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Scrophularia Nodosa
''Scrophularia nodosa'' (also called figwort, woodland figwort, and common figwort) is a perennial herbaceous plant found in temperate regions of the Northern hemisphere except western North America. It grows in moist and cultivated waste ground. Growth It grows upright, with thick, sharply square, succulent stems up to 150 cm tall from a horizontal rootstock. Its leaves are opposite, ovate at the base and lanceolate at the tip, all having toothed margins. The flowers are in loose cymes in oblong or pyramidal panicles. The individual flowers are globular, with five green sepals encircling green or purple petals, giving way to an egg-shaped seed capsule. Fossil record Seed identification of ''Scrophularia nodosa'' has been made from sub-stage IIIa of the Hoxnian at Clacton in Essex, from the Middle Pleistocene. Folklore The plant was thought, by the doctrine of signatures The doctrine of signatures, dating from the time of Dioscorides and Galen, states that herbs ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Carl Linnaeus
Carl Linnaeus (; 23 May 1707 – 10 January 1778), also known after his ennoblement in 1761 as Carl von Linné Blunt (2004), p. 171. (), was a Swedish botanist, zoologist, taxonomist, and physician who formalised binomial nomenclature, the modern system of naming organisms. He is known as the "father of modern taxonomy". Many of his writings were in Latin; his name is rendered in Latin as and, after his 1761 ennoblement, as . Linnaeus was born in Råshult, the countryside of Småland, in southern Sweden. He received most of his higher education at Uppsala University and began giving lectures in botany there in 1730. He lived abroad between 1735 and 1738, where he studied and also published the first edition of his ' in the Netherlands. He then returned to Sweden where he became professor of medicine and botany at Uppsala. In the 1740s, he was sent on several journeys through Sweden to find and classify plants and animals. In the 1750s and 1760s, he continued to collect an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Flora Of Northern America
Flora is all the plant life present in a particular region or time, generally the naturally occurring (indigenous) native plants. Sometimes bacteria and fungi are also referred to as flora, as in the terms ''gut flora'' or ''skin flora''. Etymology The word "flora" comes from the Latin name of Flora, the goddess of plants, flowers, and fertility in Roman mythology. The technical term "flora" is then derived from a metonymy of this goddess at the end of the sixteenth century. It was first used in poetry to denote the natural vegetation of an area, but soon also assumed the meaning of a work cataloguing such vegetation. Moreover, "Flora" was used to refer to the flowers of an artificial garden in the seventeenth century. The distinction between vegetation (the general appearance of a community) and flora (the taxonomic composition of a community) was first made by Jules Thurmann (1849). Prior to this, the two terms were used indiscriminately.Thurmann, J. (1849). ''Essai de Phyt ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Medicinal Plants
Medicinal plants, also called medicinal herbs, have been discovered and used in traditional medicine practices since prehistoric times. Plants synthesize hundreds of chemical compounds for various functions, including defense and protection against insects, fungi, diseases, and herbivorous mammals. The earliest historical records of herbs are found from the Sumerian civilization, where hundreds of medicinal plants including opium are listed on clay tablets, c. 3000 BC. The Ebers Papyrus from ancient Egypt, c. 1550 BC, describes over 850 plant medicines. The Greek physician Dioscorides, who worked in the Roman army, documented over 1000 recipes for medicines using over 600 medicinal plants in ''De materia medica'', c. 60 AD; this formed the basis of pharmacopoeias for some 1500 years. Drug research sometimes makes use of ethnobotany to search for pharmacologically active substances, and this approach has yielded hundreds of useful compounds. These include the common drugs asp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scrophularia
The genus ''Scrophularia'' of the family Scrophulariaceae comprises about 200 species of herbaceous flowering plants commonly known as figworts. Species of ''Scrophularia'' all share square stems, opposite leaves and open two-lipped flowers forming clusters at the end of their stems. The genus is found throughout the Northern Hemisphere. ''Scrophularia'' species are used as food plants by the larvae of some Lepidoptera species including ''Phymatopus hectoides''. Some species in this genus are known to contain potentially useful substances, such as iridoids, and several ''Scrophularia'' species, such as the Ningpo figwort (''S. ningpoensis''), have been used by herbal medicine practitioners around the world. The name ''Scrophularia'' comes from scrofula, a form of tuberculosis Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious disease usually caused by '' Mycobacterium tuberculosis'' (MTB) bacteria. Tuberculosis generally affects the lungs, but it can also affect other parts of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Doctrine Of Signatures
The doctrine of signatures, dating from the time of Dioscorides and Galen, states that herbs resembling various parts of the body can be used by herbalists to treat ailments of those body parts. A theological justification, as stated by botanists such as William Coles, was that God would have wanted to show men what plants would be useful for. It is today considered to be pseudoscience, and has led to many deaths and severe illnesses. For instance birthwort (so-called because of its resemblance to the uterus), once used widely for pregnancies, is carcinogenic and very damaging to the kidneys, owing to its aristolochic acid content. As a defense against predation, many plants contain toxic chemicals, the action of which is not immediately apparent, or easily tied to the plant rather than other factors History The concept dates from the time of Dioscorides and Galen. Paracelsus (1493–1541) developed the concept, writing that "Nature marks each growth ... according to it ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sir Harry Godwin
Sir Harry Godwin, FRS (9 May 1901 – 12 August 1985) was a prominent English botanist and ecologist of the 20th century. He is considered to be an influential peatland scientist, who coined the phrase "peat archives" in 1981. He had a long association with Clare College, Cambridge. Early life Godwin was born in Yorkshire and soon after moved to Long Eaton, Derbyshire. He had a successful school career and gained a scholarship to Clare College, Cambridge in 1918, gaining his PhD in 1926. He was to be closely involved with Clare College for the rest of his life. It was at this time that he first made friends with the ecologist Arthur Tansley who was to be an important influence on Godwin for many years. Work In the early 1930s Harry and his wife Margaret were "dynamic botanists" who, together with the archaeologist Grahame Clark, led a small group of young academics at the University of Cambridge which aimed to gain a deeper understanding of the environment of past societies by ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Middle Pleistocene
The Chibanian, widely known by its previous designation of Middle Pleistocene, is an age in the international geologic timescale or a stage in chronostratigraphy, being a division of the Pleistocene Epoch within the ongoing Quaternary Period. The Chibanian name was officially ratified in January 2020. It is currently estimated to span the time between 0.770 Ma (770,000 years ago) and 0.126 Ma (126,000 years ago), also expressed as 770–126 ka. It includes the transition in palaeoanthropology from the Lower to the Middle Palaeolithic over 300 ka. The Chibanian is preceded by the Calabrian and succeeded by the proposed Tarantian. The beginning of the Chibanian is the Brunhes–Matuyama reversal, when the Earth's magnetic field last underwent reversal. It ends with the onset of the Eemian interglacial period (Marine Isotope Stage 5). The term Middle Pleistocene was in use as a provisional or "quasi-formal" designation by the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS). W ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Essex
Essex () is a county in the East of England. One of the home counties, it borders Suffolk and Cambridgeshire to the north, the North Sea to the east, Hertfordshire to the west, Kent across the estuary of the River Thames to the south, and Greater London to the south and south-west. There are three cities in Essex: Southend, Colchester and Chelmsford, in order of population. For the purposes of government statistics, Essex is placed in the East of England region. There are four definitions of the extent of Essex, the widest being the ancient county. Next, the largest is the former postal county, followed by the ceremonial county, with the smallest being the administrative county—the area administered by the County Council, which excludes the two unitary authorities of Thurrock and Southend-on-Sea. The ceremonial county occupies the eastern part of what was, during the Early Middle Ages, the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Essex. As well as rural areas and urban areas, it forms ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hoxnian
__NOTOC__ The Hoxnian Stage was a middle Pleistocene stage (Pleistocene from million to 11,700 years BP) of the geological history of the British Isles. It was an interglacial which preceded the Wolstonian Stage and followed the Anglian Stage. It is equivalent to Marine Isotope Stage 11 (MIS 11). Marine Isotope Stage 11 started 424,000 years ago and ended 374,000 years ago. Lisiecki, L. E. (2005)Ages of MIS boundaries.http://www.lorraine-lisiecki.com/stack.html LR04 Benthic Stack] Boston University, Boston, MA The Hoxnian is divided into sub-stages Ho I to Ho IV. History The Hoxnian Stage is named after Hoxne in the English county of Suffolk where some of the deposits created were first found. It was identified and dated with palynology or pollen evidence in the biostratigraphy and later updated with aminostratigraphic techniques. Based on stratigraphic information the Hoxnian happened after the Anglian glacial as Anglian soil is frequently found underneath Hoxnian deposits. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
