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

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

Book of Nature

Volume 1, Number 3 | summer 2008

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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1726 | London

Wild Child

Wilderness as parent. More

1851 | South Seas

The Savage Sea

“Noah’s flood is not yet subsided.”More

1859 | Downe

Paradigm Shift

Darwin marvels at the grandeur of natural selection.More

Charts & Graphs

Nature’s Calling

A brief history of the toilet.

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English poet Edmund Spenser.

I always think of nature as a great spectacle, somewhat resembling the opera.

- Bernard de Fontenelle, 1686

William Shakespeare & Friedrich Nietzsche

Lapham’sDaily

La Sultana Rossa, by Titian, c. 1550. Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota.

Roundtable

A Charitable Woman

By Leslie Peirce

Sixteenth-century Ottoman queen Roxelana, once a slave, makes her mark. More

U.S. secretary of agriculture Sonny Perdue meets with German minister of food and agriculture Christian Schmidt, 2017.

DÉjÀ Vu

Equal Climates

2017:

U.S. Department of Agriculture bans words related to climate change.

-350:

Aristotle denies that the climate is changing.

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The Fall of Man, by Titian, c. 1550.

LQ Podcast

#13 Stephen Greenblatt

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve. More

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