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

Purchase

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.

More

Plums and Apricots, by Emilie Preyer (1849-1930), date unknown.

The Art of Nature

By Frederick Turner

Human art, fiction, invention, and technology are not unnatural forces that have suddenly erupted into nature, but rather the natural continuation of nature’s own evolutionary processes.

More

Map

Clearing the Inventory

Mining gold, chopping timber, tapping oil, fishing oceans.

View

1938 | Berlin

Animal Farm

Hitler’s animal protection laws.More

1749 | Paris

A Shortage of Rational Conjectures

On the importance of the superficial.More

2008 | Dubai

Paradise Regained

The world really can revolve around you.More

Charts & Graphs

An Inconvenient Truth

A thousand years of temperatures in the northern hemisphere.

View

Smiling man with thin hair sticking out at a podium

Portrait of English physicist and mathematician Isaac Newton.

Black and white photograph of American novelist John Steinbeck.

English poet and satirist Alexander Pope.

Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés.

Nature resolves everything into its component elements, but annihilates nothing.

—Lucretius, c. 57 BC

Engraving of William Shakespeare from the first folio edition.

Black and white photograph of Friedrich Nietzsche with a huge mustache.

William Shakespeare & Friedrich Nietzsche

Purchase