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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Scroll of a river passing through mountains covered in clouds.

The Great Bend

By Simon Winchester

What if the Yangtze River had turned south instead of east?

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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

1933 | South Dakota

Point of Order

The “Wild West” begins. More

1836 | Concord

All Things Are Moral

Ralph Waldo Emerson sees the unity of all things.More

Charts & Graphs

Suburban Warfare

An index of suburban danger.

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English poet and satirist Alexander Pope.

Depiction of Plymouth colony governor William Bradford.

Black and white image of American writer Herman Melville.

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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