One of my mentors when I was an undergraduate at the University of Alabama, the lepidopterist Ralph L. Chermock, once remarked to his students that a true naturalist knows the names of ten thousand species of organisms.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Friday, March 23, 2018
A True Naturalist
Edward O. Wilson, Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2016), p. 25: