Natural History
Gerald was a keen and observant student of natural history, but the value of his observations is lessened by credulity and inability to distinguish fact from legend. He gives a vivid and accurate description of the last colony of the European Beaver in Wales on the River Teifi, but spoils it by repeating the legend that beavers castrate themselves to avoid danger. Likewise he gives a good description of an Osprey fishing, but adds the mythical detail that the bird has one webbed foot. His description of Irish wildlife was harshly called "worthless"; the better view perhaps is that despite its faults it gives a valuable glimpse of Irish fauna in the 1180s. Certainly there are valuable details: while the European Kingfisher is now common in Ireland, Gerald states clearly that it was not found in Ireland in his time: on the other hand the European Dipper, which he had evidently not seen before, was very common.
Read more about this topic: Gerald Of Wales
Other articles related to "natural history, history, natural":
... The term "natural history" alone, or sometimes together with archeology, forms the name of many national, regional and local natural history societies that maintain records for birds (ornithol ... Examples of these societies in Britain include the Natural History Society of Northumbria founded in 1829, British Entomological and Natural History Society founded in 1872 ... The growth of natural history societies was also spurred due to the growth of British colonies in tropical regions with numerous new species to be discovered ...
... His love of natural history was noted by the Dartmouth faculty, who gave him a letter of introduction to study under the well-known Harvard professor Louis Agassiz ... began to visualize founding a Museum of Natural History in New York City, as the European museums of natural history were in political and monetary capitals, and New York ...
... (1987) The Butterflies of Costa Rica and their Natural History ... (1997) The Butterflies of Costa Rica and their Natural History ... (Nymphalidae, Morphinae) implications for classification and natural history ...
... A History of British Mammals Gerald Edwin Hamilton Barrett-Hamilton, Guy Dollman, Martin Alister Campbell Hinton, and Edward Adrian Wilson (1910) ASIN B0014IP87W A new ... belonging to the Genus Crocidura The Annals and Magazine of Natural History, 8th series (1915 1916) ... Catalogue of the Selous Collection of Big Game in the British Museum (Natural History) Longmans, Green and Co ...
... Miss Dai Nippon (or Miss Japan) at the Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C ... Museum of Art in Baltimore Miss Hokkaido at the Putnam Museum of History and Natural Science in Davenport, Iowa Miss Hyogo at the St ... Alabama Miss Kagawa at the North Carolina State Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh, North Carolina Miss Kagoshima at the Phoenix Museum of History in ...
Famous quotes containing the words history and/or natural:
“The true theater of history is therefore the temperate zone.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“There are several natural phenomena which I shall have to have explained to me before I can keep on going as a resident member of the human race. One is the metamorphosis which hats and suits undergo exactly one week after their purchase, whereby they are changed from smart, intensely becoming articles of apparel into something children use when they want to “dress up like daddy.””
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)