Literate Lifetime

"Today a reader, tomorrow a leader." -- W. Fusselman
Looking for something great (and free) to read? Enter an author's name and/or a key word from a book title to search for entries in our database of public domain works.


Tyson, Edward, 1650-1708

We have 1 book for this author.

Edward Tyson (1650–August 1, 1708) was born at Clevedon, in Somerset. He obtained a BA from Oxford in 1670, a MA from Oxford in 1673, and a MD from Cambridge in 1677. In 1684 he was appointed physician and governor to the Bethlem Hospital in London (the first mental hospital in Britain). He is credited with changing the hospital from a zoo of sorts, to a place intended to help the inmates.

Tyson is regarded as the founder of comparative anatomy, which compares the anatomy between species. In 1680, he discovered that porpoises are mammals.

In 1698, he dissected a chimpanzee and the result was the book, Orang-Outang, sive Homo Sylvestris: or, the Anatomy of a Pygmie Compared with that of a Monkey, an Ape, and a Man. In this book he came to the conclusion that the chimpanzee has more in common with man than with monkeys, particularly with respect to the brain. This work was republished in 1894, with an introduction by Bertram C. A. Windle that includes a short biography of Edward Tyson.[1]

References

  • John Gribbin The Scientists (2002)
  1. ^ A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients, available at Project Gutenberg.

External links


This biographical information was gathered from the Edward_Tyson page, courtesy of the Wikipedia project.

Books

A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients

Pick of the Day



Lists of Interest

Modern Library 100 Best Novels Modern Library 100 Best Novels: In 1998, Modern Library picked the top 100 Novels of the century. This list contains all of the bo ...

Webmaster's Favourites Webmaster's Favourites: These are my selections, humbly presented as books that I particularly enjoyed.



Other ways of browsing