ellauri078.html on line 141: By Emily Dickinson’s own account, she delighted in all aspects of the school—the curriculum, the teachers, the students. The school prided itself on its connection with Amherst College, offering students regular attendance at college lectures in all the principal subjects— astronomy, botany, chemistry, geology, mathematics, natural history, natural philosophy, and zoology. As this list suggests, the curriculum reflected the 19th-century emphasis on science. That emphasis reappeared in Dickinson’s poems and letters through her fascination with naming, her skilled observation and cultivation of flowers, her carefully wrought descriptions of plants, and her interest in “chemic force.” Those interests, however, rarely celebrated science in the same spirit as the teachers advocated.
ellauri078.html on line 143: In an early poem, she chastised science for its prying interests. Its system interfered with the observer’s preferences; its study took the life out of living things. In “‘Arcturus’ is his other name” she writes, “I pull a flower from the woods - / A monster with a glass / Computes the stamens in a breath - / And has her in a ‘class!’” At the same time, Dickinson’s study of botany was clearly a source of delight. She encouraged her friend Abiah Root to join her in a school assignment: “Have you made an herbarium yet? I hope you will, if you have not, it would be such a treasure to you.” She herself took that assignment seriously, keeping the herbarium generated by her botany textbook for the rest of her life.
xxx/ellauri200.html on line 174: The Ezekiels belonged to Mumbai's Marathi-speaking Jewish community known as the Bene Israel. His father was a professor of botany at Wilson College, and his mother was principal of her own school.
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