All posts from September 2015

Georgiana Molloy arrived in the Swan River Colony (now Perth, Western Australia) in 1830 and was among the small group of British colonists who founded the settlement of Augusta in the far southwest. Today, she’s remembered as the first internationally successful female botanist in Western Australia. Specimens from two of her collections, including Type specimens, are archived in Kew Herbarium and Cambridge University Herbarium. Some of her letters and some diaries have also survived, held at the Cumbria Archive Centre in Carlisle UK and the JS Battye Library in Perth WA. Researchers unable to access these documents first-hand have been able to view some sources online for several years but things are changing.

Here’s a word of the day for you: Teuthology. What does it mean? It’s the study of cephalopods. What are cephalopods? Well, they are a class of mollusks that include two extant subclasses: Coleoidea and Nautiloidea. Still not sure what cephalopods are? You probably know them by their more common monikers: octopuses, squid, cuttlefish, and nautiluses. There are over 800 living species of cephalopods known today. Dr. Ian G. Gleadall has been studying the biology of cephalopods (particularly octopuses) for 40 years. Dr. Gleadall (a marine biologist who works in Sendai, Japan) discovered BHL in November, 2014 while visiting the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. It has had a profound impact on his research.

The history of the modern circus is deeply rooted in horsemanship. The first modern circuses, which took place during the 18 century, were primarily demonstrations of tricks performed on a horse, first by former soldiers who learned such skills during military training, and later by talented men and women trained from a young age to accomplish acrobatics and other feats atop a horse. In order to teach horses to perform tricks for the circus amphitheater, horsemen relied upon instruction from mentors and in books such as Dr. Sutherland’s System of Educating the Horse, with Rules for Teaching the Horse Some Forty Different Tricks or Feats.