Welcome to the Biodiversity Heritage Library Blog

In 1805, the “Father of North American mycology”, Lewis David von Schweinitz (1780-1834), published an account of the fungi in Niesky, Germany with his friend and mentor, Johannes Baptista von Albertini (1769-1831). Documenting over 1,000 species, including 100 published as new-to-science, Conspectus fungorum in Lusatiae Superioris agro Niskiensi crescentium, e methodo Persooniana is still referenced to this day as a classic mycological text and ecological record.

The Conspectus is illustrated with 12 hand-colored plates based on drawings by Schweinitz, each featuring 6-10 figures of new species described. Whenever possible, Schweinitz based his drawings on fresh specimens, but when this was not an option, he referred to fungarium specimens or to a collection of earlier watercolors he’d created of representative specimens.

Today, these watercolor volumes are dispersed between several American institutions and offer a wealth of insight into the history and development of the Conspectus. The earliest volume of original watercolors related to the Conspectus is the Icones Fungorum Niskiensium, created (ca.) 1798-1802 and held in the archives of the Farlow Reference Library of Cryptogamic Botany at Harvard University. This volume served Schweinitz as a sketchbook of sorts, which he used to inform the final paintings in the Conspectus itself.

Natural history illustrations often aim to show life-like flora and fauna. Depictions of birds poised to take flight, fish swimming upstream, and mammals mid-stride are common in 18th and 19th century zoology and botany publications. What is lost in these often lavish illustrations is a certain truth about the way many naturalists interacted with their objects of study: many species of plant or animal were first encountered not in the wild, but in the display case, in the form of carefully prepared specimens.

One British naturalist, Captain Thomas Brown (1785-1862), made the practical observation that mounted animal specimens allowed naturalists to “contemplate, without dread, the most destructive and furious quadrupeds, and the most noxious reptiles.”

This post originally appeared on the Smithsonian Libraries blog and has been republished at the permission of the author, Julia Blakely.

As a commemoration of the Imperial collection of shells in Vienna, the printed folio of Testacea Musei Caesarei Vindobonensis of 1780, is splendid. The eighteen engraved plates, carefully colored by hand, render individual specimens in the Habsburgs’ K.K. Hof-naturalien-Cabinet as if pieces of jewelry, casting shadows on a plain background of the thick, hand-made paper. Dedicated to the Empress of Austria, Maria Theresa (1717-1780), this production was also a work of science, as the task of arranging the shells in the Cabinet and describing them for publication was given to one of the leading scientists of the day, Ignaz Edler von Born (1742-1791).

In 1737, Elizabeth Blackwell published the first weekly installment of a very ambitious project. The final work, entitled A Curious Herbal (1737-39), ultimately consisted of 500 plates of plants alongside 111 pages of text providing descriptions of their medicinal uses. Endorsed by the Royal College of Physicians, the publication helped satisfy the need for an up-to-date reference work for apothecaries.

A Curious Herbal is the subject of a chapter in Dr. Anna K. Sagal’s first monograph project, Resisting Gardens: Pedagogy and Natural Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Women’s Work. By providing free, online access to relevant literature, such as Blackwell’s Herbal, the Biodiversity Heritage Library has been an important resource for Sagal’s research on the project.

This post was originally published on the rOpenSci blog on 28 August 2018 and is republished with permission of the author, Dr. Maëlle Salmon, and rOpenSci.

Armed with rOpenSci’s packages binding powerful C++ libraries and open taxonomy data, how much information can we automatically extract from images? Maybe not much, but, experimenting with gorgeous drawings from a natural history collection, we can least explore image manipulation, optical character recognition (OCR), language detection, and taxonomic name resolution with rOpenSci’s packages.

At first glance one notices the unusual oblong-shaped book at 9” x 7” x 3” in a deep brown leather binding.

Peeking inside, there are pages and pages of botanical woodcuts – more than 1,020 – each with at least two woodcuts per leaf. For our purposes, a woodcut is an illustration engraved into a block of wood.

What is this copiously-illustrated work?

Eicones plantarum seu stirpium, arborum nempe, fructicum, herbarum, fructuum, lignorum, radicum, omnis generis : tam inquilinorum, quàm exoticorum : quæ partim Germania sponte producit, partim ab exteris regionibus allata in Germania plantantur : in gratiam medicinæ reiâque herbariæ studiosorum, in tres partes digestæ : adiecto indice gemino locupletissimo [Francofurti ad Moenum: Nicolao Bassaeo, 1590], by Iacobus  Theodorus (1522 or 1525 – 1590).

Or, using an abridged, summarized, and modernized translated title, “Pictures of plants, trees, herbs, fruits, and roots that are native to Germany and foreign countries, which are used for medicinal purposes, for apothecary students, and divided into three parts with the addition of a double index”.

On 25 August – 1 September 2018, BHL representatives from around the world traveled to Dunedin, New Zealand to attend the joint Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) and Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) conference. Hosted by the Otago Museum and the University of Otago, the conference represented several firsts, including the first joint meeting of these two organizations plus the first SPNHC meeting in the Southern Hemisphere.

With the theme “Collections and Data in an Uncertain World”, the conference was an opportunity for bioinformatics and natural science collections professionals to exchange ideas and expertise as they explored the myriad intersections between collections and the data generated from them. BHL, an institutional member of TDWG, was proud to be a conference partner for this important event.