I was given the chance to grab some 150+ year old books from the central Brooklyn library and picked up some fantastic looking volumes of The Naturalist's Library, edited by Jardin. The pages were crumbling and dustmites were swarming for sure, but the original hand-colored plates of moths and butterflies were too good to pass up.
Reading about Victorian Natural History can really get you lost in the hype that made early sciences into merely a fashionable ghost of the past (less so a major discipline for the general public). It's one of those brief phases of obsession for me again. Additionally, The Heyday of Natural History (1984) is very thorough in depicting Victorian era life and a great read for the curious or bored.
I was hoping I could also find an old illustrated book on mineralogy too
...like these by James Sowerby ( 1817), but so far no luck...
gorgeous pictures...
ReplyDeletethough I'm daft in the area of natural history, I like to think of it where art and science collided best :)