All posts in Featured Books

On the BHL blog, we often focus on the extensive biodiversity information made available through BHL and the innovative ways scientists are using the vast quantities of historical biodiversity data in BHL to conduct contemporary research. BHL is also useful for a range of non-scientific research, however, and is used by researchers in the arts and humanities as well as the sciences. Artists draw on the illustrations for inspiration, while humanities scholars use the digitised collections for historical research.

For librarians and book historians, BHL contains a wealth of provenance information, as well as the material to conduct comparative research. As a librarian in charge of a rare book collection specialising in natural history, I often use BHL to check if our copy of an item is complete, bound in the usual manner, or coloured in the same way as other copies.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is replete with publications which have had a seminal influence on their field. A highly-credentialed member of this category is John H. Day’s A Monograph on the Polychaeta of Southern Africa, published in 1967 in two volumes by the (then) British Museum (Natural History) in London. It is timely to celebrate this book now: on 24 August 2019 the author John Day would have had his 110^th birthday. And, as of this month, the author’s own copy of the book has been digitised for the BHL.

Since July 2016, the papers of taxonomic botanist John Torrey (1796-1873) have been the focus of a digitization and crowdsourced transcription project at the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG). Digitizing and Transcribing the John Torrey Papers, organized in coordination with the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, was created in an effort to digitize and make virtually accessible the correspondence of John Torrey and his colleagues, specifically letters received by Dr. Torrey.

The venerable science journal the Biological Bulletin has been published in association with the Marine Biological Laboratory of Woods Hole, Massachusetts for over 130 years. Presently, the publisher is the University of Chicago Press, with the editorial office in Woods Hole managed by longtime Editor, Carol Schachinger.

The Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) was founded in 1888 through the diligent efforts of working scientists and Boston community leaders deeply invested in the marine and associated biological sciences as a tools to conduct research and develop diverse educational opportunities for the study of marine model organisms, through experimental work ultimately leading to an improved understanding of the human condition.

The June 2019 issue of the Biological Bulletin (Volume 236, Number 3) has an informative and beautiful cover illustration of the venous return half of the circulatory system of the horseshoe crab (Limulus polyphemus), chosen to illustrate an article in the issue: Effects of the Biomedical Bleeding Process on the Behavior of the American Horseshoe Crab, Limulus polyphemus, in Its Natural Habitat. The cover of this issue of the Biological Bulletin was designed from a freely downloaded Biodiversity Heritage Library file, coincidentally from a monograph about the horseshoe crab: Recherches sur l’anatomie des Limules — an 1873 work by Alphonse Milne-Edwards, the French medical doctor, mammologist, ornithologist, and carcinologist (one who studies crustaceans) who was director of the French Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle from 1891-1900.

Fake fossils are a difficult issue for modern paleontologists: there is a booming black market in forgeries, and well-intentioned researchers of the past have even managed to accidentally fool the curators of today with detailed reconstructions! The black market manufacturers have money on their minds and past researchers were simply doing their jobs to the best of their abilities, but one historical case of forged fossils stands out as particularly sinister. The victim was a certain Dr. Johann Bartholomew Adam Beringer (1667-1738), a professor at the University of Wurzburg. The perpetrators: Beringer’s very own colleagues, J. Ignatz Roderick and Georg von Eckhart.[1] This sordid tale resulted in unfortunate endings for all three of the parties involved, but also produced a curious monograph entitled Lithographia Wirceburgensis which can be found digitized in our Unearthed! digital collection.

The first edition of The Fishes of Illinois was published in 1908 by the Illinois State Laboratory of Natural History, representing several decades’ work to document species, distributions, and ecology. The work features detailed, color paintings of fishes attributed to Lydia M. (Hart) Green and Charlotte M. Pinkerton. In the first edition were 55 images representing 53 species, with 20 images representing 18 additional species added for the 1920 second edition. Images were not credited to specific artists in either edition.

Most of the originals were kept by State Laboratory (now Illinois Natural History Survey), and are being reviewed in preparation for accession into the University Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Artists have been identified for most color plates in the 2 editions: 33 by Green, 24 by Pinkerton. Three paintings bearing the name of Max Bihn (one published) were also found among the paintings long assumed to be the work of Green and Pinkerton alone. Green routinely applied a distinctive signature in ink to the front of her work.

Charles Lathrop Pack was a principal organizer of the Victory Garden movement. Victory gardens, war gardens, or, as they were sometimes called, “food gardens for defense,” are gardens meant to be supplement and even improve upon the food supply in times of shortage and rationing due to war, providing a variety of home-grown vegetables, fruits, and herbs. Not limited to typical farming areas or countryside, Victory Gardens were planted in urban areas as well. They sprang up at private homes and in public parks and allotments in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and Germany during World War I and again in World War II.