Whence Orycteropus? The correct authorship and date for the generic name of the aardvark (Mammalia, Tubulidentata, Orycteropodidae)

Bionomina ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
NEAL WOODMAN

All else being equal, the principle of priority in zoological taxonomic nomenclature gives precedence to the earliest name for a particular taxon. Determining the origin of some late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century taxonomic names, however, can be vexing, particularly when the history of a name was never completely documented in contemporary synonymies. The authorship and date for Orycteropus Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, 1796: 102, the genus-group name for the African aardvark, Orycteropus afer (Pallas, 1766), has been variously ascribed to at least four authors other than É. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Using digitally imaged publications now available in a variety of internet-accessible libraries, I traced the comprehensive history of the name and show how and, to some extent, why its origin became obscured. É. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire’s original description was re-published twice, most likely to make the description more widely available. Rather than reinforce his authorship for the name, however, the surprising consequence of the multiple publications was to cast doubt on it.

2002 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-328 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Gilmartin

Conservative movements have generally played a negative role in accounts of the history of political expression in Britain during the period of the French Revolution. Where E. P. Thompson and others on the Left tended to identify radicalism with the disenfranchised and with a struggle for the rights of free expression and public assembly, conservative activists have been associated with state campaigns of political repression and legal interference. Indeed, conservatism in this period is typically conceived in negative terms, as antiradicalism or counterrevolution. If this has been the view of hostile commentators, it is consistent with a more sympathetic mythology that sees nothing novel about the conservative principles that emerged in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. They represent an establishment response to alien challenges. Even where conservatives set about mobilizing the resources of print, opinion, and assembly in a constructive fashion, the reputation for interference has endured. John Reeves's Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers is a useful case in point, since it managed in its brief but enterprising history to combine fierce anti-Jacobinism with the later eighteenth century's rising tide of voluntary civic activism. The association came together at the Crown and Anchor Tavern when a group of self-professed “private men” decided “to form ourselves into an Association” and announced their intentions through the major London newspapers in November and December of 1792. The original committee then called on others “to make similar exertions in their respective neighbourhoods,” forming energetic local associations that would be linked by regular correspondence with the central London committee. In this way, the loyalist movement grew with astonishing speed.


2021 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-269
Author(s):  
Waïl S. Hassan

Abstract According to a well-known narrative, the concept of Weltliteratur and its academic correlative, the discipline of comparative literature, originated in Germany and France in the early nineteenth century, influenced by the spread of scientism and nationalism. But there is another genesis story that begins in the late eighteenth century in Spain and Italy, countries with histories entangled with the Arab presence in Europe during the medieval period. Emphasizing the role of Arabic in the formation of European literatures, Juan Andrés wrote the first comparative history of “all literature,” before the concepts of Weltliteratur and comparative literature gained currency. The divergence of the two genesis stories is the result of competing geopolitical interests, which determine which literatures enter into the sphere of comparison, on what terms, within which paradigms, and under what ideological and discursive conditions.


1990 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Majeed

This paper is about the emergence of new political idioms in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain, and how this was closely involved with the complexities of British imperial experience in India. In particular, I shall concentrate on the radical rhetoric of Utilitarianism expressed by Jeremy Bentham, and especially by James Mill. This rhetoric was an attack on the revitalized conservatism of the early nineteenth century, which had emerged in response to the threat of the French revolution; but the arena for the struggle between this conservatism and Utilitarianism increasingly became defined in relation to a set of conflicting attitudes towards British involvement in India. These new political languages also involved the formulation of aesthetic attitudes, which were an important component of British views on India. I shall try to show how these attitudes, or what we might call the politics of the imagination, had a lot to do with the defining of cultural identities, with which both political languages were preoccupied.


2014 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
SEAN DYDE

AbstractThis article examines the history of two fields of enquiry in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scotland: the rise and fall of the common sense school of philosophy and phrenology as presented in the works of George Combe. Although many previous historians have construed these histories as separate, indeed sometimes incommensurate, I propose that their paths were intertwined to a greater extent than has previously been given credit. The philosophy of common sense was a response to problems raised by Enlightenment thinkers, particularly David Hume, and spurred a theory of the mind and its mode of study. In order to succeed, or even to be considered a rival of these established understandings, phrenologists adapted their arguments for the sake of engaging in philosophical dispute. I argue that this debate contributed to the relative success of these groups: phrenology as a well-known historical subject, common sense now largely forgotten. Moreover, this history seeks to question the place of phrenology within the sciences of mind in nineteenth-century Britain.


2019 ◽  
pp. 23-46
Author(s):  
Michelle Burnham

This chapter reviews the publication history of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century genre of Pacific travel narratives, and examines its narrative features. During this period, ships moved with increasing regularity on incredibly risky voyages between the world’s oceans. At the same time, novels came to dominate the literary world of fiction. These developments are related by their shared narrative dynamics, especially in the relationship between narrative suspense and numerical speculation, between words and numbers. The short-term risks and losses that attended these voyages were offset by their long-term profits, as the pleasure of accumulation concealed but also depended on the horrors of violence.


Author(s):  
Katie Barclay

Begging letters provide a rich source for historians of the poor, who have used them to explore their lives, constructions of identity, and regional variation in charitable giving. The rhetoric of benevolence and gratitude that pervades them, however, has often been dismissed as ‘inauthentic’ or as interfering with our access to the words of the poor. This chapter explores how Scottish beggars used the language of gratitude in their letters to patrons, contributing to both a history of letter-writing and masculinity amongst the poor. It highlights the way that an emotional-charitable language placed patron and client in a hierarchical social relationship that brought benefits to both parties. It argues that, rather than being an unmanly act, begging could provide space for poor or subordinate men to articulate their masculine identities within a society where social hierarchies were normal and understood as key to social order.


Author(s):  
Kathleen Davis ◽  
Nadia R. Altschul

This chapter investigates the intersections of British medievalism and colonialism in two very different places in the world: early nineteenth-century Chile, as Britain exercised economic domination over parts of the former Spanish Empire (thus it will be termed neocolonial); and late eighteenth-century India, as British officials devised strategies for extracting revenue from Bengal. Despite their many differences, in both cases an area beyond Europe is defined as Moorish and its present is associated with Europe’s past, specifically with the centuries now termed ‘medieval’. In both cases, too, medievalization forwards the economic interests at the basis of this temporal discourse, which is also fully enmeshed in the history of Orientalism. These similarities demonstrate the value of studying the under-examined effects of British medievalism beyond the familiar national frameworks, and, more broadly, underscore the importance of investigating the global dimensions of temporalizing phenomena.


1975 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 703-724 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivon Asquith

The thirty years during which James Perry owned and edited the Morning Chronicle, the leading Whig daily newspaper, were marked by important developments in the history of the press. In the early nineteenth century there was a notable growth in the spirit of political independence among newspaper proprietors, and they developed the classical liberal roles of the press: die impartial dissemination of news and the expression of public opinion. Professional editors and reporters came to replace the old all-rounders like William Woodfall who had combined the tasks of printing, editing and reporting; and individual proprietors supplanted the unenterprising ownership of syndicates. There was a rapid expansion in the number of daily evening and of Sunday papers and, though the number of daily morning papers remained fairly stable, dieir circulation increased steadily after about 1800. A well-conducted newspaper could serve, not simply as a side-product of a printer's or bookseller's business, or as an advertising medium for its proprietors' interests, but as a lucrative business venture in its own right. There was an extraordinary rise in the capital value of successful newspapers: the Morning Chronicle and the Morning Post, which were bought for a few hundred pounds each in die 1790s, were sold for £42,000 and £25,000 respectively in the early nineteenth century. Despite the heavy weight of taxation, which was successfully designed to restrict the sale of newspapers, proprietors were able to prosper thanks to die increasing profits diey made on advertisements. It has now been possible to calculate, from the ledgers of die Public Advertiser and Gazetteer, and from the office copies of the Morning Chronicle, some part of a newspaper's profits from advertising in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.


2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 74-84
Author(s):  
Tetiana Murha

The relevance of the topic is due to the history of the concept of freedom in the Russian, Polish and Ukrainian thesauri in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Because the concept of "freedom" is important in shaping the national identities of these Slavic peoples.The aim of the article was to consider the causes of metamorphoses that occurred in the use of words and changes in the connotations of the concept of "freedom". It is determined that the development of philosophical ideas about freedom in Russia in the early nineteenth century is influenced by two contradictory tendencies: nihilistic-deterministic and religious-libertarian. It is studied that in the Soviet official philosophy and ideology the concept of "freedom" acquires ritual-official and rational-determinist meaning ("freedom as a known necessity"). In contrast, "freedom" is replaced by the concept of "freedom", which has acquired positive connotations. At the same time, the identification of "freedom" with "arbitrariness" in recent years has been a source of Russian anti-liberal discourse.Conclusions. The concept of "freedom" in literature, official documents and philosophical considerations originally had two verbal reflections "liberty" and "freedom". And the first of them actually dominated until the early nineteenth century. Its meanings were related to the influence of Polish political principles and the Ukrainian Orthodox tradition, which was spread by graduates of the Kyiv-Mohyla Collegium (Academy). At the same time, it was gradually supplanted by another word, "liberty," especially under the influence of the reaction to the events and slogans of the French Revolution.


2012 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-66
Author(s):  
Laurel Davis

Baker’s book revolves around the innovations occurring in the paper and printing industry in nineteenth-century America, but the scope of the work is actually broader. Because her chosen time frame is one that involved much change and development, and because her knowledge is so deep and broad, Baker looks backward in time and discusses the tried and true techniques that were still being used in early nineteenth-century America and then moves smoothly into the developing technologies. It is a hefty task, and she pulls it off in a seemingly effortless way, imparting a surprisingly comprehensive history of papermaking and printing.


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