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SUMMARY:Clas Fredrik Hornstedt\, the 'last Linnaean' in the East Indies\, 
 1783–4 - Christina Skott (Faculty of History)
DTSTART:20170515T120000Z
DTEND:20170515T130000Z
UID:TALK72292@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Edwin Rose
DESCRIPTION:In the early 1780s members of the circle of amateur naturalist
 s in Batavia sometimes referred to as the 'East-Indies Enlightenment' soug
 ht to appoint a curator for the collections of the newly founded _Bataviaa
 sch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen_. It was not far-fetched to t
 urn to Sweden\, as the society looked for a naturalist trained in Linnaean
  method and nomenclature. The man eventually sent out to Java was Clas Fre
 drik Hornstedt\, a student of Carl Peter Thunberg\, himself one of the mos
 t prominent students of Linnaeus. Hornstedt would spend little over a year
  in Java. Returning to Sweden in 1786 he brought with him vast collections
 \, not only of animals\, plants and minerals\, but also _materia medica_\,
  ethnographica and manuscripts\, as well as extensive journals and annotat
 ions.\n\nThis paper uses Hornstedt's collecting endeavour in the East-Indi
 es to make observations on the status of science in Sweden in the generati
 on after the death of Linnaeus. It is argued that the Linnaean ambition to
  record and list everything with boundless scientific detail here was exte
 nded to geography\, history\, literature\, thus contributing to the empiri
 cal knowledge of eighteenth-century Java and its inhabitants. But Hornsted
 t has also been seen as the last travelling Linnaean\, and the fate of his
  collections shows that this particular form of knowledge gathering and co
 llecting was increasingly becoming unfashionable in Sweden.
LOCATION:Seminar Room 1\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
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