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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Painting of the flower garden dancing in her garden, surrounded by others

Funhouse Goddess

By D. Graham Burnett

It has never been easy to decipher what nature is trying to tell us, but that hasn’t stopped us from filling in the blanks. A look at the sexual politics of natural law theories.

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Map

Clearing the Inventory

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

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1865 | Brooklyn

Parade Music

Walt Whitman’s paean to town and country.More

1803 | Washington, DC

Asking for Particulars

Thomas Jefferson’s instructions for Lewis and Clark.More

2008 | Dubai

Paradise Regained

The world really can revolve around you.More

Charts & Graphs

Forms Assumed by Zeus

For his rape of mortal women.

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German writer and statesman Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Novelist and psychiatrist Daniel Mason.

Photograph of English art critic, novelist, and painter John Berger.

Painted portrait of French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, count de Buffon.

Black and white photograph of a young H.G. Wells with a mustache.

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

Engraving of a bust of Lucretius.

Drive out nature with a pitchfork, and she will always come back.

—Horace, c. 25 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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