{"id":8910,"date":"2014-07-09T11:30:13","date_gmt":"2014-07-09T18:30:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/?p=8910"},"modified":"2014-07-09T11:38:39","modified_gmt":"2014-07-09T18:38:39","slug":"other-peoples-bird-books-going-to-roost-with-the-birds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/2014\/07\/09\/other-peoples-bird-books-going-to-roost-with-the-birds\/","title":{"rendered":"Other People’s Bird Books: Going to Roost with the Birds"},"content":{"rendered":"

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When I was young, we said of someone retiring early that he was “going to sleep with the chickens.”<\/p>\n

In 1784 — antedating even my long-ago childhood — the English botanist and physician James Edward Smith<\/a> purchased the library and collections of Carl von Linn\u00e9.<\/p>\n

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Most of those materials became, of course,\u00a0the intellectual foundation of\u00a0the Linnean Society of London. The Archiater’s personal copy of the 1766 Twelfth Edition of the Systema naturae, <\/em>though, made its way into the library of Harvard’s\u00a0Arnold Arboretum<\/a>, and thence, by one of those now everyday e-miracles that still leaves me shaking my head in grateful disbelief,\u00a0to the internet<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Like so many copies of the\u00a0Systema\u00a0<\/em>in all its editions, this one is well annotated. Most of the notes are, as expected, bibliographic. But there are a few more substantive manuscript additions; my favorite is this one:<\/p>\n

In the Arctic regions, the birds retreat\u00a0once every twenty-four hours\u00a0to sleep. In this they serve as a clock for the local inhabitants, whose night thus begins and ends with the roosting of the birds.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Plus \u00e7a change….<\/p>\n

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When I was young, we said of someone retiring early that he was “going to sleep with the chickens.” In 1784 — antedating even my long-ago childhood — the English botanist and physician James Edward Smith purchased the library and collections of Carl von Linn\u00e9. Most of those materials became, of course,\u00a0the intellectual foundation of\u00a0the … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Other People’s Bird Books: Going to Roost with the Birds”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,212],"tags":[161,214,213,215],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8910"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8910"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8910\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8918,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8910\/revisions\/8918"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8910"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8910"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}