Kingdom of Ants
José Celestino Mutis and the Dawn of Natural History in the New World
2010
First Published
4.28
Average Rating
110
Number of Pages
One of the earliest New World naturalists, José Celestino Mutis began his professional life as a physician in Spain and ended it as a scientist and natural philosopher in modern-day Colombia. Drawing on new translations of Mutis' nearly forgotten writings, this fascinating story of scientific adventure in eighteenth-century South America retrieves Mutis' contributions from obscurity. In 1760, the 28-year-old Mutis―newly appointed as the personal physician of the Viceroy of the New Kingdom of Granada―embarked on a 48-year exploration of the natural world of northern South America. His thirst for knowledge led Mutis to study the region's flora, become a professor of mathematics, construct the first astronomical observatory in the Western Hemisphere, and amass one of the largest scientific libraries in the world. He translated Newton's writings and penned essays about Copernicus; lectured extensively on astronomy, geography, and meteorology; and eventually became a priest. But, as two-time Pulitzer Prize–winner Edward O. Wilson and Spanish natural history scholar José M. Gómez Durán reveal in this enjoyable and illustrative account, one of Mutis' most magnificent accomplishments involved ants. Acting at the urging of Carl Linnaeus―the father of taxonomy―shortly after he arrived in the New Kingdom of Granada, Mutis began studying the ants that swarmed everywhere. Though he lacked any entomological training, Mutis built his own classification for the species he found and named at a time when New World entomology was largely nonexistent. His unorthodox catalog of army ants, leafcutters, and other six-legged creatures found along the banks of the Magdalena provided a starting point for future study. Wilson and Durán weave a compelling, fast-paced story of ants on the march and the eighteenth-century scientist who followed them. A unique glance into the early world of science exploration, Kingdom of Ants is a delight to read and filled with intriguing information.
Avg Rating
4.28
Number of Ratings
114
5 STARS
56%
4 STARS
22%
3 STARS
17%
2 STARS
4%
1 STARS
1%
goodreads
Author
Edward O. Wilson
Author · 46 books
Edward Osborne Wilson, sometimes credited as E.O. Wilson, was an American biologist, researcher, theorist, and author. His biological specialty is myrmecology, a branch of entomology. A two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, Wilson is known for his career as a scientist, his advocacy for environmentalism, and his secular-humanist ideas pertaining to religious and ethical matters. He was the Pellegrino University Research Professor in Entomology for the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He is a Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism.
