The globetrotting naturalists of the eighteenth century were the geeks of their day: innovators and explorers who lived at the intersection of science and commerce. Foremost among them was Carl Linnaeus, a radical thinker who revolutionized biology. In What Linnaeus Saw, Karen Magnuson Beil chronicles Linnaeus’s life and career in readable, relatable prose. As a boy, Linnaeus hated school and had little interest in taking up the religious profession his family had chosen. Though he struggled through Latin and theology classes, Linnaeus was an avid student of the natural world and explored the school’s gardens and woods, transfixed by the properties of different plants. At twenty-five, on a solo expedition to the Scandinavian Mountains, Linnaeus documented and described dozens of new species. As a medical student in Holland, he moved among leading scientific thinkers and had access to the best collections of plants and animals in Europe. What Linnaeus found was a world with no consistent system for describing and naming living things—a situation he methodically set about changing. The Linnaean system for classifying plants and animals, developed and refined over the course of his life, is the foundation of modern scientific taxonomy, and inspired and guided generations of scientists. What Linnaeus Saw is rich with biographical anecdotes—from his attempt to identify a mysterious animal given him by the king to successfully growing a rare and exotic banana plant in Amsterdam to debunking stories of dragons and phoenixes. Thoroughly researched and generously illustrated, it offers a vivid and insightful glimpse into the life of one of modern science’s founding thinkers.

How can we organize and name all of the different animals and plants in the world? Many had tried before, but Carl Linnaeus came up with a system that we still use today. This Swedish scientist from over 300 years ago is known as the father of classification. Linnaeus’s system gave each plant or animal just two names. For example, the scientific term for human beings is Homo sapiens. In Latin, Homo means "man" and sapiens means "wise."

The natural world is wild, but there’s order to it too. To understand biological diversity, scientists arrange organisms into groups, a science called taxonomy. This absorbing volume looks at the ways people have tried to classify the living world over the centuries with a spotlight on the contributions of Carolus Linnaeus, whose system includes the now-famous categories of kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. The accessible text also explains how the science is changing with our developing knowledge of genetics. With millions of species yet to be discovered, the field of taxonomy will continue to tell us how organisms fit into the tree of life.

" ... traces the history of human discovery, from the establishment of classification in the eighteenth century to today's attempts to find life in space"--

An introduction to the rapidly growing category of New Adult (NA) literature, this text provides a roadmap to understanding and introducing NA books to young people in high school, college, libraries, and other settings. As a window into the experiences and unique challenges that young and new adults encounter, New Adult literature intersects with but is distinct from Young Adult literature. This rich resource provides a framework, methods, and plentiful reading recommendations by genre, theme, and discipline on New Adult literature. Starting with a definition of New Adult literature, Kane demonstrates how the inclusion of NA literature helps support and encourage a love of reading. Chapters address important topics that are relevant to young people, including post-high school life, early careers, relationships, activism, and social change. Each chapter features text sets, instructional strategies, writing prompts, and activities to invite and encourage young people to be reflective and engaged in responding to thought-provoking texts. A welcome text for professors of literacy and literature instruction, first-year college instructors, researchers, librarians, and educators, this book provides new ways to assist students as they embark upon the next stage of their lives and is essential reading for courses on teaching literature.

Did you know that the mosquito played an important role in the Louisiana Purchase? Or that dung beetles saved the cattle industry in Australia? That honeybees pollinate about one third of the food we eat? Or that the deadliest animal on earth is an insect? There’s an ant colony some 3,700 miles long! Morgan’s sphinx moth has a tongue more than 13 inches long. A locust plague stopped trains as the tracks became slippery with their crushed bodies. There’s a grasshopper in Africa that eats mice. Jim Nelson’s latest book is a treasure house of fascinating facts, stunning photographs and shocking historical events. One moment you might cringe reading about billions of locusts descending on farmland. The next you may laugh out loud at anecdotes and original poetry. Read about the wasp that turns a cockroach into a zombie or the historic 2024 hatch of a trillion cicadas. Trivia buffs will love the “Insect Book of Records” and chefs can add several insect recipes to their repertoire.

The Botanists’ Library is a lavishly illustrated compendium of the most significant publications that have informed botanical knowledge throughout history.

Examines the history of taxonomy, describing the quest of scientists to name and classify living things from Carl Linnaeus to early twenty-first-century scientists who rely more on microscopic evidence than their senses, which has encouraged an indifference to nature that is responsible for the extinction of many species.

Drawing on letters, poems, notebooks, and secret diaries, Lisbet Koerner tells the moving story of one of the most famous naturalists who ever lived, the Swedish-born botanist and systematizer, Carl Linnaeus. The first scholarly biography of this great Enlightenment scientist in almost one hundred years, Linnaeus also recounts for the first time Linnaeus' grand and bizarre economic projects: to teach tea, saffron, and rice to grow on the Arctic tundra and to domesticate buffaloes, guinea pigs, and elks as Swedish farm animals. Linnaeus hoped to reproduce the economy of empire and colony within the borders of his family home by growing cash crops in Northern Europe. Koerner shows us the often surprising ways he embarked on this project. Her narrative goes against the grain of Linnaean scholarship old and new by analyzing not how modern Linnaeus was, but how he understood science in his time. At the same time, his attempts to organize a state economy according to principles of science prefigured an idea that has become one of the defining features of modernity. Meticulously researched, and based on archival data, Linnaeus will be of compelling interest to historians of the Enlightenment, historians of economics, and historians of science. But this engaging, often funny, and sometimes tragic portrait of a great man will be valued by general readers as well.