In Pursuit of Butterflies: A Fifty-year Affair by Matthew Oates

By Matthew Oates

Matthew Oates has led a butterflying lifestyles. Naturalist, conservationist and passionate lover of poetry, he has committed himself to those exalted creatures: to their remark, to making a song their praises, and to making sure their survival. according to fifty years of designated diaries, In Pursuit of Butterflies is the chronicle of this life.

Oates leads the reader via a life of butterflying, around the mountain tops, the peat bathrooms, sea cliffs, meadows, heaths, the chalk downs and nice forests of the British Isles. choked with humour, zeal, digression, services and anecdote, this ebook offers a profound come upon with certainly one of our nice butterfly fanatics, and with a half-century of butterflies in Britain.

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Extra info for In Pursuit of Butterflies: A Fifty-year Affair

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15 THE CHALLENGE TO SCIENCE A confrontation between these views has become unavoid­ able. For a long time this confrontation was postponed by con­ sidering irreversibility as an illusion, as an approximation; it was man who introduced time into a timeless universe. How­ ever, this solution in which irreversibility is reduced to an illu­ sion or to approximations can no longer be accepted, since we know that irreversibility may be a source of order, of co­ herence, of organization. We can no longer avoid this confrontation.

Isaiah Berlin has rightly seen in this question the beginning of the schism be­ tween the sciences and the humanities: The specific and unique versus the repetitive and the uni­ versal, the concrete versus the abstract, perpetual move­ ment versus rest, the inner versus the outer, quality versus quantity, culture-bound versus timeless principles, mental strife and self-transformation as a permanent con­ dition of man versus the possibility (and desirability) of peace, order, final harmony and the satisfaction of all ra- tional human wishes-these are some of the aspects of the contrast.

We believe that to some extent ever y language provides a different way of describing the common reality in which we are embedded. Some of these characteristics will survive even the most careful translation. In any case, we are most grateful to Joseph Ear ly, Ian MacG il vray, C arol Thurston, and especially to Carl Rubino for their help in the preparation of this English-language version. We would also like to express our deep thanks to Pamela Pape for the careful typing of the successive versions of the manuscript.

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