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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1749 | Paris

A Shortage of Rational Conjectures

On the importance of the superficial.More

1783 | Weimar

Goethe in Love

Falling for a natural beauty.More

1851 | South Seas

The Savage Sea

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

Charts & Graphs

Forms Assumed by Zeus

For his rape of mortal women.

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French-American author J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur.

Black and white image of American writer Herman Melville.

Portrait bust of presumed author of the Iliad and the Odyssey Homer.

Photograph of American novelist Jack London.

God writes the Gospel not in the Bible alone, but on trees and flowers and clouds and stars.

—Martin Luther

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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