just a very few examples. Lynn Merrill, on the other hand, delineates a more comprehensive, cultural romance, one extending over many years. Whatever we choose to call this love, we are still in the process of discovering just how deep and lasting it was. Like many love affairs, it was marked at first by a blush enthusiasm and fascination with otherness. This was followed by curiosity and a rage to risk self in the quest to know more about the other – and sometimes, as a result, by ridiculous missteps. Think of George Eliot and George Henry Lewes sloshing around at the seashore, ill-equipped but determined to find out enough to write about what they were trying to capture and study. Or recall Mary Kingsley out in Africa in a canoe propelled by several Congolese, tumbling out of the boat but saving her trusted copy of Albert Günther's 1880Introduction to the Study of Fishes, tenacious in her desire to bring back labeled specimens to the British Museum of Natural history. Earlier, in a similarly resolute quest to record birdlife, John and Elizabeth Gould globe-trotted to the extent that they put Elizabeth's life and their growing family at risk. And people like explorer/naturalist Thomas Bowdich died of fever for their fervor over natural history, in Bowdich's case as he worked to detail facts about specimens in Porto Santo, off the coast of West Africa. Bowdich left a wife to fend for herself and their family via her own study of natural history, and one result was Sara Bowdich Lee's beautifully illustratedFresh-Water Fishes of Great Britain(1828). The romance with nature certainly cut across class and gender barriers. Stonecutter Hugh Miller could lose himself as easily in geological pursuits as could Charles Darwin or Sir Charles Lyell and Marianne North's passion for plants may well have matched or exceeded that of Kew's famous botanist, Sir Joseph Hooker.

scholarly journals I. The Croonian Lecture.—On the theory of the vertebrate skull

1859 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 381-457 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Biological Science ◽  
The Other ◽  
Small Space ◽  
Half Century ◽  
Organic Structure ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Articles Of Faith ◽  
The Mind

The necessity of discussing so great a subject as the Theory of the Vertebrate Skull in the small space of time allotted by custom to a lecture, has its advantages as well as its drawbacks. As, on the present occasion, I shall suffer greatly from the disadvantages of the limitation, I will, with your permission, avail myself to the uttermost of its benefits. It will be necessary for me to assume much that I would rather demonstrate, to suppose known much that I would rather set forth and explain at length; but on the other hand, I may consider myself excused from entering largely either into the history of the subject, or into lengthy and controversial criticisms upon the views which are, or have been, held by others. The biological science of the last half-century is honourably distinguished from that of preceding epochs, by the constantly increasing prominence of the idea, that a community of plan is discernible amidst the manifold diversities of organic structure. That there is nothing really aberrant in nature; that the most widely different organisms are connected by a hidden bond; that an apparently new and isolated structure will prove, when its characters are thoroughly sifted, to be only a modification of something which existed before,—are propositions which are gradually assuming the position of articles of faith in the mind of the investigators of animated nature, and are directly, or by implication, admitted among the axioms of natural history.

scholarly journals Observations upon the Natural History of Epidemic Diarrhoea

1910 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 602-777 ◽  
Author(s):  
O. H. Peters
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Special Interest ◽  
Health Department ◽  
The Other ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Town ◽  
Made In

The following observations upon the Natural History of Epidemic Diarrhoea were made in Mansfield during the summer and autumn of 1908. The fact that at the time the writer was engaged in preparing a paper—to which the present paper is to some extent complementary—upon the epidemiological relations of season and disease, lent special interest to the enquiries regularly made from the Health Department of this town into the circumstances attending fatal attacks of diarrhoea. Early in the season a more than usually extensive enquiry was made into one of these fatal attacks in an area where an outbreak of diarrhoea appeared to be spreading outwards from a group of old privy-middens. To test how far the condemnation of the latter was justifiable another area was taken on the other side of the town, where the houses were newly built and provided exclusively with water-closets; and records, collected by house-to-house visitation, were obtained of all cases of epidemic diarrhoea, whether non-fatal or otherwise, occurring in these localities. The enquiries thus begun were afterwards extended so as to embrace two fairly large districts, a chance of doing this being provided by the opportune postponement of the addition to the department of certain work of inspection which had been impending at the beginning of the summer. These districts were several times revisited and scattered observations were also made throughout the other parts of the town. During 1909, while there was no opportunity of making extended observations, there were valuable opportunities during the course of the routine inspections of the summer of testing and re-testing the principal results obtained during 1908.

Emerson's Atom and the Matter of Suffering

2009 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-47
Author(s):  
Mark Noble
Keyword(s):  
Field Theory ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Classical Field Theory ◽  
Classical Field ◽  
The Other ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Solid Bodies ◽  
Lines Of Force

This essay argues that Ralph Waldo Emerson's interest in the cutting-edge science of his generation helps to shape his understanding of persons as fluid expressions of power rather than solid bodies. In his 1872 "Natural History of Intellect," Emerson correlates the constitution of the individual mind with the tenets of Michael Faraday's classical field theory. For Faraday, experimenting with electromagnetism reveals that the atom is a node or point on a network, and that all matter is really the arrangement of energetic lines of force. This atomic model offers Emerson a technology for envisioning a materialized subjectivity that both unravels personal identity and grants access to impersonal power. On the one hand, adopting Faraday's field theory resonates with many of the affirmative philosophical and ethical claims central to Emerson's early essays. On the other hand, however, distributing the properties of Faraday's atoms onto the properties of the person also entails moments in which materialized subjects encounter their own partiality, limitation, and suffering. I suggest that Emerson represents these aspects of experience in terms that are deliberately discrepant from his conception of universal power. He presumes that if every experience boils down to the same lines of force, then the particular can be trivialized with respect to the general. As a consequence, Emerson must insulate his philosophical assertions from contamination by our most poignant experiences of limitation. The essay concludes by distinguishing Emersonian "Necessity" from Friedrich Nietzsche's similar conception of amor fati, which routes the affirmation of fate directly through suffering.

scholarly journals XX. Discovery of the metamorphosis in the second type of the cirripedes, viz. the lepades, completing the natural history of these singular animals, and confirming their affinity with the crustacea

1835 ◽  
Vol 125 ◽  
pp. 355-358 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Sea Water ◽  
The Other ◽  
External Appearance ◽  
The Real ◽  
Real Nature ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
The Waves

The Fourth Memoir, published in my Zoological Researches and Illustrations, No. III. page 69, &c., having first made known the real nature of the Cirripedes , the key of which remained concealed in their metamorphosis, it might have been expected that some naturalist favourably situated to investigate the oceanic tribe of these animals, would have been the first to make the same discovery in regard to these, and thereby complete their natural history. It was scarcely to be expected that the honour of this discovery also should be reserved for the author, fixed to one spot, where none of them naturally exist, and are but casually thrown upon our shores by the waves of the Atlantic, attached to pieces of wreck, or brought into port fixed to the bottoms of ships returning from distant voyages. Fortunately, however, two ships of this description came into this harbour (Cork), one from the Mediterranean, the other from North America, which, not being sheathed with copper, had their bot­toms literally covered with Barnacles of the three genera of Lepas , Cineras , and Otion ; and having persons employed expressly for the purpose, numbers of these were brought alive in sea water, amongst which were many with the ova in various stages of their progress, and some ready to hatch, which they eventually did in prodigious numbers, so as to enable him to add the proof of their being, like the Balani, natatory Crusta­cea in their first stage , but of a totally different facies and structure; a circumstance which determines the propriety of the separation of the Cirripedes into two tribes, and evinces the sagacity of Mr. MacLeay in being the first to indicate that these two tribes, the Balani and Lepades , were not so closely related as generally supposed. The larvæ of the Balani , described in Memoir IV. under the external appearance of the bivalve Monoculi ( Astracoda ), have a pair of pedunculated eyes, more numerous and more completely developed members, approximating to those of Cyclops , and of the perfect Triton ; while, in the present type, or Lepades , the larva resembles some­what that of the Cyclops , which Müller, mistaking for a perfect animal, named Amymone , and which can be shown to he common to a great many of the Entomostraca ; or the resemblance is still more striking to that of the Argulus Armiger of Latreille, which, in fact, is but an Amymone furnished with a tricuspidate shield at the back.

scholarly journals Natural history of the lizard Enyalius brasiliensis (Lesson, 1828) (Leiosauridae) from an Atlantic Forest of southeastern Brazil

2004 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 353-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Van Sluys ◽  
V. M. Ferreira ◽  
C. F. D. Rocha
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Atlantic Forest ◽  
The Other ◽  
Southeastern Brazil ◽  
Important Food ◽  
Insect Larvae ◽  
Lizard Species ◽  
Food Items ◽  
History Of ◽  
Forest Leaf Litter

Information on the ecology of lizard species from the Brazilian Atlantic Forest is scarce and almost nothing is known about the ecology of lizards of the genus Enyalius. In this study, we provide information about some aspects of the natural history of E. brasiliensis from an area of Atlantic Forest in Ilha Grande, RJ. Enyalius brasiliensis (N = 15) feeds mainly on arthropods. The most frequent food items were insect larvae, orthopterans, and ants; in terms of volume, larvae and termites were the most important food items; ants and termites were the most numerous prey categories. Two females were reproductive (one had 10 and the other, five vitellogenic follicles); the smallest measured 92.4 mm in SVL. Seven lizards were found on forest leaf litter. The other microhabitats used were vines, fallen logs, branches, and a crevice on a slope.

The Legacy of the ‘Edinburgh Lamarckians’

2019 ◽  
pp. 156-195
Author(s):  
Bill Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Medical Student ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

The penultimate chapter looks at the longer-term impact of the efflorescence of evolutionary speculation in early-nineteenth-century Edinburgh on later generations of natural historians. First it examines the evangelical reaction against progressive models of the history of life and its role in the eclipse of the ‘Edinburgh Lamarckians.’ Next it examines to the evolutionary theory proposed by Robert Chambers in his anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) to assess its possible debt to the Edinburgh transformists of the 1820s and 1830s. Finally it turns to the important question of the possible influence of the ‘Edinburgh Lamarckians’ on Charles Darwin during his time as a medical student in Edinburgh in the years 1825 to 1827, during which period he rubbed shoulders with many of the key proponents of evolutionary ideas in the city.

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