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A Renaissance victory for the dual Alessandro

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 April 2016

Stephen Jay Gould*
Affiliation:
Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138

Extract

Kepler famously remarked of his great Florentine friend that he could never keep sufficiently straight a man whose first name so resembled his last: Galileo Galilei. Others have labored under (or benefited from) this duality, and this third essay of my series tells a tale of the most obscure, yet highly significant, character that I have ever encountered from the early history of our science: the Neapolitan scholar (1461–1523) who called himself Alessandro ab Alessandro, or Alexander de Alexander, or Alessandro degli Alessandro—all meaning (roughly) Alexander from the family of Alexander.

Type
Conceptual Index Fossils: Number 3
Copyright
Copyright © The Paleontological Society 

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References

Literature Cited

Gould, S. J. 2002. I have landed: the end of a beginning in natural history. Harmony Books, New York.Google Scholar