A gardener friend of ours used to object to calling a plant by its Latin name. She heard it as pretense and obfuscation. But after the sage incident, she conceded that there was some point to it.

'A NEW botanist is arisen in the North," the Sheridan Professor of Botany at Oxford announced in 1736, "founder of a new method, based on stamens and pistils, whose name is Linnaeus." That method was ...

SKEPTICISM IS A VIRTUE: That’s the slogan under which Brill’s Content, the media-watchdog magazine, wages war on bias, cant, and sloppiness in the press. The magazine can be tough on journalists whom ...

For two years in the late 1970s I followed in the footsteps of Carl Linnaeus: I toiled in the field of taxonomy. The small corner of nature's jigsaw puzzle that I tackled was a group of marine sponges ...

Swedish naturalist Daniel Solander published little in his lifetime. But through his botanic collections from his travels and a rigorous application of a revolutionary naming system, he laid important ...

The age of Enlightenment provided the backdrop for eighteenth century European theories about human difference. Exploration of Africa, Asia and the Americas brought Europeans in contact with people ...