Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Life Sciences Commons™

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Selected Works

1996

Stemmatics

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences

Trees Of History In Systematics And Philology, Robert O’Hara Dec 1995

Trees Of History In Systematics And Philology, Robert O’Hara

Robert J. O’Hara

«The Natural System» is the name given to the underlying arrangement present in the diversity of life. Unlike a classification, which is made up of classes and members, a system or arrangement is an integrated whole made up of connected parts. In the pre-evolutionary period a variety of forms were proposed for the Natural System, including maps, circles, stars, and abstract multidimensional objects. The trees sketched by Darwin in the 1830s should probably be considered the first genuine evolutionary diagrams of the Natural System—the first genuine evolutionary trees. Darwin refined his image of the Natural System in the well-known evolutionary …

Go to article

Mapping The Space Of Time: Temporal Representation In The Historical Sciences, Robert J. O’Hara Dec 1995

Mapping The Space Of Time: Temporal Representation In The Historical Sciences, Robert J. O’Hara

Robert J. O’Hara

William Whewell (1794–1866), polymathic Victorian scientist, philosopher, historian, and educator, was one of the great neologists of the nineteenth century. Although Whewell’s name is little remembered today except by professional historians and philosophers of science, researchers in many scientific fields work each day in a world that Whewell named. “Miocene” and “Pliocene,” “uniformitarian” and “catastrophist,” “anode” and “cathode,” even the word “scientist” itself—all of these were Whewell coinages. Whewell is particularly important to students of the historical sciences for another word he coined, one that was unfortunately not as successful as many of his others because it is difficult to …

Go to article