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If you were asked who Henry David Thoreau is, chances are you’d have a least a general idea along the lines of an author who wrote, among other things, works centered around natural history themes. If we ask you who John Burroughs is, however, would you be able to confidently respond? The fact is, John Burroughs is recognized as “the most important practitioner after Thoreau of that especially American literary genre, the nature essay.” Given the nickname “The Grand Old Man of Nature,” Burroughs was a “virtual cultural institution” of the American Conservation Movement by the turn of the century.

This week for our book of the week, we feature a title that Charles Darwin himself called “one of the great monuments of science in the 19th century.” The book? Voyage dans l’Amérique Méridionale(1835-47), by Alcide Dessalines d’Orbigny. The work chronicles d’Orbigny’s travels to South America for the Paris Museum from 1826-1833. As a result of this voyage, d’Orbigny returned to Paris with more than 10,000 natural history specimens.

It’s almost Halloween, and to celebrate, we wanted to feature a book that properly connoted the Halloween spirit. What did we find? Observations Suggested by the Cattle Plague, About Witchcraft, Credulity, Superstition, Parliamentary Reform, and Other Matters (1866), by H. Strickland Constable. This book is a delightful, tongue-in-cheek discussion of the unconventional cures for ailments and diseases that were popularly accepted during the time period. You might be asking, why is this kind of a book in BHL? The answer: Cattle!

Several months ago, we introduced a new BHL logo, and to publicize the event, we published a blog post that detailed the various images that BHL Staff Members saw within the abstract lines of our new logo. At the end of the post, we asked our users to share their interpretations of the logo with us as well. Many of you did, and, as promised, we’re sharing those today. We send a special thanks to all of you who shared your thoughts with us, and if our logo inspires other ideas, don’t hesitate to share them by commenting on this blog, sending us a tweet (@BioDivLibrary), or posting on our Facebook wall.

This week, while browsing our Flickr site (which, by the way, has over 15,900 images!), we stumbled across the book Field Book of Giant Fishes (1949), by J.R. Norman and F.C. Fraser, and were intrigued. What exactly was a giant fish by this book’s standards, and what would we find when we delved into the pages of this enigmatic title?

This week, we feature one of our colleagues from “across the pond,” as we like to say. Meet Dr. Francisco Welter-Schultes, whose many accomplishments include studying mollusks at the University of Goettingen, initiating and running the AnimalBase project, and, last but certainly not least, participating in the BHL-Europe project!