Richard Fallon

Miller's favourite phrase is 'noble araucarian'.

Is this true @susieoftraken.bsky.social? Seems legit.

It was emphatically the period of plants,—"of herbs yielding seed after their kind." In no other age did the world ever witness such a flora: the youth of the earth was peculiarly a green and umbrageous youth,—a youth of dusk and tangled forests, of huge pines and stately araucarians, of the reed-like calamite, the tall tree-fern, the sculptured sigillaria, and the hirsute lepidodendron. Wherever dry land, or shallow lake, or running stream appeared, from where Melville Island now spreads out its ice wastes under the star of the pole, to where the arid plains of Australia lie solitary beneath the bright cross of the south, a rank and luxuriant herbage cumbered every footbreadth of the dank and steaming soil; and even to distant planets our earth must have shone through the enveloping cloud with a green and delicate ray.

Hugh Miller here nonchalantly proposes that the Carboniferous period was so green with plants that its greenness could have been seen from distant planets. From his 7 February 1854 Exeter Hall lecture on 'The Two Records: The Mosaic and the Geological'.

Thread a camel through the eye of a lith...

Please help me share the CFP for this Literature Compass Special Issue dedicated to the work of Simon J James and covering key Victorian and Edwardian writers like H. G. Wells, George Gissing, Dickens, Wilde, George Du Maurier, and Conan-Doyle on behalf of Hadas Elber-Aviram.

'A puzzled Battersea park-keeper, Mr C. Barnard, takes a second look – this time without spectacles – at "Biolith", a Blue Ancaster stone sculpture by Barbara Hepworth, on show at the Second International Open Air Exhibition of Sculpture'. Add your own wacky double take sound effects.

Will have to get out the microscope to look for traces of compliments

The auction page for an 1888 preparatory charcoal sketch for Henry Jones Thaddeus's painting of the elderly Richard Owen. I guess you would put your champagne on a little ledge to celebrate if you won this auction (www.morganodriscoll.com/art/henry-jo...).

Stipple engraving of Gideon Mantell, standing before fossil bones. Painted by J. J. Masquerier and engraved by Samuel Stepney.

A bit more detail in his journal and Gideon Mantell could have been the Samuel Pepys of paleontology. 6 March 1842: 'Attended a lecture by Prof. Ansted on the Megatherium, at the London Institution—very poor'. Need more dirt about the rubbish ground sloth lecture.

Okay I lied before. This is ACTUALLY the final cover. I was, however, telling the truth about it being great for people interested in heritage, libraries, our relationship to books, &c. Maybe your library would like to preorder a copy? Maybe you are rich and would like to preorder a copy?

@claregs.bsky.social Hastily messaging you here as I haven't done age verification for messages and I don't have your current email: there are some interesting and fun historical NHM-RCA connections. If that would ever be a useful topic for you do get in touch!

Thanks! Haha ouch... Everyone's a critic.

Turner's sublime, quasi-impressionistic painting of the misty mountains around Loch Coruisk on Skye.

Making the final corrections for a chapter on nineteenth-century 'Cosmic Time' for Bloomsbury's Cultural History of Time book series. It was great fun to write, so let's hope the wisdom from the film industry doesn't apply here (if the actors are having lots of fun, the audience won't).

Eating the Washington monument won't last it long

A Cathedral to Nature: The Archives of the Natural History Museum — Explore Your Archive An overview of the collections of The Natural History Museum Archive, providing insights into a range of fascinating topics.

💫New Blog Post!💫

Our last blog for July's theme #EYANature explores the archives of the Natural History Museum. Check it out to discover more about their fascinating collections 🌱

@nhmlibraryarchives.bsky.social #ExploreYourArchive

www.exploreyourarchive.org/a-cathedral-...

Poster for The Deadly Mantis film, with various lurid captions, including 'Out of a Million Years...A Thousand Tons of Horror!'

Lot of good posters for The Deadly Mantis out there. 'Dwarfing man's machines! Jet planes can't stop him! Flamethrowers no avail! Trapped by science!' A series of events for STS scholars to ponder upon.

Italian poster for "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers" (1956). #scifi #horror

Hadn't come across this at all but thanks for alerting me to it!

Leonid Brezhnev, the leader of the Soviet Union, met Connors when Brezhnev arrived on Air Force One at El Toro Marine Corps Air Station with President Richard Nixon in June 1973. Brezhnev noticed Connors in the group on the tarmac waiting to receive the President and him. Brezhnev shook Connors' hand and then wrapped his arms around him, and leapt into Connors' arms to be lifted up by the hulking American actor. The crowd laughed and clapped at the spectacle. Later, at a party given by Nixon at the Western White House in San Clemente, California, Connors presented Brezhnev with a pair of Colt Single Action Army "Six-Shooters" (revolvers), which Brezhnev liked greatly.[38] Few American television programs were permitted to be broadcast in the Soviet Union at that time; The Rifleman was an exception, because it happened to be Brezhnev's favorite show. Connors and Brezhnev got along so well that Connors accepted an invitation to visit the Soviet leader in Moscow in December 1973. After Brezhnev's death in 1982, Connors expressed an interest in returning to the Soviet Union for the General Secretary's funeral, but the U.S. government would not allow Connors to be part of the official delegation.[39]

Not sure who needs to hear this, but the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev had a bromance with the US actor-sportsman Chuck Connors and at one point leapt right into his arms. At least, according to Wikipedia.

In the mists of time, that one

Very true. It's blandly acknowledging a factoid here, but not offering the (source-backed) correction that would make its paragraph actually valuable.

Here's a good example of Google's LLM buoying up 'widely believed facts' (to quote Futurama): 'The phrase "she sells seashells by the seashore" is a famous tongue twister that is widely believed to be inspired by Mary Anning'. As @tomsharperocks.bsky.social has noted, this claim has no substance.

Illustrated London News feature on the British Association, with vignettes of famous men of science around an engraving of the central auditorium.

Close-up of Lord Rosse in action pose.

Lord Rosse. Professor Sedgwick. The Marquis of Northampton. The British Association for the Advancement of Science Meeting at York. Coming autumn 1844.

Like most English-language journalism about prehistoric animals in the mid-1890s, evidently written and illustrated by someone who had the books of H.N. Hutchinson to hand. In this case Creatures of Other Days (1894).

Daguerreotype of Emily Dickinson in a gold mount.

Nineteenth-century lithograph of the 'bobolink or rice-bird'.

Didn't know much about Emily Dickinson before starting to read this mammoth edition of her poems. I now know something for sure: Dickinson really loved the bobolink.

Forthcoming (early 2026) *The Science of Lost Worlds* (BSPSOpen/UCalgary Press). Featuring illustrations by Jim Robins and philosophy by um me!!!

Cheers!

Thank you!!

Not sure about economics but a lot of fundamentalists did blame evolution and its alleged amorality for the horrors of WW1. However there are also broader questions about US conservative/populist reactions against, as they felt, having modern/liberal ideas foisted upon them, taught in schools, etc.

Thanks, Benjamin! Ronald Numbers's revised edition of The Creationists is still the main overview of creationism, albeit its heart is in the c20th. Ralph O'Connor has a great article on the nineteenth-century heyday of YEC in the 1820s–40s too.