The Oxbow (The Connecticut River near Northampton), by Thomas Cole, 1836.

The Oxbow (The Connecticut River near Northampton) (detail), by Thomas Cole, 1836. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Mrs. Russell Sage, 1908.

Book of Nature

Volume 1, Number 3 | summer 2008

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Birds and Flowers of Spring and Summer, by Kano Eino, late seventeenth century.

Preamble

Messages in a Bottle

By Lewis H. Lapham

Nature is the only artist, the wonder of her collected works formed by their reflections in the mirrors of the human imagination.

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Plums and Apricots, by Emilie Preyer (1849-1930), date unknown.

The Art of Nature

By Frederick Turner

Human art, fiction, invention, and technology are not unnatural forces that have suddenly erupted into nature, but rather the natural continuation of nature’s own evolutionary processes.

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Map

Clearing the Inventory

Mining gold, chopping timber, tapping oil, fishing oceans.

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1893 | Chicago

The End of History

Frederick Jackson Turner outlines the importance of frontiers. More

1687 | Cambridge

Law of the Land

Isaac Newton’s rules for investigating phenomena.More

1938 | Berlin

Animal Farm

Hitler’s animal protection laws.More

Charts & Graphs

A Pound of Flesh

Resource consumption required to produce one pound of food.

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British author Aldous Huxley.

Black and white photograph of E. B. White sitting at his typewriter with his dachshund.

Black and white photograph of former chancellor and Führer of Germany Adolf Hitler.

Photograph of British writer and journalist Simon Winchester.

Henry David Thoreau

Nature is immovable.

—Euripides, c. 415 BC

Engraving of William Shakespeare from the first folio edition.

Black and white photograph of Friedrich Nietzsche with a huge mustache.

William Shakespeare & Friedrich Nietzsche

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