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Naturalist, educator, and founder of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz was born on May 28, 1807, in Môtier, Switzerland, the oldest son of prominent pastor Rodolphe Agassiz and Rose Mayor Agassiz. Growing up near Lake Morat, Louis was fascinated by fish, catching them barehanded along with his brother Auguste. Louis was determined to study science, although his family encouraged him to pursue medicine. He studied at the Universities of Munich, Heidelberg, and Erlangen, earning a Ph.D. in 1829 and an M.D. in 1830.

1834 was a landmark year in the field of herpetology – the study of amphibians and reptiles. It was the year that the first volume of André Marie Constant Duméril’s monumental work Erpétologie générale ou Histoire naturelle complète des reptiles was published.

In 1855, after an exhausting trip across the Amazon, botanist Richard Spruce reached the Escalera Mountains of northern Peru. “I am among magnificent scenery and an interesting vegetation,” he wrote. In 2013, botanist Corine Vriesendorp went back to those same mountains—still remote, still magnificent, and essentially unexplored since Spruce. “Stunningly beautiful,” she wrote.

Art is an integral part of scientific investigation and documentation. Before the advent of photography, illustrations were used to capture intricate species details, habitat appearance, and even behaviors such as predation. Photography gained popularity as a visual recording method within scientific publications in the late nineteenth-early twentieth centuries, over time increasing the efficiency and accuracy by which nature could be recorded. Scientific illustrations and photographs are an important part of the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

We’ve spent a fun-filled week exploring the history, art, and science of gardening with our Garden Stories event.

The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, a religious sect commonly referred to as the Shakers, was founded in 18-century England from a branch of the Quakers. Along with other newly formed devotional groups, they soon immigrated to colonial America. There they established as their economic foundation a variety of cottage industries that thrived throughout the 19 and into the early 20 centuries. Now known mostly for wonderfully simple architecture, austere but beautifully designed furniture and such functional objects as nesting oval boxes and baskets, members of the Shaker communities also once had booming garden and seed businesses.

Seventeenth and eighteenth-century America had established nurseries—George Fenwick’s in Connecticut in the 1640s, John Bartram’s in Philadelphia (approximately 1729) and Robert Prince’s on Long Island (1737)—that traded plants to and from Europe. The owners were accomplished botanists and plant collectors.