All posts in Featured Books

“If this were true, adios theory”

Such important words for Darwin, and so revealing to us. They offer us insight into the inner workings of this brilliant mind as he nursed to full fruition an idea that started on the now-legendary Galapagos Islands. Studying the works of the leading scientists of his time was critical to Darwin’s development of this idea. By applying, and sometimes countering, the theories of others, he constructed one of our most important scientific foundations – Evolution. He documented this intellectual progression in the margins of the books in his library. And this marginalia, and indeed digital scans of his personal library, are now available for you to peruse at your leisure on BHL in Charles Darwin’s Library!

This week we’re going to do our book of the week a little differently. We came across this awesome tool on the National Geographic website called Backyard Bird Identifier. By answering some simple questions about a bird that you have seen in either the U.S. or Canada, the application tells you the possible species. We thought that was pretty cool, so we decided to see if this tool could identify birds based on answers that we give solely by looking at the illustrations and associated descriptions in one of the books in our collection.

Summer is in full swing and that means all the gardeners have already started coming out of the woodwork to get their hands dirty. We came across this book in BHL and thought it would be an appropriate book of the week for all of our garden-loving friends: 1000 Hints on Flowers and Birds (1917), by Mae Savell Croy.

It’s bugs galore today as we feature the book The Cabinet of Oriental Entomology (1848), by J.O. Westwood. This delightful book is full of gorgeous illustrations of exotic insects. We’re picking out some of the illustrations that we particularly love and providing you with an excerpt of what the author had to say about the creatures shown. Enjoy!1) Papilio icarius

“How old is that fossil and how do you know it?” This is the introductory sentence, and the question addressed, in this week’s book of the week, How Old are Fossils (1927), by Sharat Kumar Roy. According to the author, this is a question that is often asked by visitors to a museum, but it is also a question that is particularly time-consuming to answer.

Ever wonder what people believed about natural history in Shakespeare’s time? Well, even if you haven’t, we’re going to tell you. One of our BHL colleagues at Harvard brought the book Natural History in Shakespeare’s Time (1896), by H.W. Seager, to our attention, and we knew we just had to highlight it.

This week, we featured one of our BHL users, Dr. Torsten Dikow, in our regular blog series, BHL and our Users. With a focus on flies in his research, Dr. Dikow identified his favorite book in BHL, which we’re highlighting today as our book of the week.