Cartas de um jovem cientista

Esta comunicação visa apresentar uma tradução comentada da correspondência entre Francisco de Arruda Furtado (1854-1887) e Charles Darwin (1809-1882) originalmente em francês e inglês. Também apresento aqui um transcrito traduzido parcial de cartas ainda não publicadas entre Darwin e Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911) que mencionam Furtado. Academicamente essas cartas fornecem um recorte sobre o ofício do naturalista no século XIX, sobre a importância das ilhas oceânicas, neste caso os Açores, como laboratórios e estações de trabalho e sobre a vasta rede de contatos postal pela qual os naturalistas se comunicavam. Para além disso, as cartas mostram uma relação inspiradora entre um naturalista açoriano iniciante e seu ídolo quarenta e cinco anos mais velho e uma lenda viva da ciência.

From Specimen to System

The discipline of nineteenth-century botany was central both to the British imperial project and to the development of global theory. This article shows how the work of botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817–1911) advanced certain concepts of globalization by exploring scale relationships in two mid-century texts—a systematic botany, Flora Indica (1855), and a travel narrative, Himalayan Journals (1854)—and by analyzing in particular the methodologies that link individual botanical species and their global distribution. In doing so, he drew upon tropes of the sublime and related aesthetic techniques to raise crucial hermeneutical questions and to perform an important scale critique. His contributions underscore the need for new scale critiques in the humanities today and the recognition that such critiques have significant antecedents in the work of nineteenth-century writers and scientists.

Ecological Form

Victorian England was both the world’s first industrial society and its most powerful global empire. Ecological Form coordinates those facts to show how one version of the Anthropocene first emerged into visibility in the nineteenth century. Many of that era’s most sophisticated observers recognized that the systemic interconnections and global scale of both empire and ecology posed challenges best examined through aesthetic form. Using “ecological formalism” to open new dimensions to our understanding of the Age of Coal, contributors reconsider Victorian literary structures in light of environmental catastrophe; coordinate “natural” questions with social ones; and underscore the category of form—as built structure, internal organizing logic, and generic code—as a means for generating environmental and therefore political knowledge. Together these essays show how Victorian thinkers deployed an array of literary forms, from the elegy and the industrial novel to the utopian romance and the scientific treatise, to think interconnection at world scale. They also renovate our understanding of major writers like Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, John Ruskin, and Joseph Conrad, even while demonstrating the centrality of less celebrated figures, including Dinabandhu Mitra, Samuel Butler, and Joseph Dalton Hooker, to contemporary debates about the humanities and climate change. As the essays survey the circuits of dispossession linking Britain to the Atlantic World, Bengal, New Zealand, and elsewhere—and connecting the Victorian era to our own—they advance the most pressing argument of Ecological Form, which is that past thought can be a resource for reimagining the present.

Updated nomenclature and taxonomic status of the plants of Bangladesh included in Hook. f., the Flora of British India: Volume-II

Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker in his second volume of the Flora of British India included a total of 2328 species in 416 genera under 28 natural orders (= families) of which 201 species in 104 genera under 20 natural orders are determined to have been recorded from the area now in Bangladesh. These taxa are listed with their updated nomenclature and taxonomic status as per ICBN following Cronquist’s system of plant classification. The current nomenclatural treatment revealed a total of 200 species in 109 genera under 25 families to be recognized from the area of Bangladesh. The recorded area and the name of specimen’s collector, as in the protologue of the Flora of British India, are also provided. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3329/bjpt.v19i2.13133 Bangladesh J. Plant Taxon. 19(2): 173-190, 2012 (December)