All posts in Featured Books

Do you have hen fever? Many in the 19th century did. From about 1845-1855, an obsession with owning and breeding the world’s finest chickens swept across the United States. The epidemic started with Queen Victoria in England, whose royal menagerie of exotic species was enhanced, according to Wright’s The Illustrated Book of Poultry, in 1843 with a selection of chickens known as Cochin China fowl.

Études de fleurs et de fruits: peints d’après nature by Henriette Vincent is a book of beautiful botanical illustrations.  With 48 color plates of stipple engravings of flowers and fruits, this work was first published in Paris, France in 1820. This is a scarce volume with only a few copies known to exist in libraries. In his Flower and fruit prints of the 18th and early 19th centuries, Gordon Dunthorne calls this book “…among the most exquisite of all flower prints in their beauty and delicacy of execution.” Among the fruit depicted are plums, currants, cherries, apricots, grapes, apples, pears, peaches, raspberries, and strawberries.

2016 marks the 10th anniversary of the Biodiversity Heritage Library. We’re kicking off our year-long celebrations with our #BHLat10 campaign this week, 11-15 April 2016. The campaign celebrates BHL’s impact on the global science community, our history and growth, and our collections. Content is being published on our blog, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Pinterest, and BHL.

John Bartram was born in Marple, Pennsylvania in 1699. Although he received limited formal education, he eventually distinguished himself as one of the leading botanists of his day. Through an early and intense interest in botany, he collected rare and useful plants and seeds throughout the colonies which he provided to the gentlemen of Europe, an opportunity which arose from his close friendship with the English botanist, Peter Collinson. He also established one of the finest botanic gardens of the colonial period in Kingsessing (now part of the park system in south Philadelphia). He grew dozens of species of trees, shrubs, and other plants collected on his travels. He even experimented with breeding and selection of cultivars to meet a demand abroad for exotic plants.

In 1872, the Royal Society of London launched the first non-commercial exploration of the deep sea – the Challenger Expedition. Covering nearly 70,000 nautical miles and resulting in the discovery of nearly 4,700 new-to-science species of marine life, the expedition revolutionized knowledge of the ocean and the field of oceanography. It also ignited an interest in deep-sea dredging as a means of scientific discovery. Carl Chun, a German zoologist, was particularly inspired by the Challenger‘s discoveries.

Over 210 years after Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland’s work titled Essai sur la géographie des plantes was published, climate science, book conservation, and botanical research have converged around this 1805 work. This book was digitized and made available in 2008 by the Missouri Botanical Garden for the Biodiversity Heritage Library. In 2015, scientists published a paper detailing their findings as they retraced the path that Humboldt and Bonpland took on their ascent up the dormant volcano, Chimborazo, in Ecuador.