voyage

Island Life

This is the first edition of Alfred Russel Wallace’s (1823-1913) work on biodiversity, a subject of study that wasn’t as popular 130 years ago. Wallace is referred to as the “father of biogeography” due to his extensive fieldwork around the world documenting species' distribution based on their locations. He is also considered Charles Darwin’s biggest influencer and proponent when Darwin was writing On the Origins of a Species, based on Wallace's theories of natural selection.

Vlyssis Aldrovandi

Italian polymath Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605) has been called the father of natural history by such giants in the field as Carl Linnaeus and the Comte de Buffon. A true Renaissance man, he studied law, philosophy, and medicine before being named the University of Bologna’s first Chair of Natural Science in 1561. He founded the University’s botanical garden— one of the first of its kind in Europe— several years later, and included space for his natural history collection, which included animal specimens, minerals, plants, and man-made artifacts.

Report on the Collections of Natural History

The Southern Cross Expedition (otherwise known as the British Antarctic Expedition) holds a special place in history: it was the first British venture of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, the first to ever winter on the Antarctic mainland, the first to visit the Great Ice Barrier in over 50 years, and a pioneer of Antarctic survival and travel techniques. Roald Amundsen, the first man to reach the South Pole, even stated that the expedition’s work helped him and other explorers.

Resa uti Europa, Africa, Asia, foerröttad åren 1770-1779

Linnaeus's greatest disciple and successor, Carl Peter Thunberg (1743-1838) made major contributions to the botany of South Africa and Japan as a result of his travels described in this book. The Smithsonian Libraries holds many of his specifically botanical publications, as well as an English translation of this work (3rd ed., 1795-1796; in the Russell E. Train Africana collection). Thunberg's narrative covers his travels in southern Europe, the Cape of Good Hope, the South African interior, Java, Japan, and Ceylon, and holds great ethnographical interest.

Les Trochilidées, ou, les Colibris et les Oiseaux-Mouches

René Primevère Lesson, having served as surgeon/pharmacist/naturalist on the round-the-world scientific voyage of the Coquille (1822-1825), subsequently published several works in ornithology and mammalogy. Les Trochilidées is the third and last volume of his classic work on hummingbirds, and its purchase completes the Smithsonian Libraries' set. Beautifully illustrated, the plates are color-printed and finished by hand to accompany the species descriptions and a general natural history of hummingbirds. This copy survives in sheets as issued, folded but un-cut and un-bound.

Paradisus Batavus, Continens Plus Centum Plantas Affabre Aere Incises & Descriptionibus Illustratas.

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.