Schweigger’s (1812) chelonian types from the extinct eighteenth century Portuguese “Royal cabinet of natural history of Ajuda”: some contributions for their identification and nomenclatural implications

Zootaxa ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 3395 (1) ◽  
pp. 18 ◽  
Author(s):  
LUIS M. P. CERÍACO ◽  
ROGER BOUR
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Zoological Nomenclature ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Intense Debate

The work Prodromus Monographiae Cheloniorum, published by Schweigger in 1812, has recently been the subject ofseveral studies. One result of these studies—the rediscovery of the Testudo gigantea Schweigger, 1812holotype—triggered an intense debate in The Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature, where, among other issues in dispute,the identity and nature of the specimen indicated as the holotype for the species is put in question. Using historical sources,mostly unpublished, and analysis and comparison of taxidermic characteristics of the specimen with other specimens ofthe same nature, we can clearly trace its origin to the extinct Royal Cabinet of Natural History of Ajuda in Lisbon, fromthe “philosophical journey” of Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira to the specimens transported to Paris by Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in 1808, thus helping dispel any doubts regarding the identity and nature of what is being identified as the Testudogigantea holotype, along with other chelonian specimens. This information is of great importance in the current taxonomicdebate as well as in recognizing the historic importance of the Royal Cabinet of Natural History of Ajuda and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire’s 1808 mission to Lisbon.

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.

‘Promiscuous’ Planting

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-44
Author(s):  
Angma Dey Jhala
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Soil Quality ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Border Region ◽  
Swidden Agriculture ◽  
Chittagong Hill Tracts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Hill Tribes

During the eighteenth century, the travelogue flourished as a genre and was used to describe peoples both familiar and unfamiliar to the western observer. Chapter 1 examines one such account, the 1798 travelogue of the Scottish doctor Francis Buchanan in the CHT. In his tour diary, he deployed the language of natural history to describe not only the region’s unusual soil quality, topography, and local jhum or swidden agriculture, but also the religious, cultural, and linguistic practices of the various hill tribes he encountered. In the process, he exposed the tumultuous history of this border region, which found itself at the crossroads of imperial ambition by both the East India Company and the kingdom of Burma. He is also an intriguing example of an Enlightenment era man of science and reason in the Chittagong Hill Tracts.

History of Religion as Critique of Religion?

2021 ◽  
pp. 10-30
Author(s):  
Hans Joas
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
Universal History ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Literary Character ◽  
History Of

The Scottish eighteenth-century philosopher and historian David Hume can be considered a pioneer of the “natural history of religion” in the sense of a universal history of religion that is not based on theological presuppositions. This chapter offers a characterization of his methodological achievements and a reevaluation of his empirical claims concerning monotheism, polytheism, religion and tolerance. It also interprets the German reception of Hume in Herder and other eighteenth-century thinkers as a serious critical continuation that is free from Hume’s anti-Christian motives. This continuation opens the perspective of a serious study of the literary character of religious texts, in this case of the Bible. All simple contrasts between Enlightenment and religion are overcome as soon as we take this interaction of thinkers into account.

Three Eighteenth-Century Attempts to Map the Natural Order: Johann Herrmann – Georg Christoph Würtz – Paul Dietrich Giseke

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kees van Putten
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
Two Dimensional ◽  
History Of ◽  
A Chain

Abstract By the second half of the eighteenth century, the age-old concept of nature as a chain of being had been superseded by the idea that the order of nature was a two-dimensional whole. Carolus Linnaeus, for instance, stated that vegetal nature was ordered like a geographical map. Paul Dietrich Giseke, one of his followers, rendered this metaphor concrete by making a “genealogic-geographical map of the natural orders of plants.” Could mapping nature in this way help to produce a true image of it and thereby achieve a better understanding of nature’s order? I intend to answer this question by analyzing Giseke’s map along with two closely connected images of the order of nature, Johann Herrmann’s “Table of affinities between animals” and the hitherto unnoticed “geographical map” of medicines, designed by Georg Christoph Würtz. The article deals with the relation between these images, examines the respective advantages and drawbacks of their maps and situates them with respect to the models of the natural history of the time.

The Crime Wave: Recent Writing on Crime and Criminal Justice in Eighteenth-Century England

1986 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 380-435 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Innes ◽  
John Styles
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Short Life ◽  
Law Faculty ◽  
History Of ◽  
Crime Wave ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The One ◽  
Criminal Legislation

One of the most exciting and influential areas of research in eighteenth-century history over the last fifteen years has been the study of crime and the criminal law. It is the purpose of this essay to map the subject for the interested nonspecialist: to ask why historians have chosen to study it, to explain how they have come to approach it in particular ways, to describe something of what they have found, to evaluate those findings, and to suggest fruitful directions for further research. Like all maps, the one presented here is selective. The essay begins with a general analysis of the ways in which the field has developed and changed in its short life. It then proceeds to consider in more detail four areas of study: criminality, the criminal trial, punishment, and criminal legislation. This selection makes no pretense of providing an exhaustive coverage. A number of important areas have been omitted: for example, public order and policing. However, the areas covered illustrate the range of approaches, problems, and possibilities that lie within the field. The essay concludes with a discussion of the broader implications of the subject.The Development of the FieldBefore the 1960s crime was not treated seriously by eighteenth-century historians. Accounts of crime and the criminal law rarely extended beyond a few brief remarks on lawlessness, the Bloody Code, and the state of the prisons, often culled from Fielding, Hogarth, and Howard. There were exceptions, but they fell outside the mainstream of eighteenth-century history. The multiple volumes of Leon Radzinowicz's monumental History of the English Criminal Law and Its Administration from 1750 began to appear in 1948, but Radzinowicz worked in the Cambridge Law Faculty and the Institute of Criminology, and, as Derek Beales has pointed out, his findings were not quickly assimilated by historians.

Practices of Satisfaction, 1215–1700

2004 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 106-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Bossy
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
General Public ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Oxford English Dictionary ◽  
Short History ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Professional Fields

The title, and subject, of this piece is ‘satisfaction’, though its main locus in time is the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I chose the subject because it fitted in with our president’s preoccupations, and because it interested me; it turns out, to my surprise, to jog our elbow about some contemporary matters, as I guess he wished.We had better start with the word, where there are two distinctions to be considered. The obvious one is between making up for, paying for, making amends, making reparation; and contentment, gratified desire, giving satisfaction, what you can’t get none of. I shall say that the first is the strong meaning, the second the weak one. The first is always other-directed, and entails an offence previously committed; the second is principally self-directed. ‘To content’ is a classical meaning of satisfacere, but it means to content someone else: to do something (facere), as against receiving something. A short history of the word in Latin and English records that the strong meaning emerged into late Latin as a description of church penance, and so passed into English in the fourteenth century. Its heyday was from then until the eighteenth. It referred to ecclesiastical penance (interrupted by the Reformation), the theology of the Redemption (encouraged by the Reformation), and in general public usage to the meeting of any kind of obligation, payment, atonement or compensation. From the eighteenth century it passed from public use, superseded by the weak meaning except in technical or professional fields. One professional usage, to which The Oxford English Dictionary gives a good deal of attention, is ‘to satisfy the examiners’: they think it is a case of ‘content’; may it be a case of ‘avert wrath’?

The Natural History of Whales

Polar Record ◽  
1942 ◽  
Vol 3 (24) ◽  
pp. 553-563
Author(s):  
N. A. Mackintosh
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Southern Hemisphere ◽  
Present State ◽  
Comparative Anatomy ◽  
Sperm Whale ◽  
Anatomy And Physiology ◽  
Right Whales ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Right

The purpose of this article is to give a general indication of the present state of our knowledge of whales, regarded as an element of the oceanic fauna, and to indicate some of the more important problems which still await solution. The term “whales” is used here to include only the largest of the Cetacea, which are the Right whales, the Rorquals and the Sperm whale; and the subject has to do with these whales in the collective sense, that is to say their habits as a community, and their breeding, growth and distribution, especially in the southern hemisphere, rather than with such matters as comparative anatomy and physiology.

Footprints of "Experiment" in Early Arabic Optics

2009 ◽  
Vol 14 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 79-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elaheh Kheirandish
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Science ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Point Of Departure

AbstractThis study traces the early developments of the concept of experiment with a view of extending the subject in both content and approach. It extends the content of the subject slightly backward, prior to the methodological breakthroughs of the Optics of Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen or Alhacen, d. ca. 1040), which are credited as a "significant landmark in the history of experimental science." And it extends the approach to the subject slightly forward, from the premise that early science was "largely carried out in books," to a close examination of the books through which the footprints of 'experiment' may be traced. The point of departure is the Optics of Ahmad ibn 'Ī;sā, a revealing text for the early developments of concepts such as 'demonstration' and 'experiment', and one through which some modern discussions are examined and extended with reference to this and other historical sources.

The Natural History of Philosophy in Canada

Dialogue ◽  
1986 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-66
Author(s):  
Thomas Mathien
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Biological Species ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
The Past ◽  
Evolutionary Study ◽  
Major Study ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One ◽  
Intellectual Discipline

Some writers about the history of philosophy in Canada have wondered why it should be studied. That is a worthy question, but it is not the one I want to discuss here. I am going to assume there are good reasons for doing so because I want to consider some general features of the subject of such studies and to determine what has to be done to establish certain descriptive claims about it. I will also point out some concerns I have about the proper explanation of certain interesting features of Canadian philosophic activity, and I will present a brief evaluation of one major study. I will do this with the aid of a contention that the study of the history of an intellectual discipline is a little like an evolutionary study of a biological species, but I will close by pointing out one reason for doing history which goes beyond description, and even explanation, of the past.

Is Globalisation Yesterday’s News?

Itinerario ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-128
Author(s):  
A. G. Hopkins
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
United States ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Full Potential ◽  
The West ◽  
History Of ◽  
Lively Debate ◽  
The Subject

Globalisation is now a fashionable topic of historical research. Books and articles routinely use the term, though often in a loose manner that has yet to realise the full potential of the subject. The question arises as to whether globalisation, as currently applied by historians, is sufficiently robust to resist inevitable changes in historiographical fashion. The fact that globalisation is a process and not a single theory opens the way, not only to over-general applications of the term, but also to rich research possibilities derived in particular from other social sciences. One such prospect, which ought to be at the centre of all historians’ interests, is how to categorise the evolution of the process. This question, which has yet to stimulate the lively debate it needs, is explored here by identifying three successive phases or sequences between the eighteenth century and the present, and joining them to the history of the empires that were their principal agents. These phases, termed proto-globalisation, modern globalisation, and postcolonial globalisation provide the context for reviewing the history of the West, including the United States, and in principle of the wider world too.

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