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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Painting of the flower garden dancing in her garden, surrounded by others

Funhouse Goddess

By D. Graham Burnett

It has never been easy to decipher what nature is trying to tell us, but that hasn’t stopped us from filling in the blanks. A look at the sexual politics of natural law theories.

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Map

Clearing the Inventory

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

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1830 | Washington, D.C.

Removing the Indians

Andrew Jackson defends the price of progress.More

1903 | Grand Canyon

Notes from the Edge

Theodore Roosevelt asks us to think of the children.More

1687 | Cambridge

Law of the Land

Isaac Newton’s rules for investigating phenomena.More

Charts & Graphs

Something from Nothing

Archaic notions of spontaneous generation.

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Smiling man with thin hair sticking out at a podium

Painting of William Wordsworth.

Oil painting portrair Michel de Montaigne in red robes and white collar

Portrait of English physicist and mathematician Isaac Newton.

Nature never breaks her own laws.

—Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1500

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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