In his new book “Hearsay Is Not Excluded; A History of Natural History,” Prof. Michael R. Dove takes up the histories of four representative natural historians from the previous four centuries – Georg Eberhard Rumphius, Carl Linnaeus, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Harold C. Conklin – to examine how their own studies were undertaken in times and socio-cultural circumstances when crossing today’s more fortified disciplinary boundaries was not only allowed but expected.
Prior to the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope that has recently delivered to us so many awe-inspiring images of the universe, it was the Hubble Space Telescope, named for astronomer Edwin Hubble and launched in 1990, that set the standard for what we could see from a space-based observational platform. Indeed, both technological developments that went into the creation of, as well as of course images from, Hubble continue to provide new information not only to astronomers and astrophysicists but to a wide range of scientists around the world.
For readers of Prof. Maura Flannery’s superb long-running blog on the subject of herbaria, the simple statement “Prof. Maura Flannery has written a book on the history of herbaria” is a sufficient declaration to cause a run on copies at bookshops across the land. However for those not already among the readers of her blog, I hope these humble words I’ve here assembled will cause both regular readership of it as well as a run to your local bookshop.
The four women profiled in Prof. Matthew Kelly’s new book are very much deserving of our thanks and praise for all the work they did to make it possible for so many people today still to be able to enjoy some of England’s most important, iconic, and beautiful urban green spaces and wild natural areas.