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This text gives biographical accounts of the leading plant collectors and their activities in Southern Africa from the days of the East India Company until modern times.
These parson-naturalists made a significant contribution to the development of British scientific natural history, and played an important role in the foundation of the conservation movement and in the origins of organisations such as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the National Trust. This book presents a full range of interesting and sometimes eccentric individuals from the early days of the Christian faith in the British Isles to modern times. Missionary endeavor and service to the Empire brought the influence of the English parson-naturalist to the very ends of the earth. A key to the appreciation of the success of the parson-naturalist phenomenon is understanding the social milieu in which these men worked. Until the twentieth century clergy were members of a relatively tightly-knit social group, often related to one another by kinship or marriage; a man's clerical colleagues were also his scientific colleagues and his kinsfolk.
Cornwall, the land of sandy beaches, pretty fishing coves, historic fishing ports, tin mining, mansions and gardens, quaint thatched cottages, atmospheric moors, art galleries, writers and picturesque towns? All of that is true but there is so much more to Cornwall and its influence on the rest of Britain and many parts of the world is often forgotten or unknown but yet continues. The county has seen political intrigue; religious upheavals; financial scandals. It has produced political radicals, slaves and slave owners; artists, writers and musicians; renowned engineers, mineralogists and scientists and was the first to introduce compulsory education. Cornwall was the birthplace of the discoverers of chemical elements, the planet Neptune and solar power and has been hugely significant in radio, electrical telegraphy and television. Cornish people have been influential across the centuries, the world and an incredible number of disciplines.
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The author's aim in these essays, which complement his pioneering books on natural history, has been to find out more about the different categories of people who engaged in this field in the past, and to piece together how the subject has been shaped by changes in society as a whole. For long the historical study of natural history was neglected, being questionably science as historians of science chose to define that word; David Allen’s work has done much to remedy this. One group of the essays included here seeks to reinterpret and document more fully topics covered in The Naturalist in Britain; others look at crazes that swept society, notably the Victorian mania for fern collecting, and at the biographies of some of the leading naturalists in 18th- and 19th-century Britain.