Geographie des Plantes Equinoxiales

Tableau Physique des Andes et Pays Voisins 1805


This is an elevation profile of equinoctial plants of the Andes Region, using the cutaway technique. Drafted by Alexander von Humboldt (1769 –1859), centered on Mount Chimborazo. It includes 2 tables showing the distribution of plants and geology in the area, including large numbers of plant families, genera, and species names corresponding to the vicinity of the equator in South America.
The tables also show data about altitude, appearance of electricity, changes in weight, blueness of the sky, animals, location of the snowline, the boiling point of water, and atmospheric pressure, temperature, humidity, and composition.

Vlamertinghe: Passing the Chateau

‘The Falcon’s Bath’ (ca. 1400)

 

‘And all her silken flanks with garlands drest’—
But we are coming to the sacrifice.
Must those flowers who are not yet gone West?
May those flowers who live with death and lice?
This must be the floweriest place
That earth allows; the queenly face
Of the proud mansion borrows grace for grace
Spite of those brute guns lowing at the skies.

Bold great daisies’ golden lights,

Bubbling roses’ pinks and whites—

Such a gay carpet! poppies by the million;

Such damask! such vermilion!

But if you ask me, mate, the choice of colour
Is scarcely right; this red should have been duller.

Edmund Blunden (1896 – 1974)

 

“My experiences in the First World War have haunted me all my life and for many days I have, it seemed, lived in that world rather than this.” E.B.
“To Blunden the countryside is magical. It is as precious as English literature, with which indeed it is almost identical. … both the countryside and English literature are ‘alive,’ and both have ‘feelings.’”  Paul Fussell
As Alec Hardie has pointed out, nearly every author Blunden writes about has “some personal reason for deserving sympathy as a man: prolonged ill-health, madness, suicide, or some inability to deal with the circumstances of his time.” ““He is temperamentally unwilling to show other than sympathy.”

All Is Leaf

Lucas Cranach the Elder (c. 1472 – 1553)

“To divide the united, to unite the divided, is the life of nature; this is the eternal systole and diastole, the eternal collapsion and expansion, the inspiration and expiration of the world in which we move.”
“I compare the earth and her atmosphere to a great living being perpetually inhaling and exhaling.”

 

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832)

 

The Humble Bee

by Elizabeth Pennisi
for the American Association for the Advancement of Science

For years, cognitive scientist Lars Chittka felt a bit eclipsed by his colleagues at Queen Mary University of London. Their studies of apes, crows, and parrots were constantly revealing how smart these animals were. He worked on bees, and at the time, almost everyone assumed that the insects acted on instinct, not intelligence.
Chittka’s team has shown that bumble bees can not only learn to pull a string to retrieve a reward, but they can also learn this trick from other bees, even though they have no experience with such a task in nature. The study “successfully challenges the notion that ‘big brains’ are necessary” for new skills to spread, says Christian Rutz, an evolutionary ecologist who studies bird cognition at the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom.
Many researchers have used string-pulling to assess animals, particularly birds and apes. So Chittka and his colleagues set up a low clear plastic table barely tall enough to lay three flat artificial blue flowers underneath. Each flower contained a well of sugar water in the center and had a string attached that extended beyond the table’s boundaries. The only way the bumble bee could get the sugar water was to pull the flower out from under the table by tugging on the string.
The team put 110 bumble bees, one at a time, next to the table to see what they would do. Some tugged at the strings and gave up, but two actually kept at it until they retrieved the sugar water. In another series of experiments, the researchers trained the bees by first placing the flower next to the bee and then moving it ever farther under the table. More than half of the 40 bees tested learned what to do.

Next, the researchers placed untrained bees behind a clear plastic wall so they could see the other bees retrieving the sugar water. More than 60% of the insects that watched knew to pull the string when it was their turn. In another experiment, scientists put bees that knew how to pull the string back into their colony and a majority of the colony’s workers picked up string pulling by watching one trained bee do it when it left the colony in search of food. The bees usually learned this trick after watching the trained bee five times, and sometimes even after one observation. Even after the trained bee died, string pulling continued to spread among the colony’s younger workers.
But pulling a string does not quite qualify as tool use, because a tool would have to be an independent object that wasn’t attached to the flower in the first place. And other invertebrates have shown they can use tools: Digger wasps pick up small stones and use them to pack down their burrow entrances, for example. But that two bees figured out how to pull the string with no help while other bees picked up on that ability, was impressive, says Ivo Jacobs, a cognitive zoologist at Lund University in Sweden who was not involved with the work. “This shows unexpected behavioral flexibility.”
Rutz is impressed, too, because the work involved almost 300 bees and clearly documented how string pulling spread from bee to bee in multiple colonies.
With additional experiments, Chittka hopes to figure out the neural basis of these abilities.
The findings hint at a form of culture in bees, Jacobs says. With their ability to learn where others are, find out what they are doing, and experiment on their own, the insects demonstrated that they can pass on knowledge—a key requirement of culture, considered to be a complex phenomenon.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/10/hints-tool-use-culture-seen-bumble-bees

Study of a Tree

Georges Michel (1763-1843)

 

by Hope Jahren

A seed is alive while it waits. Every acorn on the ground is just as alive as the three-hundred-year-old oak tree that towers over it. Neither the seed nor the old oak is growing; they are both just waiting.
What each seed is waiting for is known only to that seed. Some unique trigger-combination of temperature-moisture-light and many other things is required to convince the seed to jump off the deep end and take its chance–to take its one and only chance to grow.
. . . .
When you go into a forest … you probably don’t look down, where just beneath your single footprint sit hundreds of seeds, each one alive and waiting. They hope against hope for an opportunity that will probably never come. More than half of these seeds will die before they feel the trigger that they are waiting for, and during awful years every single one of them will die.
. . . When you are in the forest, for every tree that you see, there are at least a hundred more trees waiting in the soil, alive and fervently wishing to be.

A coconut is a seed as big as your head. It can float from the coast of Africa across the entire Atlantic Ocean and then take root and grow on a Caribbean island. In contrast, orchid seeds are tiny: one million of them put together add up to the weight of a paper clip. Big or small, most of every seed is actually just food to sustain a waiting embryo. The embryo is a collection of only a few hundred cells, but it is a working blueprint for a real plant with a shoot and a root already formed.
When the embryo within a seed starts to grow, it basically just stretches out of its doubled-over waiting posture, elongating into official ownership of the form that it assumed years ago.
. . . .
After scientists broke open the coat of a lotus seed and coddled the embryo into growth, they kept the empty husk. When they radiocarbon-dated this discarded outer shell, they discovered that their seedling had been waiting for them within a peat bog in China for no less than two thousand years. This tiny seed had stubbornly kept up hope of its own future while entire human civilizations rose and fell.

With gratitude to Nicolas Silver for presenting me with the book from which this incomplete excerpt is lifted.
“Lab Girl” is a 2016 memoir by American geochemist, geobiologist, and professor Hope Jahren.

See also:

https://secretgardening.wordpress.com/2017/01/17/in-our-hands-forests-sleep/

https://secretgardening.wordpress.com/2014/05/10/the-seed-shop/

 

Letters on the Natural History of the Insects Mentioned in Shakspeare’s Plays

Order 3. Lepidoptera
William Bartram (1739 – 1823)

 

“Robert Patterson (1802-1872) was a remarkable naturalist you’ve probably never heard of. At the age of 19, he co-founded the Belfast Natural History Society. He also wrote a number of zoology texts and designed a series of zoological diagrams for use in schools. In 1857, he posted a ‘real Irish Rabbit’ across the Irish Sea to Charles Darwin, at Darwin’s request.”
Manu Saunders, https://ecologyisnotadirtyword.com/

Manu Saunders introduces Robert Patterson irresistably, and so caused me to seek his book online–where I found it!
But the introduction and table of contents were so charming: intermingling the science, the poetry, the observations of human as well as insect life, that I have yet to work my way through to the actual body of the book itself.
Here is some of what snared my attention, broken up, and sometimes re-punctuated, by me:

Letters on the Natural History of the Insects Mentioned in Shakspeare’s Plays.
With Incidental Notices of The Entomology of Ireland.
by Robert Patterson

Contents

LETTER I. INTRODUCTORY EPISTLE.

Ennui occasionally experienced while residing in the country.
Its cause. (Originates in a defective system of education.)
Proper meaning of the term Naturalist. The legitimate objects of his inquiry.
Periodical changes in the aspect of the external world.
Pleasures which the study of Nature affords; mental effects of such pursuits.
Poetry and Natural History might “each give to each a double charm.”
Inquiry proposed with regard to the knowledge of Natural Phenomena, exhibited by some of our most admired Poets.
Shakspeare “the Poet of Nature.”
Opinion of Dr. Johnson.
Remark of the late John Templeton, Esq.
Shakspeare, in accurate observation, superior to Milton.
Illustrative extracts from ” Lycidas” and the” Winter’s Tale.”
Number of the notices of natural objects in the Dramatic Works of Shakspeare.
Their investigation, why interesting . . . page 1

 

LETTER II. ENTOMOLOGY RECOMMENDED.

Solace which the study of Natural History affords to the man
of business. The benefits it confers on the man possessed of leisure.
The study of insects proposed. It should not be deemed frivolous, because the objects are diminu-tive. They are a portion of the works of God. Their diversity and beauty.
Peculiar advantage enjoyed by the Entomologist.
Numbers of insects.
Importance of a knowledge of their habits.
Their destructive powers. Benefits they confer . . . page 13

 

LETTER III. LARVAE AND PUPAE.

Advantages which may be anticipated from the proposed in-
quiry. Subject of the present Letter — Insects in their
early or imperfect states.
Expression used by Hamlet, “If the sun breed maggots in a dead dog.”
Distinction between the vertebrate animals and insects.
Destructive powers possessed by caterpillars; frequently mentioned by Shakspeare.
The pupa state. “There is a difference between a grub and a butterfly.”
“The smirch’d moth- eaten tapestry.”
“The worm i’ the bud ;” “the canker.”
Cocoon of the silk-worm; its value. “The worms were hallowed that did breed the silk.”
“An empty hazel nut.”
“The old grub.”
“Your worm is your only emperor for diet.”
Different meanings of the word “worm” in Shakspeare . . . 27

There is more–much more. I don’t want to overload anyone’s attention, but allow the words and ideas to stay lively as you take them with you.
I may not be able to resist sharing more at some other time.

 

A Midsummer Night

Detail, Scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Edwin Landseer (1802 – 1873)

 

Everything changes, nothing dies: the spirit wanders, arriving here or there, and occupying whatever body it pleases, passing from a wild beast into a human being, from our body into a beast, but is never destroyed.
So, I say as a seer, cease to make kindred spirits homeless, by wicked slaughter: do not let blood be nourished by blood!

Pythagoras of Samos (c. 570 BC – c. 495 BC)
in Ovid’s Metamorphosis

 

The Kongouro from New Holland

George Stubbs (1724 – 1806), Associate Member of the Royal Academy

 

The first depiction of an Australian animal in Western Art, this portrait was commissioned by Joseph Banks and said to be based on the inflated skin of an animal he had collected from the east coast of Australia in 1770 during Lieutenant James Cook’s first voyage of discovery
[It is, also, clearly a fleshed-out version of a sketch by Sydney Parkinson.]

 

Colliding Worlds

Breadfruit, engraving after a drawing by Sydney Parkinson (c. 1745 – 1771)

 

Eye-opening Records of Colliding Worlds

by Jonathan Jones,
for The Guardian

Sydney Parkinson drew the weird animal in a clear sharp line, looking at it carefully, then looking again, erasing his mistakes until he had an image that was beautifully recognisable. He wondered what to call this creature that was so utterly unlike anything back home in Britain.
He found out by speaking with local people and making a brief dictionary of their language. From a British Library exhibition: James Cook: The Voyages, a moving and absorbing account of a moment when worlds apart suddenly met –you can picture how they communicated by pointing at parts of their bodies: words like belly, hand, foot.

Among these basic terms is the name of the creature Parkinson drew. He transcribes it as “kangooroo”. It means, he says, “the leaping quadruped”. What he heard was probably the word “gangurru”, which is indeed the name of a type of kangaroo in the language of the Guugu Yimithirr people who James Cook, his crew, and the artists and scientists they took to the far side of the world met when they landed at the place they named Endeavour River.

As an attempt to give an Australian species an Indigenous Australian name, kangooroo isn’t bad. Parkinson’s drawing – the first ever made by a European – is just one of his sensitive scientific images of flora and fauna including a great white shark.
The adventure cost him his life: he died (of disease, not a shark bite) on the Endeavour’s voyage home. Another artist, Alexander Buchan, who portrayed the people of Tierra del Fuego, had died earlier in the voyage.

The fact that artists, as well as scientists such as the pioneering naturalist Joseph Banks, went on Cook’s voyages was unprecedented.
There were none on the ships of Columbus or Cabot. Cook’s first voyage went to Tahiti so a team of astronomers could observe the transit of Venus. They were not there to conquer. They got on well with the Tahitians – too well for Cook, who worried the newcomers would spread venereal disease and was upset when satirists back home had fun with the romantic exploits of Mr Banks.

Banks’s friendship with the Tahitian female chieftain Purea led to the most unexpected of the expedition’s artworks. Tupaia, high priest of the god of war, was part of Purea’s retinue. He not only became a translator for the English, but also started to record Tahitian life and beliefs in bold, compelling drawings. When the Endeavour sailed on to New Zealand he went too, and portrayed their encounters with Maori people.

Tupaia’s picture of Banks meeting a Maori, done in 1769, is one of the most eye-opening records of cultural encounter you could ever hope to see. For Tupaia, Banks and the Maori are foreign and fascinating. Banks in his blue coat is giving the New Zealander a piece of cloth in exchange for a big, red lobster. “I had a firm fist on the lobster,” remembered Banks. Tupaia also died on the Endeavour’s return to Britain.

Given the death rate of the Endeavour’s artists, it’s amazing that an up-and-coming painter, William Hodges, risked it all to go Cook’s second voyage. Not only would he survive, but he proved an accomplished, ambitious artist. His panoramic sketches of war canoes massing off Tahiti and a Polynesian vessel at sea are great works of art that anticipate JMW Turner – but Turner never went to the Pacific. His pictures of the Resolution and the Adventure isolated in the vast black seas of the Antarctic circle, menaced by towering icebergs, are even more daunting.

Suddenly, you see how far Cook sailed, how extreme the risks these 18th-century explorers took in their frail wooden ships. Hodges in Antarctica painted the most unearthly journey anyone had ever made.
His icy sketches are as incredible as images sent back today by the furthest space probes. But they were made by a human being shivering on a sailing ship with no radio, no contact with home, in a sea with no mercy. “We were the first that ever burst / Into that silent sea,” as Coleridge was to write in 1798, as if dreaming of these images by Hodges. Did Romanticism start in Antarctica?

An array of material at the British Library sets the remarkable artistic legacy of these voyages alongside a mass of documents from the original journals of Cook and Banks, the beautiful charts the captain made and to some of the first examples of Pacific art ever collected by Europeans.

By the end you feel dwarfed by the immensity of the world they sailed and haunted by the faces of the peoples they encountered. The violence of imperialism was coming. Yet this was a moment when strangers looked at one another with open eyes.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/apr/26/james-cook-the-voyages-british-library-review#comments

 

Thorns

Acacia
John William Lewin (1770 – 1819)

 

The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.

John Muir  (April 21, 1838 – December 24, 1914)