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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1794 | London

Forests of the Night

William Blake’s fearful symmetry.More

1872 | New York City

Defending His Park Against the Philistines

Parks and recreation by Frederick Law Olmsted.More

1896 | Island of Dr. Moreau

Man of Science

H.G. Wells manufactures monsters.More

Charts & Graphs

Forms Assumed by Zeus

For his rape of mortal women.

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

English economist and demographer Thomas Malthus.

Oil painting portrair Michel de Montaigne in red robes and white collar

British author Aldous Huxley.

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

Black and white photograph of former chancellor and Führer of Germany Adolf Hitler.

At the age of seventeen, Hawthorne mused to his mother about the possibility of “relying for support upon my pen.”

The temple bell stops but I still hear the sound coming out of the flowers.

—Basho, c. 1690

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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