...: they were sleepwalkers, finding their way in the dark, and Darwin would illuminate them. His argumentative style continually attempted to draw existing practices of classification to his assistance, and made the judgments of his colleagues into surrogate phenomena that would provide evidence for his views...

... literature—and that on nature, as found in natural history writings, especially in botanical classifications. The European colonizing enterprise had resulted in an extensive flow of new objects at every level. Visual representations of these new objects circulated in the European cultural world and were...

...Robert E. Kohler Between the 1890s and the 1930s field ecologists in the United States (and elsewhere) looked to classification to make their fledgling science an exacting and respectable one. Taking plant taxonomy as their model, ecologists expected that more comprehensive empirical knowledge...