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

Purchase

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.

More

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.

More

Map

Clearing the Inventory

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

View

c. 1600 | Salem

Staging a Puppet Show

Nathaniel Hawthorne on what lies beneath Main Street.More

1866 | Atlantic Ocean

State of Nature

For Jules Verne, the sea is everything.More

1912 | Yosemite

Defying the Foul Fiend

John Muir defends man’s holiest temple.More

Charts & Graphs

Something from Nothing

Archaic notions of spontaneous generation.

View

Portrait bust of Roman poet Virgil.

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

Image of English naturalist Charles Darwin.

Black and white photograph of Polish-born English writer Joseph Conrad.

Image of medieval traveler Sir John Mandeville.

American diplomat, scholar, and conservationist George Perkins Marsh.

Men argue, nature acts.

—Voltaire, 1764

Engraving of William Shakespeare from the first folio edition.

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

William Shakespeare & Friedrich Nietzsche

Purchase