All posts from January 2010

The lure of Antarctica has been captivating humans for hundreds of years, centuries even before the discovery of such a landmass occurred. Discussions about the existence of such a place were proposed as early as the first century AD, when Ptolemy suggested that there must be a giant landmass to the south serving to counterbalance the mass of the giant northern lands (Europe, Asia and North Africa) and preserve symmetry in the world. Following such proclamations, maps constructed as early as the 1500s began portraying a giant continent in the mysterious southern reaches of the globe. However, while belief in the existence of this southern continent permeated antiquity, it was not until the 1800s that confirmation of such a place actually occurred.

The history of botanical taxonomic literature began in a textual format as far back as the 400s B.C. Such prestigious names as Hippocrates, the “father of medicine,” and Theophrastus of Eresius, the “father of botany,” are among those to have first written about botany. These early writings, however, lacked the illustrations which are so important to botanical (and all other forms of biodiversity, for that matter) identification. Even when illustrations entered the scene, they were rare and costly, as they had to be reproduced by hand. It was the introduction of the printing press that changed this situation, as this allowed woodcuts producing line illustrations to be inserted into botanical books.

Apart from the morbid coincidence of dying in the same year–1895–there’s not a whole lot binding these two scientific luminaries together. Minerals and volcanoes on one hand and entomology and horticulture on the other. But, the world is small and the sub-world of scientific publishing even smaller, so onward, ho!