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chained_bear commented on the word Poinciana pulcherrima
"Darwin carried Humboldt's Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions aboard the Beagle. ... The five-volume English translation appeared in 1825, when Darwin was 16. 'My whole course of life,' he subsequently wrote of Humboldt, 'is due to having read and re-read his Personal Narrative as a youth.' ...
"Humboldt had managed to convey the exhilaration of watching closely as bugs, flowers, birds, and animals pursued their survival strategies with such writing as this: 'What a fabulous and extravagant country we're in ... fantastic plants, electric eels, armadilloes, monkeys, parrots .... What trees! Coconut palms, 50 to 60 feet high; Poinciana pulcherrima with a big bouquet of wonderful crimson flower, pisang and a whole host of trees with enormous leaves and sweet smelling flowers as big as your hand, all utterly new to us. As for the coloring of the birds and fishes--even the crabs are sky-blue and yellow.'"
--Joyce Appleby, Shores of Knowledge: New World Discoveries and the Scientific Imagination (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2013), p. 233
December 28, 2016