1 - Aristotle was the first to really get to classifying and describing animals, and he went further in classifying them into different groups, blood bearing and bloodless, and various groupings within in those two categories. Although there were many, many flaws in his system they were a start to studying animals with the view of them being something more than things to hunt. Travel was not nearly as easy as it became in later years, and due to such Aristotle and Pliny had to reply heavily on word of mouth and second hand accounts of animals and creatures that others had witnessed, but as people often do, accounts were embellished and folk lore also wound its way into the descriptions of animals Pliny and Aristotle had put together.
2 - In the 1700s travel across the world had become much easier than it had been in the time of the ancient Greeks like Aristotle and Pliny. There were European ships crossing the seas with naturalists anxious to discover new forms of life. In Linnaeus's time, in contrast to Aristotle and Pliny's times there was much less need for naturalists and those studying animals to rely on word of mouth. There was overall, across Europe much more interest in the world people were living in and people were much interested in knowing as much as they could about the world that they were living in. Linnaeus was called the LIttle Oracle because of his gift for organizing species and animals in ways that others had been previously unable to do.
3 - Peter Dunwiddie - "I always regretted going back to school. It wasn't that I didn't enjoy school, it was that I was having to go back inside. That was the hard part. So I was always the student sitting in the back by the window.
I've often felt that when you enter a room full of people it's the naturalists that are standing over by the window, gazing out to see what's going on outside. And I can identify with that."
Tom Fleischner - "Natural history facilitates people falling in love with the world"
Arya Degenhardt - "Natural history is a wiggly one to describe or to define. I think the definition that's come closest for me, or resonated the most, is this idea of falling in love. It is falling in love with the world around us.
The reason why that makes sense to me is because when you fall in love with something, you really want to get to know it better and there's many different ways that happens, on purpose and on accident. That's what it feels like to me to be a naturalist, is to be inspired to ask the questions that get you to learn more, which always inspires more questions because that love always goes deeper. So, I think for me it really is as simple as that."
Those were the three quotes that caught my attention the most. I related really strongly to all of them. I've always been easily lost in looking out the window and watching things go by, whether it be the traffic going up and down michigan avenue or people walking up and down outside of a cafe. Looking out the windows on an airplane as the landscape changes, or looking over the side of a boat going from one island to a smaller one, i can spend forever watching things pass by.
The other two speak to me personally in the same way (and relate to each other in the same way, and for all practical purposes are saying the same thing) I love the act of falling in love with one's surroundings. Both the natural things and the unnatural things. I've lived in three drastically different places, and fell in love with those places in all different ways at different rates. The different landscapes, trees, sights, smells. I think it's really lovely when people fall in love with their surroundings and regardless of scientific background or purpose start to investigate and learn as much as they can about their surroundings.
4 - The part of Dillard's essay that stood out the most to me was,
"Still," wrote van Gogh in a letter, "a great deal of light falls on everything." If we are blinded by darkness, we are also blinded by light. When too much light falls on everything, a special terror results.
I find the idea of being blinded by light fascinating, both in the literal sense and in the more metaphorical sense. There's something inherently terrifying about about being suddenly thrown into bright light. I'm very interested in the way in which van Gogh saw the world and his sense of light and color, which is the main reason I was drawn that particular part of Dillard's essay. I think that in light and in darkness the same object can often appear to be very different. There was a part in Dawn of Zoology where there was an account of mount Vesuvius's eruption and it was written that "It was now day in other places, though here it was still night, more dark and more profound than any ordinary night;" I think there's also something incredibly interesting about the disorienting nature of a dark sky during when it would normally be light.
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