The Island of Newfoundland was nicknamed “The Rock” because of its rocky terrain and high cliffs.

I’m Elizabeth Smith, and I work at the Canadian Museum of Nature’s Library & Archives as Acquisitions and Cataloguing Officer. In this capacity, I have the privilege of caring for a rare book collection consisting of approximately 4,000 pre-20^th century monographs, manuscripts and periodicals, including a special unpublished manuscript, Entomologia Terrae Novae by Philip Henry Gosse — which I had the privilege of hand couriering to St John’s Newfoundland for a short exhibit and panel talk at Memorial University’s QEII Library this past September.

Elizabeth Smith is an acquisitions and cataloguing officer with the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa. Here she holds Philip Henry Gosse’s unpublished manuscript, Entomologia Terrae Novae. (Francesa Swan/CBC). Source.

This special manuscript has been digitized by the Museum’s Library & Archives on BHL.

On arrival in St John’s, I was greeted by the managing editor for Boulder Books and whisked over to the CBC Radio station to do an interview for On-The Go with Ted Blades. Months prior, Boulder reached out to our library to inquire about borrowing the manuscript to be shown in tandem with the launch of their newest field guide, Stouts, Millers & Forky-Tails: Insects of Newfoundland & Labrador, which drew inspiration from Gosse’s work. I was ultimately invited to speak alongside Dr. Tom Chapman, head of the Department of Biology at Memorial University and co-author of that field guide, at an engagement and advocacy event held by Memorial’s QEII Library in the Centre for Newfoundland Studies (CNS). The event was fittingly called A Bug’s Life: Tales of the N.L. Insect (1833-2019).

Philip Henry Gosse, 1863. Source: Canadian Museum of Nature Blog.

Entomologia Terrae Novae, authored by Philip Henry Gosse in 1833, was the first attempt to classify and illustrate the insect fauna of Newfoundland. About 250 magnificent illustrations adorn its pages — many of which are of the Lycaenidae family, which is the second-largest family of butterflies.

(Below) The common blue butterfly (Polyommatus icarus) of the Lycaenidae family along with (above) the black swallowtail (Papilio polyxenes). Gosse, Philip Henry. Entomologia terrae novae. 1833. Contributed in BHL from the Canadian Museum of Nature Library / Bibliothèque du Musée canadien de la nature.

I pondered with my entomologist colleague, Dr. Bob Anderson, as to why that might be. Perhaps it was the metamorphosis process that fascinated Gosse? We reflected on the fact that much of the world’s life forms were only starting to be explored, and that exploration and illustration was a hobby in this (almost) Victorian Era. Dr. Anderson also taught me of the value in capturing the host plants in scientific illustrations, as it can inform research scientists of various things. There are several examples of this throughout the book.

Gosse captured the metamorphosis process and host plants in his drawings. Gosse, Philip Henry. Entomologia terrae novae. 1833. Contributed in BHL from the Canadian Museum of Nature Library / Bibliothèque du Musée canadien de la nature.

Philip Henry Gosse was the son of Thomas Gosse and Hannah (née Best). He was sent from England to Carbonear at age 17 to work as a clerk. Gosse’s father, Thomas, was a miniature portrait artist himself, but it was Gosse’s aunt (Susan Bell) who first taught him to draw. He did so exquisitely, sometimes with the help of a microscope. Throughout the manuscript, readers can see examples of insects which Gosse carefully represented in their actual size and enlarged to a magnified proportion to show more detail.

Example from Gosse’s manuscript of an insect drawn to scale and magnified. Gosse, Philip Henry. Entomologia terrae novae. 1833. Contributed in BHL from the Canadian Museum of Nature Library / Bibliothèque du Musée canadien de la nature.

Meticulously hand drawn insects like these are nothing short of impressive. If you take a closer look, you will also notice annotations and even … a dolphin sketch! Gosse went on to illustrate other forms of life, some for which he was more famous (for example, he’s known for inaugurating the word “aquarium” and making these glass enclosures popular with the publication of his 1854 monograph dedicated to the subject).

Dolphins, an unexpected inclusion in Gosse’s manuscript. Gosse, Philip Henry. Entomologia terrae novae. 1833. Contributed in BHL from the Canadian Museum of Nature Library / Bibliothèque du Musée canadien de la nature.

Gosse moved on from Newfoundland to Quebec and other locations, taking the manuscript with him and eventually passing it along to his son, Edmund Gosse. It was passed down through the Gosse family until it was donated to the Canadian Museum of Nature in the 1950s.

This singular manuscript holds many treasures and a few surprises. We were excited to bring this work back to Newfoundland for the first time since its creation in the 1830s to be showcased as part of this special event with the Memorial University’s QEII Library. While it is a phenomenal experience to view the manuscript in person and appreciate the almost 3D quality of the drawings, the digitized copy in the Biodiversity Heritage Library ensures that everyone can enjoy this unique item and the important milestone it represents for the history of entomological studies in Newfoundland.

Dragonflies of Newfoundland. Gosse, Philip Henry. Entomologia terrae novae. 1833. Contributed in BHL from the Canadian Museum of Nature Library / Bibliothèque du Musée canadien de la nature.

At the Long Night of the Museums on 31 August 2019, the library of the Museum für Naturkunde presented its digitisation activities around a current project to index its Drory Library. In addition to particularly impressive books from the collection, which are already accessible in the Biodiversity Heritage Library, two books were digitised which were not yet available in BHL.

Fig. 1. Display during the Long Night of the Museum 2019. Photo by: Elisa Herrmann | MfN.

Long Night of the Museums

The Long Night of the Museums is a popular series of events and a highlight in Berlin’s cultural calendar. This year, 40,000 visitors accepted the invitation of 75 Berlin museums, which opened their collections and offered deeper insight into their research. For the second time in a row, the Museum für Naturkunde was the most popular destination with 10,500 visitors. Current scientific research and internal developments were presented to the public at 20 events. The latter included in particular the digitisation of the museum’s collections. In addition to insect boxes and archival material, the focus was also on the library collection. The Museum für Naturkunde has been a Member of BHL since 2018 and will primarily digitize for BHL.

The Drory Library

The Drory Library is a sub-collection of the Historic library collection and of special importance. It is the library of Edward Drory (1844-1904), an enthusiastic beekeeper but also an important Berlin personality. Edward Drory was a successful entrepreneur and owner of the English Gas Institute in Berlin. In his time, he owned the “largest apist library” with publications beginning in 1470, although most of the collection dates from the 18th and 19th centuries. In 1904, Edward Drory donated his beekeeping library to the Royal Zoological Museum in Berlin with the agreement that all volumes would receive an ex-libris (fig. 3) and be displayed in the library of the Hymenoptera collection.

Fig. 2. Edward Drory in front of his apiary, 1874. Photo Courtesy: Viola Richter | MfN.

Fig. 3. Ex-Libris of the Dory library. Photo courtesy: Elisa Herrmann | MfN.

The collection comprises approximately 2,400 volumes — of which about 800 are journals and about 1,600 are monographic volumes (around 480,000 pages) — and contains literature in various languages — German, French, English, Latin, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Finnish, and Polish.

The long-term goal is to digitize the Drory library and the corresponding card catalogue completely or at least partially and to make it available as a research basis or scientific-historical contribution for a number of disciplines — history of science, biology (species diversity of bees, taxonomic findings, endangerment of honeybees by humans), medicine (allergies to bee venoms), pharmacy & naturopathy (bee venom, propolis as a means of treatment) and agricultural sciences (economic significance of bees). To reach this goal, the library started an indexing project with a grant from the von Pawel-Rammingen Stiftung that will answer the most important questions before starting the digitization, such as the exact scope, conservatory condition and availability on the Internet.

Fig. 4. File from the Historical archive of the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, documenting the handover of the Drory library to the museums. Photo by: Elisa Herrmann | MfN.

Fig. 5. Books from the Drory library that went on display during the Long Night of the Museum 2019. Photo by: Elisa Herrmann | MfN.

During the Long Night, selected works were presented to the visitors, including a copy of Naturgeschichte, Klassification und Nomenclatur der Insekten vom Bienen, Wespen und Ameisengeschlecht […] by J. L. Christ from 1791, as well as books on beekeeping, bee-friendly plants and philosophical-literary essays on bees, in order to illustrate the range of the Drory Library. One highlight on display was the archive file with the documents for the handover of the library to the museum from 1905 (fig. 4).

Many books from the collection are not yet in BHL; two of them were scanned in front of the visitors that night. They are currently undergoing final quality control and will soon be uploaded to BHL as the first digital collections of the Museum für Naturkunde.

However, at the event visitors were already able to select motifs from digitised material that they took home with them as buttons (fig. 6) and BHL’s motif cards also enjoyed great popularity.

Fig. 6. Buttons with motifs chosen from digitised BHL material next to a copy of the original. Photo by: Elisa Herrmann | MfN.

The library team answered many interesting questions about the materials and technology used and was thus able to present not only the library collection but also the digitisation infrastructure and the rich treasure of BHL. Many visitors did not yet know about BHL and were enthusiastic about the prospect of over 54 million freely accessible pages — whether for scientific work, homework or to marvel at the beautiful illustrations.

Digitisation at the Museum für Naturkunde

The Museum für Naturkunde sees itself facing great opportunities to digitally open up its collection through an investment of several million euros by the federal and state governments. The library thus has the opportunity to scan a large number of holdings for BHL and its own digital collections to make them accessible to the scientific community and the general public. The highest priority is given to unique material, such as handwritten entry books, followed by holdings that are not yet available in BHL.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library and the Hymenoptera Anatomy Ontology

Katja C. Seltmann

The realm of ontology concerns the nature of reality, determining what exists, how it fits within a hierarchy, and how various elements are organized according to similarities and differences. Traditionally a philosophical question within metaphysics, today ontology has a firm application within systems biology as well.

Anatomy ontologies describe the structural and developmental relationships between the various parts of an organism. Defining anatomical ontologies reveals a complete list of distinguishing characteristics for that organism or group of organisms. The act of creating an anatomical ontology requires precise definitions of the terminology used to describe a variety of phenotypes.

Authors that have contributed to the past 250 years of taxonomic literature did not use standardized vocabularies. Katja C. Seltmann (Project Manager for the Tri-Trophic Thematic Collection Network at the American Museum of Natural History) desired to find a way to efficiently analyze this multi-century body of literature to create a single anatomical ontology, specifically for the insect order Hymenoptera. Accomplishing this feat required utilizing the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL).

Millions of pages of analog biodiversity literature, spanning the 15th-21st centuries, are digitized and made freely available online by the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Among the over 59,000 titles in the collection is the Journal of Hymenoptera Research (JHR), published by the International Society of Hymenoptera since 1992. Seltmann and a team of four other researchers utilized this publication from BHL to help build the Hymenoptera Anatomy Ontology (HAO).

The Order Hymenoptera contains sawflies, wasps, bees and ants. Find this and other 1807 illustrations of the Order in Nouvelle méthode de classer les hyménoptères et les diptères.

The NSF-funded Hymenoptera Anatomy Ontology is based on a language recognition tool (called the “Proofer”), which can be implemented across biodiversity literature in order to discover domain-specific anatomy terms. Employing the tool across the OCR for JHR resulted in the discovery of nearly 1,200 new terms for HAO. Furthermore, the development of the ontology is iterative. As the “Proofer” is applied to new collections of literature, it finds matches to existing terms as well as proposes new terms to add to the ontology. A human is required to review the proposed terms, selecting those to be added to the growing database.

After creation, this ontology can be applied as a filter to the literature in order to reveal trends in term occurrence within species descriptions, ultimately allowing researchers to analyze hundreds of years worth of scientific publications without having to sift page by page through the texts. The tool is thus instrumental in improving the efficiency of scientific research, and the process and impact was detailed in the 2012 PLoS ONE article “Utilizing Descriptive Statements from the Biodiversity Heritage Library to Expand the Hymenoptera Anatomy Ontology” (Seltmann et al.).*

According to Seltmann, the Biodiversity Heritage Library plays a critical role in modern scientific research, including her own work:

“I am very fond of the BHL. It set a precedent for open access to literature that I feel initiated a cascading of change in our expectations. Sharing information, publications and open access is no longer the suspicious topic it used to be only a few years ago. Now, expectation is that publications, data and otherwise will be readily available. BHL, in my opinion, was truly one of the first examples of an open model becoming successful in the biological community, and, because it was useful, it changed attitudes.”

The process used to create the Hymenoptera Anatomy Ontology can be applied to other disciplines in order to build any phonotype-relevant ontology. However, as the PLOS article articulates,

“Natural language processing methods for biological data discovery is only possible through open access publications, and efforts such as the Biodiversity Heritage Library to make legacy literature freely available. This exercise to observe trends in the terminology illustrates how the accessibility to literature facilitates anatomy ontology construction.”

This use case thus provides a clear example of how the BHL is inspiring scientific discovery through free access to biodiversity knowledge.

Interested in telling us about how BHL has helped support your research? Send us feedback or write to [email protected].

* Seltmann KC, Pénzes Z, Yoder MJ, Bertone MA, Deans AR (2013) Utilizing Descriptive Statements from the Biodiversity Heritage Library to Expand the Hymenoptera Anatomy Ontology. PLoS ONE 8(2): e55674. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0055674

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.

According to the Preface,

“This book presents in a convenient form for reference a collection of the quaint theories about Natural History accepted by Shakespeare and his contemporaries…The plan of the book is to give some illustration of each word mentioned by Shakespeare when there is anything remarkable to be noted about it…It is certain that Shakespeare believed some of the strange ideas here mentioned, especially about those animals which he had no opportunity of observing in their wild state; but on the other hand, Shakespeare’s knowledge of Natural History (in so far as his own observation extended) was far greater than that of his contemporaries as here illustrated.”

In our post this week, we thought we’d highlight some of the more interesting ideas held by Shakespeare and his contemporaries regarding the natural world. For each animal, we present, as does our book of the week, Shakespeare’s reference to the creature, as well as what his contemporaries were saying about them. Enjoy looking at Shakespeare in a whole new light!

Barnacles:

“We shall lose our time,
And all be turn’d to barnacles”
– Tempest, iv. I, 248-50

“In the island of Ireland, and Orcades, in certain places there, there be certain trees, much like unto willow-trees, out of which come forth certain hairs, increasing by little and little into birds, having shape of ducks, hanging upon the bough by their nebs or bills, and when they are come to full perfectness, they fly away of themselves, or fall into the next seas, which birds we call Barnacles. This is related by the people that dwell there.”
– Lupton’s Notable Things, bk. vii

Basilisk or Cockatrice

“Come, basilisk,
And kill the innocent gazer with thy sight.”
– ii. King Henry VI., iii, 2, 52-3

“The Cockatrice is a king of serpents, and they be afeard and flee when they see him. For he slayeth them with his smell and with his teeth; and slayeth also all things that have life, with breath and with sight…But he is overcome of the weasel; and men bring the weasel to the Cockatrice’s den where he lurketh and is hid.”
– Bartholomew (Berthelet), bk, xviii.

“Its head is very pointed, its eyes red, its colour inclining to black and yellow; it has a tail like a viper, but the rest of its body is like a cock. The Basilisk is sometimes gendered from a cock; for towards the end of summer the cock lays an egg from which the Basilisk is hatched. But many things must concur to this gendering, for it lays the egg in much warm dung, and there sits on it. And those who have seen its creation say that there is no shell to the egg, but a very strong skin which can resist the hardest blows. Also the opinion of some is that a viper or toad sits on the cock’s egg – but this is doubtful.”
– Hortus Sanitatis, part iii (“Of Birds”) ch. xiii

Beans

“Peas and beans are as dank here as a dog, and that is the next way to give poor jades the bots.”
– I King Henry IV., ii, I, 9-10

“The Bean is a manner of codware, and serveth to pottage, and in old time men used to eat thereof. Beans cause vain dreams and dreadful. Many meddle beans with breadcorn, to make the bread the more heavy. By oft use thereof the wits be dulled. Or else, dead men’s souls be therein. Therefore the bishop should not eat beans. Beans grow in Egypt with sharp pricks, therefore crocodiles flee from them, and dread lest their eyes should be hurt with the sharp pricks of them. Such a bean is x cubits long, with a head as a poppy, and therein Beans be closed, and that head is red as a rose. And those beans grow not on stalks nor in cods.”
– Bartholomew, (Berthelet), bk. xvii.

Bees

“So work the honey bees,
Creatures that by a rule in nature teach
The act of order to a peopled kingdom.
They have a king and officers of sorts;
Where some, like magistrates, correct at home.”
– King Henry V., i, 2, 187-204

“Bees be cunning and busy in office of making honey, and they dwell in their own places that are assigned to them, and challenge no place but their own…They have a host and a king, and move war and battle, and fly and void smoke and wind, and make them hardy and sharp to battle with great noise…Bees make among them a king, and ordain among them common people. And though they be put and set under a king, yet they be free and love their king that they make by kind love; and defend him with full great defence…And bees choose to their king him that is most worthy and noble in highness and fairness, and most clear in mildness, for that is chief virtue in a king.”
– Bartholomew (Berthelet), bk. xii

And that’s just what they had to say about creatures beginning with “B”! Keep reading to find out more about what our ancestors used to think about the world we live in. Of course, chances are that five hundred years from now, our descendants will be reading some of the things we think we know about the world and laughing as well. Just something to consider…