Ordering the Myriad Things

Name: Ordering the Myriad Things
ISBN: 9780295749471

From Traditional Knowledge to Scientific Botany in China

Nicholas K. Menzies,

K. Sivaramakrishnan,

312 pages
English
PDF
Available on iOS & Android

eBook - PDF

Available until 23 Dec |Learn more

Ordering the Myriad Things

From Traditional Knowledge to Scientific Botany in China

Nicholas K. Menzies,

K. Sivaramakrishnan,

About this book

Winner of the 2024 SHNH Natural History Book Prize (The John Thackray Medal) An exploration of plant wisdom, from the Southern Mountain Tea Flower to the Dawn Redwood China's vast and ancient body of documented knowledge about plants includes horticultural manuals and monographs, comprehensive encyclopedias, geographies, and specialized anthologies of verse and prose written by keen observers of nature. Until the late nineteenth century, however, standard practice did not include deploying a set of diagnostic tools using a common terminology and methodology to identify and describe new and unknown species or properties. Ordering the Myriad Things relates how traditional knowledge of plants in China gave way to scientific botany between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, when plants came to be understood in a hierarchy of taxonomic relationships to other plants and within a broader ecological context. This shift not only expanded the universe of plants beyond the familiar to encompass unknown species and geographies but fueled a new knowledge of China itself. Nicholas K. Menzies highlights the importance of botanical illustration as a tool for recording nature—contrasting how images of plants were used in the past to the conventions of scientific drawing and investigating the transition of "traditional" systems of organization, classification, observation, and description to "modern" ones.

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Yes, you can access Ordering the Myriad Things by Nicholas K. Menzies, K. Sivaramakrishnan in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & Chinese History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.