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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Scroll of a river passing through mountains covered in clouds.

The Great Bend

By Simon Winchester

What if the Yangtze River had turned south instead of east?

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Map

Clearing the Inventory

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

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1818 | Ingolstadt

Intelligent Design

Frankenstein breaks through the bounds of death.More

1864 | Turin

Cultivation and Its Discontents

“Man is everywhere a disturbing agent.”More

c. 1846 | Walden Pond

Survival of the Fittest

Henry David Thoreau observes the kingdom of the ants. More

Charts & Graphs

Animal Instincts

Composite animals from mythical lore.

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

Smiling man with thin hair sticking out at a podium

Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, and writer Marcus Tullius Cicero.

Painted portrait of German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt.

Color photograph of American writer Annie Dillard.

Portrait of third president of the United States Thomas Jefferson.

Those things are better which are perfected by nature than those which are finished by art.

—Cicero, c. 45 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

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