The Life of Animals: Part 1, Chapter 05: Seals; Chapter 06: Insectivores

Brehm, Alfred Edmund, 1829-1884Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.9
Word count
183K words
Chapters
19

Tags

Foreign Language Books Natural Sciences Animal EncyclopediaNatural HistoryMarine LifeScience EnlightenmentNature ObservationInsectivoresMeticulous NarrativeTaxonomic StudyIllustrated GuideBiology Primer

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Het Leven der Dieren: Deel 1, Hoofdstuk 05: Robben; Hoofdstuk 06: InsectenetersAuthor: Brehm, Alfred Edmund, 1829-1884,Language: Dutch, Class: QL: Science: Zoology, Release Date: Jun 6, 2006

Editor's review

This volume contains the chapters "Seals" and "Insectivores" from Volume 1 of Het Leven der Dieren (The Life of Animals), surveying animal form, habits, and habitat in the observational manner of a nineteenth-century naturalist. Its value lies not only in animal knowledge but in showing the historical face of classification names, descriptive language, and the organization of knowledge. Readers can trace the tradition of nature writing before modern zoology and compare its generalizing accounts with today's more specialized ecological and behavioral research. The seal section suits reading alongside coastal observation, while the insectivore section can be cross-referenced with insect classification and food-chain knowledge. Although some species names and classifications have been updated, the text retains value for the history of science and of reading.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. First mark roughly where seals and insectivores fall in modern classification, then read paragraph by paragraph
  2. Organize the author's descriptions of appearance, habitat, and habits into a comparison table
  3. Consult reliable field guides to check the relationship between old names and actual species
  4. Try a short essay comparing the book's observations with the focus of modern ecology

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19

FAQ

Which animals do the two chapters discuss? Chapter 5, "Seals," mainly discusses seal-like animals, and Chapter 6, "Insectivores," discusses animals grouped as insectivores. Specific translations and classification scope may differ between editions.
Do I need Dutch to read this book? Not strictly, but basic Dutch helps in accurately identifying animal names, body parts, and descriptions of habits. If reading is difficult, use modern field guides and bilingual materials for support.
Does the content still match today's zoology? It should not be adopted wholesale. Many observations and generalizations have historical value, but species names, classifications, and some behavioral explanations have been corrected or supplemented by modern research.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Brehm, Alfred Edmund, 1829-1884 Author

Alfred Edmund Brehm (1829–1884) was a noted nineteenth-century writer on zoology. Details of his life are limited in publicly available sources, yet he left his mark on the history of European natural-history reading through the voluminous Het Leven der Dieren (The Life of Animals). The library holds twenty-two of his works, most of them fascicles of this great series, arranged by taxonomic group and covering beasts of prey, parrots, fowl, rails, waders, seabirds, rodents, and edentates, which shows how he introduced animals order by order within a classification system. His writing combines scientific description with readability, skillfully setting out habits and forms and bringing natural-history knowledge to ordinary readers; it thus had a lasting influence on later popular animal books.