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Just added to our collection: The Essential Naturalist, edited by Michael H. Graham.
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When George Shaw first described a specimen of platypus brought to him by Captain John Hunter, the second governor of New South Wales, he (along with most naturalists of the time) thought it was a hoax. In his first description of it in 1799, he noted that it was “impossible not to entertain doubts as to its genuine nature”, and even took scissors to the dried skin sent to him in order to check for stitches.
However, by the time he gave his lecture series at the Royal Institution, he had no doubts of its authenticity, though it still baffled him as to its true nature as an animal.
From Zoological lectures delivered at the Royal Institution. George Shaw, 1809.
(via biomedicalephemera)
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Cuvier Day
Turtle juveniles.
Cuvier had a younger brother named Frederic, who was also a naturalist. He was mentioned by Darwin as having determined many facts regarding differentiating habit and instinct. Frederic wrote a Natural History book with Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, with whom his older brother had significant ideological differences. Still, all three men recognized each other as respectable and important natural history writers.
(via aureliomadrid)
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Cuvier Day
Swordfish and similar specimens.
Though much of his classification work built off of Lamarck’s categorization, Cuvier was highly skeptical if Lamarck’s theories of evolution and differentiation. Cuvier was personal friends with Geoffroy St. Hilaire (another proponent of gradual changes in species), and though he respected Lamarck as a naturalist, he even wrote in his “Elegy for Lamarck” a fairly flippant refutation that Lamarckian evolution,
“…rested on two arbitrary suppositions; the one, that it is the seminal vapor which organizes the embryo; the other, that efforts and desires may engender organs. A system established on such foundations may amuse the imagination of a poet; a metaphysician may derive from it an entirely new series of systems; but it cannot for a moment bear the examination of anyone who has dissected a hand, a viscus, or even a feather.”
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Cuvier Day
Reindeer and roe deer stag.
Cuvier classified organisms into 4 classes: Vertebrata, Articulata (arthropods & segmented worms), Mollusca (considered to be all other squishy invertebrates), and Radiata (Cniderians/Echinoderms).
