All posts by Grace Costantino

For anyone who has seen the new BHL business cards, this week’s Book of the Week may look vaguely familiar. Several of the species images used on the cards (and indeed at the top of this webpage) were taken from plates found in the Report on the Zoological Collections Made During the Voyage of the H.M.S. ‘Alert.’

One such expedition, the Challenger Expedition of 1872-1876, served to help “lay the foundation for oceanography.” The expedition, leaving from Portsmouth, England, on the 21st of December, 1872, traversed over 68,000 nautical miles during its exploration. The findings were documented in the publication Report of the Exploring Voyage of the H.M.S. Challenger during the years 1873-1876. This publication, which cataloged over 4,000 new species, provided readers not only with in-depth text describing the findings from the voyage, but also a myriad of beautifully illustrated plates to correspond with these findings.