18th century

Schulze, a German physician (1730-1775) with interests in mineralogy and paleontology, was a pioneer of paleobotany, the study of fossil plants. He is credited with recognizing the true nature of fossils, rejecting the supernatural explanations that had held sway for centuries. The Smithsonian Libraries already holds a related publication by Schulze concerning fossil woods; this one is on plants more generally, and the six copper plate engravings in the book are some of the earliest published images of plants preserved in rock sediments.

Frederik Christian Kielsen (1774-1850), a Danish naturalist and teacher, published his Icones in six separate parts: fishes, mammals, insects, invertebrates, birds, and amphibians.  Each has a brief text providing a Linnaean systematic classification followed by (as the title suggests) illustrations of the animals covered; the Icones piscium (fishes) has 48 plates that illustrate 130 species in 57 genera.  With this volume we also purchased his Icones mammalium (111 plates, including 11 of whales and three of Homo sapiens) and Icones insectorum (106 plates

The natural history rare book collection includes a growing body of publications describing, cataloging, illustrating, and/or discussing early natural history cabinets and specimen collections. They are important to scientific researchers for identifying collections and individual specimens that are referenced in taxonomic works (and that may have served as the type on which a new species was named). In this short publication, Friedrich Christian Lesser (1692-1754) describes a number of specimens in his natural history cabinet.