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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c. 1170 | Cîteaux

Mirror of Nature

Alain de Lille on the seasons of humankind.More

c. 1670 | Massachusetts Bay Colony

More Heaven than Earth

“No winter and no night.”More

1749 | Paris

A Shortage of Rational Conjectures

On the importance of the superficial.More

Charts & Graphs

Something from Nothing

Archaic notions of spontaneous generation.

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

English poet and satirist Alexander Pope.

Photograph of American environmentalist Aldo Leopold.

Painted portrait of English poet John Milton.

American author Evan S. Connell.

A garden must be looked into, and dressed as the body.

—George Herbert, 1640

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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