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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Deer in the Forest, by Gustave Courbet, 1868.

And Such Small Deer

By Garret Keizer

A writer struggles to defend his trees from a pack of hungry deer—“an episode of great vexation and buffoonery.”

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Map

Clearing the Inventory

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

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c. 1861 | Amherst

Taints of Majesty

Emily Dickinson looks up at the night sky.More

1851 | South Seas

The Savage Sea

“Noah’s flood is not yet subsided.”More

1872 | New York City

Defending His Park Against the Philistines

Parks and recreation by Frederick Law Olmsted.More

Charts & Graphs

A Pound of Flesh

Resource consumption required to produce one pound of food.

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Painting of a bearded man with dark eyes wearing a white ruff

At the age of seventeen, Hawthorne mused to his mother about the possibility of “relying for support upon my pen.”

French man of letters Denis Diderot.

Engraving of William Shakespeare from the first folio edition.

Black and white photograph of Emily Dickinson sitting next to a desk.

Image of English naturalist Charles Darwin.

We never are definitely right; we can only be sure we are wrong.

—Richard P. Feynman, 1965

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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