Monday, May 28, 2007
The nature of things
The other night there was a spider on the wall above my head while I was sitting with D. on the couch. We started to wonder about the term Arachnid, and whether it was the Species, the Genus or the Class or what (in the Aristotelian scheme). So, without an encyclopedia and being too lazy to get up and go to the computer, I got out the dictionary and one word led to another and I learned that Arachnid is the class (which includes scorpions, daddy long legs and mites and ticks), Arthropod is the Phyllum and it includes arachnids and insects and (my suspicions about lobsters were correct!) crustaceans. Also myriapods. Myriapods are many-legged creatures like millipedes and centipedes. The dictionary search went on from there, one word leading to the next. All this is probably old knowledge to anyone who took Biology in school, but for someone like me, someone whose parents advised her to to go into the vocational program and "take typing", this was all so interesting and cleared up some of the fuzzier areas of my knowledge about our multi-legged friends.
Don't you love dictionaries? And to think, we were wondering what we'd do with our evenings now that our favourite shows are in repeats. We's gonna do us some learnin'! I once heard that hippos are related to whales; I wonder how... And are sea cucumbers related to centipedes? I'm so glad I don't eat sea creatures.
The other night there was a spider on the wall above my head while I was sitting with D. on the couch. We started to wonder about the term Arachnid, and whether it was the Species, the Genus or the Class or what (in the Aristotelian scheme). So, without an encyclopedia and being too lazy to get up and go to the computer, I got out the dictionary and one word led to another and I learned that Arachnid is the class (which includes scorpions, daddy long legs and mites and ticks), Arthropod is the Phyllum and it includes arachnids and insects and (my suspicions about lobsters were correct!) crustaceans. Also myriapods. Myriapods are many-legged creatures like millipedes and centipedes. The dictionary search went on from there, one word leading to the next. All this is probably old knowledge to anyone who took Biology in school, but for someone like me, someone whose parents advised her to to go into the vocational program and "take typing", this was all so interesting and cleared up some of the fuzzier areas of my knowledge about our multi-legged friends.
Don't you love dictionaries? And to think, we were wondering what we'd do with our evenings now that our favourite shows are in repeats. We's gonna do us some learnin'! I once heard that hippos are related to whales; I wonder how... And are sea cucumbers related to centipedes? I'm so glad I don't eat sea creatures.
# posted by becca : 11:19 AM
