Virgolie

erikkwakkel:

pixiedustparcels:

Rare first dated edition of an extensively illustrated early herbal in contemporary hand-colour, with the title and most of the plant and animal names in Latin and German.

for more posts like these, please check out my blog: pixiedustparcels

Nice early-printed book on plants. The medieval page can still be felt in page design.

scientificillustration:

oakapples:

Colour chart used by Austrian botanical illustrator Ferdinand Bauer (1760-1826) for his field observations. His technique was to sketch a ‘painting-by-numbers’ in situ, which we he could later add colour to after returning from whichever botanical expedition he was on. The example of his painting shown here is a depiction of Grevillea banksii, named for the great Sir Joseph.

You can see a sketch with the numbers here:

http://scientificillustration.tumblr.com/post/5616283295/

wasbella102:

A gift of love, music written on a heart, manuscript c.1350-1400

(via archivalia)

jothelibrarian:

Pretty medieval manuscript of the day is a beautiful calendar for May from a stunning manuscript called the The Hours of René d’Anjou which is in the collection of the British Library.

Image source: British Library MS.Egerton 1070. Image declared as public domain on the British Library website.

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josedavidmorales:

A class proyect made with wax crayons. Thirty insects.

Un trabajo de clase hecho con Ceras Manley. Treinta insectos.

(via scientificillustration)

elliott-batten:

Kiyoshi Awazu

(via breakdownpress)

biomedicalephemera:

kidsneedscience:

Born in 1707, Carl Linnaeus would rise to such a level of greatness that the philosopher Jean-Jaques Rousseau once said “Tell him I know no greater man on earth,” and was heralded by many of his contemporaries and apostles as Princeps botanicorum - the Prince of Botany. This praise was not without merit: he’s the reason we name almost everything in biology the way that we do. Prior to Linnaeus, the science dealing with naming, organizing, and classifying organisms, called taxonomy, was a disorganized and confusingly complex mess. The word taxonomy is derived from an irregularly-conjugated Ancient Greek word taxis which means arrangement, and the Ancient Greek suffix -nomia, derived from the Ancient Greek word nemein, meaning to manage.

Linnaeus had a passion for botany, and while he went to school to study medicine, his long-term goals always included learning about plants. At 25, he won a grant to travel to Lapland and document the local flora and fauna. While there, he began to classify the flowers he found with what we now know as the bionomial classification system - from the Latin bi, meaning two, and nominus meaning name. Prior to this system, species were given long, many-worded descriptive names, and there were several competing outlines for classifying plants and animals into groups, none of which were particularly accurate or helpful to a scientist not intimate with the specific branch of biology the outline was designed for. 

The binomial classification system uses two identifiers for a species - the “generic name” (also known as its genus), and the “specific” name (also known as the species). Linnaeus introduced this system in his book Systema naturae, first published in 1735. Even though the first edition was basic and just twelve pages long, it introduced to the scientific community a system that was simple, understandable, easy to remember, and easy to add new species to. Throughout his life, Linnaeus and his apostles continued work on Systema naturae, and by its 10th Edition in 1758, it classified over 4400 species of animals, and 7700 species of plants.

Portrait of Carl Linneaus by Hendrik Hollander, 1853, in the public domain.

Image from Haeckel’s Tree of Life in the public domain.

Guest post for Kids Need Science.

Taxonomy and Nomenclature 101

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urban-librarian:

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

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centuriespast:

Blockbook (ca. 1470)
Apocalypsis Sancti Johannis
Germany, about 1463–67

The Morgan library

(via archivalia)