User:Macdonald-ross/S3
Mice and bumblebees[change | change source]
Charles Darwin worked out an interesting example where the number of bumblebees depended on the number of mice:
- "Humble-bees are indispensable to the fertilisation of the heartsease (Viola tricolor) [and] humble-bees alone visit the red clover (Trifolium pratense). The number of bumblebees in any district depends on the number of field-mice, which destroy their combs and nests... Now the number of mice is largely dependent.. on the number of cats. Hence it is quite credible that the presence of a feline animal in large numbers in a district might determine... the frequency of certain flowers in that district". Darwin, Charles; Costa, James T. 2009. The Annotated Origin: a facsimile of the first edition of On the Origin of Species annotated by James T. Costa. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: Belknap Press of Harvard University. ISBN 978-0-674-03281-1 p73/74
title thoughts[change | change source]
- This is the basic English wiki guideline on the subject: [1]. It's the default for us, too. Also the position also fits the general English language practice. I hope I have time to do more. I see "Halley's comet" as standard, and so does New Oxford dictionary for scientific writers and editors, but I have to admit En wiki voted down the attempt to move its Halley's Comet page. No-one there thought of saying that the phrase is just a contraction of "The comet of Halley", which puts it in a different light. As for "Meteor Crater", there is absolutely no way 'crater', clearly a common noun, should be capitalised.