Regne animal. Reptiles. Pl. 5. 1. L’Emyde d’Hermann. 2. La Trionyx Chagrinee.

Title

Regne animal. Reptiles. Pl. 5. 1. L’Emyde d’Hermann. 2. La Trionyx Chagrinee.

Description

Five illustrations of two tortoises. 1. emys hermanni. Silent, 2. Trionyx granosus. Silent/African softshell turtle. From the book 'Oken's Allgemeine Naturgeschichte' (Natural History) published 1833, engraved by N. Remonde.

ca. 1860

Artist

Oken (1779-1851)

Oken, Lorenz, (1779-1851) was a German physician, natural philosopher, natural scientist and biologist, comparative anatomist and physiologist. He is regarded as the most important representative of a romantic-speculative natural philosophy of Schellingian character. With Isis, Oken published the first interdisciplinary journal in the German-speaking world for over thirty years. The Assembly of German Naturalists and Physicians was founded on his initiative. Oken received his doctorate in 1804 and his dissertation, written in German, bore the Latin title Febris synochalis biliosa cum typo tertiano et complicatione rheumatica. As early as the summer of 1802, Oken wrote a 22-octavo-page overview of the outline of the system of natural philosophy and the resulting theory of the senses, which was influenced by the romantic natural philosophy of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and contained the basic ideas of Oken's later natural philosophy.Oken lectured as an associate professor of medicine at renowned universities such as Göttingen, Jena, Paris, Munich and finally Zurich.

Historical Description

With the exception of the polar regions and high mountains, turtles colonize all continents and oceans. They can be found in various natural habitats, in tropical forests and swamps, in deserts and semi-deserts, lakes, ponds, rivers, brackish water areas and seas, in temperate, tropical and subtropical climate zones. In Europe there are only nine autochthonous species apart from the sea turtles, four land and five water turtle species. They belong to the Sauropsida order and first appeared more than 220 million years ago in the Carnian (Upper Triassic). They range from Mediterranean land turtle species, gopher or desert tortoises and the particularly numerous, smaller water turtle species in North America and Southeast Asia to large river turtles in South America, giant tortoises on some island groups, soft-shelled turtles in Asia and snake-necked turtles in Australia, right up to the largest, the leatherback turtles, which form a family of their own alongside the sea turtles.