Blending global scope with local depth, this book throws new light on important themes. Spanning four centuries and vast space, it combines the history of ideas with particular histories of encounters between European voyagers and Indigenous people in Oceania (Island Southeast Asia, New Guinea, Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands).
This book is a new history of an ancient geography. It reassesses the evidence for why Europeans believed a massive southern continent existed, and why they advocated for its discovery. When ships were equal to ambitions, explorers set out to find and claim Terra Australis. Antipodes charts these voyages?voyages both through the imagination and across the High Seas?in pursuit of the mythical Terra Australis. In doing so, the question is asked: how could so many fail to see the realities they encountered? And how is it a mythical land held the gaze of an era famed for breaking free the shackles of superstition? That Terra Australis did not exist didn?t stop explorers pursuing the continent, unwilling to abandon the promise of such a rich and magnificent land till it was stripped of every ounce of value it had ever promised. In the process, the southern continent?an imaginary land?became one of the shaping forces of early modern history. Includes 48 pages of b & w and colour images.
A chapter on Staphylinidae in a 1976 book on marine insects was the last general work on coastal rove beetles worldwide. Since then, phylogenetic studies on rove beetles have yielded a different perspective on that family, now with well over 50,000 species. Almost 400 species of them are now believed to be restricted to sea coasts. The detailed distribution and current classification of the coastal species are here documented in a review of the world literature accompanied by discussion and numerous color photographs of habitus and habitat.
The legacy of Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) looms large over the natural sciences. His 1799–1804 research expedition to Central and South America with botanist Aimé Bonpland set the course for the great scientific surveys of the nineteenth century, and inspired such essayists and artists as Emerson, Goethe, Thoreau, Poe, and Church. The chronicles of the expedition were published in Paris after Humboldt’s return, and first among them was the 1807 “Essay on the Geography of Plants.” Among the most cited writings in natural history, after the works of Darwin and Wallace, this work appears here for the first time in a complete English-language translation. Covering far more than its title implies, it represents the first articulation of an integrative “science of the earth, ” encompassing most of today’s environmental sciences. Ecologist Stephen T. Jackson introduces the treatise and explains its enduring significance two centuries after its publication.