Reform in the garden

English gardens powered by steam engines offer an intriguing view of how technological and scientific progress was naturalized in the landscape of 19th-century Prussia, and in Prussian culture, during the early years of industrial modernization. One such garden is Peacock Island, in the Havel River near Potsdam. A product of the reform era that preceded and followed the Napoleonic Wars, it expressed the goal of Friedrich Wilhelm III and his government to enter into the British system of factory production and world trade. Modern science, as represented especially by Alexander von Humboldt, played a prominent role.     

The leopard in the garden: life in close quarters at the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle

French naturalists at the Muséum Nationale d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris in the early nineteenth century recognized that their individual and collective successes were intimately linked to questions of power over specimens. France's strength abroad affected the growth of the museum's collections. At the museum, preserving, naming, classifying, displaying, interpreting, and otherwise deploying specimens went hand in hand with promoting scientific theories, advancing scientific careers, and instructing the public. The control of specimens, both literally and figuratively, was the museum's ongoing concern. The leopard in this essay's title, a live specimen confiscated from the streets of Paris in 1793, serves here to represent the tensions created in an existing order of things by the introduction of a potentially disruptive agent. The essay explores the life of the museum and the interrelations among its naturalists, the special challenges created by the establishment of a menagerie, and the histories of particular specimens and ideas.     

构建可持续发展的未来:植物园的作用——第三届世界植物园大会综述及启示

一会议的背景和基本情况世界植物园大会为国际植物园保护联盟(BGCI)最高规格国际会议,旨在为全球的植物园、植物研究所、大学、园艺研究所和