title: Sex, Botany, and Empire: The Story of Carl Linnaeus and Joseph Banks (Revolutions in Science)
author:  Patricia Fara 
description: Fara, of the history and philosophy of science department at Cambridge, presents a book in search of a thesis. Despite the intriguing title, it spends little time drawing parallels among British imperialism, botany and eroticism (or, as Fara calls them, "the three Ss: Sex, Science and the State"). The main focus is, instead, on two 18th-century botanists: Carl Linnaeus, a Swede who developed the modern system for classifying organisms, and Joseph Banks, who popularized Linnaeus's system and brought science into the political arena in Britain as head of the Royal Society. Instead of relating a coherent history of these two men who never met, the book bounces between the two like a pinball, going forward and backward in time, repeatedly revisiting Banks's satyric/scientific trip to Tahiti and Australia with James Cook. Instead of analysis of the history being presented, we are treated to long-winded portraits of the key figures and of Tahitian orgies. In the end, the reader comes away with an incoherent image of the British Empire at the end of the 18th century. Fara (<I>Newton: The Making of Genius</I>) would have done better to spend time placing her stories in a historical context that might have showed how sex, botany and empire were connected. 15 illus. <BR>Copyright &copy; Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
zlib_text:   
    
    
  
  **THE**  
   **EVOLUTION**  
   **OF**  
   **CALPURNIA**  
   **TATE**
  
    
  
  JACQUELINE KELLY
  
   **THE**  
   **EVOLUTION**  
   **OF**  
   **CALPURNIA**  
   **TATE**
  
  ![](Images/image00149.jpeg)  
    
    
    
    
    
  HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY  
  NEW YORK
  
   **Table of Contents**
  
    
  
  TITLE
  
  COPYRIGHT
  
  DEDICATION
  
  CHAPTER 1: THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES
  
  CHAPTER 2: THE MEASURE OF THE MORNING
  
  CHAPTER 3: THE POSSUM WARS
  
  CHAPTER 4: VIOLA
  
  CHAPTER 5: DISTILLATIONS
  
  CHAPTER 6: MUSIC LESSONS
  
  CHAPTER 7: HARRY GETS A GIRLFRIEND
  
  CHAPTER 8: MICROSCOPY
  
  CHAPTER 9: PETEY
  
  CHAPTER 10: LULA STIRS UP TROUBLE (BUT DOESN’T MEAN TO)
  
  CHAPTER 11: KNITTING LESSONS
  
  CHAPTER 12: A SCIENTIFIC STUDY
  
  CHAPTER 13: A SCIENTIFIC CORRESPONDENCE
  
  CHAPTER 14: THE SHORT HOE
  
  CHAPTER 15: A SEA OF COTTON
  
  CHAPTER 16: THE TELEPHONE COMES
  
  CHAPTER 17: HOME ECONOMIES
  
  CHAPTER 18: COOKING LESSONS
  
  CHAPTER 19: A DISTILLERY SUCCESS, OF SORTS
  
  CHAPTER 20: THE BIG BIRTHDAY
  
  CHAPTER 21: THE REPRODUCTIVE IMPERATIVE
  
  CHAPTER 22: THANKSGIVING
  
  CHAP