Mammal evolution an illustrated guide / Эволюция млекопитающих иллюстрированное руководство

Shelley's lines paint a picture of a lost world, a world resurrected from the antiquities of Greek mythology. But Shelley had more than ancient legends to go on; he was acutely aware of the discoveries of great extinct beasts from the writings of contemporary naturalists. It is known that Shelley attended lectures on mineralogy at Oxford and possessed a library of scientific works which included the writings of Newton, Laplace, Herschel, Davy and Erasmus Darwin. By 1812 he was familiar with James Parkinson's Organic remains published in three volumes between 1804 and 1811. Parkinson was a surgeon and an oryctologist (one who studies fossils or more literally 'things dug up'; the term was popular in the early nineteenth century to be ousted soon after by the term palaeontology). In Organic remains we find vivid portraits of strange gigantic beasts destroyed by a great deluge, the visible evidence of the biblical flood. Our aim here is also to record lost worlds, but in prose rather than poetry, and in anatomical detail rather than in imaginative verse. Shelley's works, however, demonstrate all too clearly how in the early nineteenth century new scientific knowledge was eagerly acquired by the cognoscenti when there were no fissures separating arts and sciences. <...>