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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1830 | Washington, D.C.

Removing the Indians

Andrew Jackson defends the price of progress.More

1794 | London

Forests of the Night

William Blake’s fearful symmetry.More

1687 | Cambridge

Law of the Land

Isaac Newton’s rules for investigating phenomena.More

Charts & Graphs

Cost of a Fur Coat

The number of animals involved in the making of a coat.

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Depiction of Plymouth colony governor William Bradford.

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

American poet Anne Bradstreet.

American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted.

Animals hear about death for the first time when they die.

—Arthur Schopenhauer, 1819

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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