It was two o’clock in the morning. Having just arrived in England mid-afternoon of the preceding day, I was severely jet-lagged and just drifting off to sleep in a farm-field facing room of the Berkshire countryside hotel that would be my lodging for the first half of my stay in the UK. Suddenly, out of […]
When something is decreasing in quality, the common expression is that it has “gone to the dogs.” (As a dog enthusiast, I’ve never been particularly fond of this expression, but there it is…) However as the cover of the new second edition of the the Princeton Field Guide series’ Carnivores of the World has “gone from the dogs” of its first edition “to the cats,” can we interpret this as a sign that it has increased in quality?
When the two volume sixth edition of Walker’s Mammals of the World was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1999, its highly respected eponymous author, Ernest P. Walker, had been dead for thirty years. Now, nineteen years later, Ronald P. Nowak continues Walker’s legacy with the publication of this new, extensively updated volume.
As a naturalist, I like to think of myself as well-grounded in the ideas of science. I cringe whenever someone confuses astronomy with astrology. I try (always unsuccessfully) to remind family members that, despite how much time they spend picking lottery numbers, simple probability renders all their cogitations moot. And yet…