Today's quote is from Ralph Waldo Emerson; the picture was taken at the Linnean Society last summer.
But these young scholars who invade our hills,
Bold as the engineer who fells the wood,
And travelling often in the cut he makes,
Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not,
And all their botany is Latin names.Blight
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Herbarium specimen collected by, and from the personal collection of, Carl von Linné.
Photographed at the Linnean Society of London, 29 August 2008
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As promised, I will gather here (and update a couple of times during the day) some of the most interesting posts from around the blogosphere about the celebrations of the 300th birthday of Carl von Linne aka Carolus Linnaeus, the guy you cussed at when, back in high school, you had to memorize the…
tags: Sandwalk, Down House, Darwin, nature, photography, London, England, Bromley, England, sciblog
A gate in a brick wall next to the greenhouse behind Darwin's Down House, where Darwin conducted a lot of his botany experiments.
Image: GrrlScientist 31 August 2008 [larger view].
Sunday, the…
Portion of the personal library of Carl von LinnéLinnean Society, London
If anything should be clear from the range of creatures that I write about at Tet Zoo - think caecilians, borhyaenoids, imaginary giant owls and rhynchosaurs - it's that there's an almost infinite amount of technical information on obscure creatures 'locked away' in the technical literature. Among…
Sadly, that can be the case. I read once of a paleontologist who was assailed on a cliff face in France. The Frenchman complained about all the scientists digging on the cliff.
The paleontologist talked about the scientific value of the fossils (IIRC, it was ammonites before and after the K/T boundary) and asked what harm he was doing anyway. But when he stepped back and looked at the cliff, it was pockmarked with the holes from which fossils had been removed.
I understand the sentiment, BaldApe, but I do wonder, what's more important? The paleontologist's work, or a pristine cliff face? Was he damaging anything other than an anthropocentric sense of aesthetics?
A particularly bad example is contained in Galen Rowell's mountain light. If you peruse the journal article, it is clear that the team that determined the age of the oldest living tree in California's Bristle Cone Pine Grove did so by *cutting down the tree.* It seems that the core-borer they had broke and they did not want to wait a few days for a new one.
Argghh!
What I'm saying is that there are trade-offs, and scientists themselves are often not very good at evaluating them. (See Tuskegee Syphilis study, for instance) If there is important scientific work to be done, a pristine cliff face may not be so important. If it's just a matter of getting a particular fossil for your own collection, that changes the matter somewhat.