William Sharp Macleay, an English naturalist, was born July 21, 1792. Around 1820, Macleay proposed a classification system (a taxonomy) that was quite popular for about three decades. Macleay thought that nature was arranged in patterns of five. So there were 5 classes of animals in the natural world (first image)…
Richard Owen, an English anatomist, was born July 20, 1804. Owen was a brilliant paleontologist, the English heir to the great Georges Cuvier in France. When Charles Darwin returned from the Beagle voyage in 1836 and was looking for someone to identify and describe the mammal fossils he had brought back, he settled on Owen, and he couldn’t have made a better choice…
Alexander Dallas Bache, an American scientist and administrator, was born July 19, 1806. Bache was the great-grandson of Benjamin Franklin, graduated from West Point, taught natural philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania for 15 years, and then, in 1843, was appointed to head the United States Coast Survey. Bache proceeded to fashion the Survey into the largest and most successful scientific institution of the century…
Gilbert White, an English cleric and naturalist, was born July 18, 1720, in Selborne, a hamlet in East Hampshire, southwest of London. After an education at Oxford, White returned to the family home, The Wakes, and spent the last 30 years of his life observing the birds, mammals, fish, insects, and the general passing of the seasons at his parochial parish…
Sometimes it is well to remind ourselves that scientists and engineers were not the only ones trying bring order to the world of the modern in the early 20th century. Artists were just as eager to find effective ways to capture a landscape of high-rise buildings, powerful locomotives, and ships at sea.
James Bowerbank, a British naturalist, was born July 14, 1797. Bowerbank was one of scores of English naturalists who provided Charles Darwin with specimens, support, and information, and made it possible for Darwin to pursue his studies and eventually compose The Origin of Species in the relative isolation of his home in Downe…
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