Books and Naturalists (Collins New Naturalist Library, Volume 112)
David Elliston Allen
Language: English
Pages: 454
ISBN: 0007300174
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Natural history, perhaps more than any other pursuit or study, has always relied heavily on books. Without their basic function of enabling the different kinds of animals and plants to be described in adequate detail, the subject could never have come into being and gone on to thrive as it does today. In displaying nature's colourful diversity, books have stimulated attempts to capture the wonders of the natural world with the pencil or in paint. They have challenged their readers to seek out and record what the countryside has to offer, and they have enabled naturalists to convey to unknown fellow spirits the excitements of 'the chase' and of unexpected discoveries. In this latest book in the highly-acclaimed New Naturalist series, David Elliston Allen explores the often complicated ways in which books on the flora and fauna of these islands have been published through the years, from the earliest days of printing through to the era of the computerised distribution atlas and the giant multinational compendium. Difficult to free from market constraints, publication in book form would have remained an elusive aim for all too many naturalists but for the regular trickle of individual publishers who have shared their delight in the subject and leant over backwards to assist it. The important role played by these allies, the colourful backgrounds of many of the authors and the sometimes fraught relationship between the partners in a process in which the aims of business and learning do not necessarily coincide are among the many themes woven together into a fascinating account, which also breaks new ground.
(as would indeed be the case with its ostensible successor in 1932, the Comital Flora of the British Isles by G. C. Druce). This provision at long last of an authoritative baseline, against which the novelty or otherwise of a find in one or other of those comparatively small areas could readily be checked, gave botanising anywhere in Britain a dual dimension, a national context simultaneously with a local one, far more compellingly than Cybele Britannica had been able to. A vice-county was a
exceptional, multi-talented figure. Of the books that Turner produced as a naturalist (he produced purely medical treatises as well), the first two can be seen as skirmishes in a broader campaign he waged to topple Latin from its throne, symbolising as that did to those of his persuasion the stifling hold of papism. Libellus de re herbaria novus, a mere booklet (as the title carefully announced), just 20 pages in length, was a product of his early Cambridge years and was no doubt printed at his
the burden of running a business with others. Indeed, it is obvious that he must have been allowed no small amount of latitude, to attend to the magazine of which he was either sole editor or editor-in-chief for an interrupted 36 years as well as to travel widely overseas, or he could hardly have achieved so much, a ferociously hard worker though he was in everything he undertook. Despite partly retiring in 1936, he was forced to return when wartime exigencies required his full-time involvement
part of a growing number of amateurs that proved entirely compatible. In ornithology, lines of enquiry had spontaneously developed that meshed extremely well with what Huxley and his ‘school’ were propagating. The most salient of those had had its origin back in the 1880s and had arisen out of the need for passage-movements in birds to be studied at widely separated points by coordinated chains of record-keepers. That had called into being a form of collective research that depended on the
Confervae 464 British Deer and their Horns 337 British Desmidieae, The 276, 277 British Dragonflies 399 British Ecological Society 407, 411 British Entomology 218, 219, 268, 465 British Fauna 123 British Flora, The 102 British Fresh-water Fishes 260 British Fungus-flora 355 British Herpetological Society, formation of 436 British Islands and their Vegetation, The 408 British Jungermanniae 139, 464 British Lichen Society, formation of 436 British Medical Journal 220 British Mosses