Beatrix Potter -- Girl geek

Like most people of my age, I was raised on the diminutive copies of the works of Beatrix Potter. The stories were okay, albeit skimpy on the prose, but the colored plates were (and continue to be) enchanting. We have a freebie Showtime gracias a DirecTV and I recently watched Miss Potter[1].

Anyway, getting back to the point of this trabajo -- Thanks to a Natural History article in the 1980's, I had known that Potter had done more than just children's books[2]. During my morning perigrinations, I came upon a site which had some of her original illustration studies. This sparked me into doing a bit more research into the remarkable woman. The movie stated that she left 4000 acres of land in the Lake Region of Northern England to the National Trust, which was founded by a priest, whom she might have had contact with when she was a girl, vacationing in the area.

Just found a link to her scientific illustrations.

As a scientist (or whatever the hell I am), I was surprised that, in addition to her work as a scientific illustrator, she also was active in the field of mycology and was one of the early proponents of lichens being a symbiotic[3] relationship between funji and alga [4]. She also was a published author, although, as a woman, she was prevented from presenting her article at the Linnean Society[5].

I also looked for her original purchase in the Lake Region, Hill Top Farm. If you have an interest, you can look at it at 54.3517°N, 2.970453°W, in nearly high resolution[6].

In her latter life, she was a great proponent of preserving the Herdwick sheep[7], I only mention because of the shepherds use of the Yan-Tan-Tethra counting of sheep. I was first introduced this in Sir Terry Pratchett's Tiffany Aching Novels (It appears that he was using a mix of regional dialects).

So, forthcoming are planned trabajos in Portugese, yurt canvas, and lichens.


[1] I am a bit ticked that my verison of FireFox no longer has the IMDB search tab, but I have provided a link to the move that I had to go through google to obtain. Grumble.

I enjoyed the movie, even though I watched it over a period of over a week. 'S strange thanks to Bridget Jones', I had thought that Renee Zellweger was a Brit, rather than a Tejana.

[2] http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/ . I subsribed religiously and would read the magazine cover to cover the day that it arrived -- A welcome break from technical reading related to my major at the time. I resubscribed for a year, but after the death of Stephen Jay Gould and Raymond Sokolov leaving the magazine, it was never quite the same. The magazine did allow me to talk intelligently about biology and natural history and one of my professors in Ecuador would ask me, "Do you know?" A great ego-bost for a Latin American Historian.

[3] I originally called this a comensual relationship -- I guess that the alga gets something from the lichen. Trace minerals?
[4] A subject truly worth it's own post.
[5] I tried to find full text copies of the articles, but the Linnean Society does have a page listing her contributions. Sigh -- not everything is on the web.
[6] Unfortnatly Google Street View has not made it to Sawry on the B5285.
[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herdwick_sheep