biology

This book is of interest primarily for including the journal of Charles Le Raye, a fur trader who was purportedly captured by the Sioux on the upper Missouri River. It included descriptions of the Native American peoples whom he encountered and the animals of the region. The journal is actually a fabrication, drawn from contemporary accounts of the Lewis & Clark and the Pike expeditions, but it is the source for the first descriptions and scientific names of seven species of American mammals, including the mule deer.

Englishman John Ray (1627-1705) is considered by many to be the greatest naturalist of his day, and his works in the fields of botany and zoology are classics of pre-Linnean classification. The Synopsis methodica stirpium brittannicarum, in particular, was the standard botanical authority for many years; it is considered remarkably accurate in its coverage and descriptions of the British flora, and the classification follows a natural sequence, replacing earlier methods with the concept of grouping plants by direct observation of their similarities and differences.

Thomas Martyn was Regius Professor of Botany at Cambridge University and an early adopter of Linnaean classification and nomenclature, which he promulgated in his public lectures. In this work, based on a paper given to the Linnean Society in 1789, he defines hundreds of Linnaean terms and clarifies conceptual aspects of the Linnaean system, which is the foundation for the work of modern researchers at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

This is a manual for collecting, preserving, and organizing natural-history specimens: specifically, the arrangement of a mineral collection, organizing a botanical collection and creating an herbarium, and the conservation of zoological exhibits. These subjects form one of the Cullman Library's particular interests, in support of collection management staff as well as historical research at the National Museum of Natural History. The half-dozen or so German manuals in our collection fall mainly at either end of the 1800s, and this one forms a continuum through the 19th century.

This slim pamphlet, prepared for a short-lived organization that preceded the founding of the Smithsonian Institution, is one of a numerous collection of early instructions for collecting specimens of plants and animals. These publications reflect the growing recognition of the importance of proper preservation techniques and record-keeping for natural history collections as private collections evolved into public museums through the 19th century.

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

A professor of anatomy and surgery at the University of Leiden, Adriaan van de Spiegel (1578-1625) also studied botany, and his Isagoges in Rem Herbariam Libri Duo is an early work on plant classification. Linnaeus, who established the modern system of scientific nomenclature, held Spiegel's book in high regard and named a genus of flowering plants Spigelia in his honor.

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.

Hermann, a physician and botanist, traveled to Africa, India, and Ceylon in the service of the Dutch East India Company and later served as the director of the famous botanic garden at the University of Leiden. In this work he published detailed descriptions and illustrations of the garden's plants, organized in accordance with the classification system of the great pre-Linnaean systematist Joseph Tournefort, under whom Hermann had studied in Paris.

Pierre Hippolyte Lucas (1815?-1899) began his career in science at 13 as an apprentice preparator in the zoological laboratory of the Muséum Nationale d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris. He became a respected expert on several orders of invertebrates and wrote up the specimens of several important French expeditions. Held by only 6 libraries in the U.S., the present work is on non-European butterflies, including species from Australia and other areas in the Pacific.

A Dutch/Belgian ornithologist and paleontologist, du Bus amassed a private collection of almost 2500 bird specimens upon which he based this work and which he donated to the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences when he became its director in 1846. Describing and illustrating species new to Western science, the Esquisses ornithologiques was issued in parts, with five hand-colored lithographs and corresponding text in each; SIL holds the first three parts (of seven total), with their original printed wrappers.