We had two readings today. Don read an amusing excerpt from
Bill Bryson's book, A Short History of Nearly
Everything:
Sometime in the 18th
century......
The volume of life
on Earth was seemingly infinite, as Jonathan Swift noted in some famous lines:
So, naturalists
observe, a flea
Hath smaller fleas
that on him prey;
And these have
smaller still to bite 'em;
And so proceed
ad infinitum.
All this new
information needed to be filed, ordered and compared with what was known. The world was desperate for a workable system
of classification. Fortunately there was
a man in Sweden who stood ready to provide it.
His name was Carl
Linne (later changed, with permission, to the more aristocratic von
Linne), but he is remembered now by the
Latinized form Carolus Linnaeus. He was
born in 1707 in the village of Rashult in southern Sweden, the son of a poor
but ambitious Lutheran curate, and was such a sluggish student that his
exasperated father apprenticed him (or, by some accounts, nearly apprenticed
him) to a cobbler. Appalled at the
prospect of spending a lifetime banging tacks into leather, young Linne begged
for another chance, which was granted, and he never thereafter wavered from
academic distinction. He studied
medicine in Sweden and Holland, though his passion became the natural
world. In the early 1730s, still in his
twenties, he began to produce catalogues of the world's plant and animal
species, using a system of his own devising, and gradually his fame grew.
Rarely has a man
been more comfortable with his own greatness.
He spent much of his leisure time penning long and flattering portraits
of himself, declaring that there had never “been a greater botanist or
zoologist,” and that his system of classification was “the greatest achievement
in the realm of science.” Modestly, he
suggested that his gravestone should bear the inscription Princeps
Botanicorum, “Prince of Botanists.”
It was never wise to question his generous self-assessments. Those who did so were apt to find they had
weeds named after them.
[Don's summary of
additional material:]
Thanks to old Carl
and his Linnaean system of classification, our friend Hugh's life is, today,
made much easier. Ground cherry was once
named Physalis amno ramosissime ramis angulosis glabris foliis
dentoserratris. Linnaeus changed it
to the much more succinct Physalis angulata, a name it retains even
today. Before the Linnaean system, a
botanist could not be sure if Rosa sylvestris alba cum rubore, folio glabro was
the same plant as what others called Rosa sylvestris indora seu canina. Linnaeus solved the puzzlement by decreeing
them both as simply Rosa canina.
Emily read a quotation from John Burroughs and one short
poem, both from the book Hummingbird
Nest: A Journal of Poems by Kristine O'Connell George, 2004, Harcourt.:
The
woods hold not such another gem
as
the nest of the hummingbird.
The
finding of one is an event.
John Burroughs, naturalist
Visitor
A spark, a glint,
a glimpse
of pixie tidbit.
Bright flits, brisk
zips,
a green-gray blur,
wings, zings, and whirr --
I just heard
a humming of bird.
