Old Email Archive

digest 1997-04-28 #001


11:25 PM 4/27/97 -0700
From: "Society for Literature & Science" 

Daily SLS Email Digest
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 27 Apr 1997 04:16:28 -0700
From: Everdell@aol.com
Subject: Re: requesting thoughts
In a message dated 4/23/97 1:14:38 AM, you wrote:
Tim Catalano writes:
<>
My own experience suggests that popular science begins more as a French
genre
in the 18th century.  A direct line runs from Bayle's Thoughts on the
Comet
(c1687) through Voltaire's Philosophical Letters (1734) to 19thC writers
like
Camille Flammarion, Jules Verne, and even Henri Poincare.  Try it;
you'll
like it.  I think it should be called the "literature of
explanation" and be
taken right back to antiquity and forward to John Casti, Lewis Thomas,
and
S.J. Gould.  As for the literature of exploration, I recommend a dip in
the
vast voyage literature of the 16th and 17th centuries, culminating in
Montaigne's "Cannibals" and feeding directly into Darwin's
Voyage of the
Beagle.
- -Bill Everdell, Brooklyn