Not many birds bedazzle as thoroughly as the adult male Painted Bunting. No matter how many you’ve seen or how often, every one remains a source of startlement, whether it is emerging shyly from a Florida thicket, swaying on a heavy grass halm in the deserts of Arizona, or chewing steadily at a feeder in snowy Massachusetts. This, the most gaudily colored bird north of Mexico, is guaranteed to create a stir.

That stir was even greater three hundred years ago, when European natural historians first confronted this novel beauty. So colorful was the bird that the first scientists to describe it believed that it must be native to regions even more exotic than America. Eleazar Albin, in the notes accompanying his or his daughter Elizabeth Albin’s 1737 engraving of the species, reported that the bird had been brought to England from China for the pleasure “of a curious Gentleman” (Albin 1738). A dozen years on, Linnaeus, having failed to find the bird described or depicted in the handbooks available to him, diagnosed it as a new species, which he inscrutably named Emberiza ciris, and determined that with so brightly colored a plumage, the specimens could have come only from India (Linnaeus 1750).

With the benefit of nearly three centuries’ hindsight, such wild geographic speculation was strictly speaking unnecessary. As early as the 1720s, the natural historian Mark Catesby had seen, drawn, and described the Painted Bunting in southeastern North America, an account that he published in London in 1729 (Catesby 1729). Moreover, the Spanish in America had known the bird even before that, poetically naming it the “mariposa pintada,” the ultimate source of the species’ modern English name. (Coincidentally, it was by way of Spain that Linnaeus’s type specimen would later reach Sweden.) In their early publications, neither Albin nor Linnaeus reveals any awareness of these facts, but in 1758, Linnaeus included the colorful little finch in the tenth edition of the Systema with a citation to Catesby and, this time, an accurate, if not overly precise, statement of its range: “Habitat in America” (Linnaeus 1758).

Even as he corrected earlier misapprehensions about the bird’s geographic distribution, Linnaeus introduced a new confusion into the historical record of the Painted Bunting. In the 1758 Systema, the formal species diagnosis—based, of course, on the colorful adult male—is followed by a description of the female, which is “blue, with white on the belly only, [and] becomes almost gray in winter” (Linnaeus 1758). The only citation Linnaeus gives for this brief account of the female is Catesby, who, he says, depicted her on Plate 44 of his Natural History of Carolina under the name Liniaria caerulea (Linnaeus 1758).

In fact, however, Catesby portrays only the male Painted Bunting on Plate 44 as published, and the accompanying text describes the female of that species quite differently, as “remarkable for her plain Colour, which is not unlike that of a Hen-Sparrow, but with a faint Tincture of Green” (Catesby 1729). Catesby treats his Liniara caerulea—the bird we know as the Indigo Bunting—as a distinct species, the Blew Linnet, the male of which is depicted on his Plate 45 and not, as Linnaeus erroneously indicates, Plate 44.

It is easy to forgive the odd typographical error in the nearly 1,400 pages of the 1758 Systema. But Linnaeus’s erroneous “lump” of the two bunting species and his mistaken claim that both are depicted on the same plate in Catesby are more than mere slips of the pen. Instead, these misstatements complicate what is generally thought of as the direct and straightforward link between Catesby and Linnaeus (for example, Stone 1929), shifting attention instead to the Swedish taxonomer’s still under-appreciated reliance on a different, intermediate source—the ornithological works of George Edwards.

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In August of 1736, Linnaeus wrote to a botanical colleague that he had just returned from England, where he had spoken with Catesby “and the other botanists” (Linnaeus 1736). This was their only meeting. As prolific a correspondent as Linnaeus was, the sum total of extant letters between the two great naturalists is a single brief cover note accompanying a small shipment of plants Catesby sent to Sweden (Jarvis 2015). More surprising still, Linnaeus “almost certainly” did not own any of the volumes of Catesby’s Carolina, apparently consulting the Englishman’s work instead in the libraries of colleagues and patrons in Sweden and The Netherlands (Jarvis 2015).

The intellectual and personal relationship that bound Linnaeus and George Edwards ran far deeper—and centered not on botany but on ornithology. Linnaeus would eventually name nearly 350 species of birds on the basis of descriptions, paintings, and etchings furnished by Edwards over the years (Lederer 2019). A. Stuart Mason goes so far as to name Linnaeus as Edwards’s “admirer” (Mason 1992), an assessment amply vouched for in the preserved correspondence of the two naturalists. It is uncertain whether the two well-traveled colleagues ever met (James 1933), but Linnaeus clearly held Edwards and his work in considerable esteem.

In a 1759 letter introducing Edwards to Daniel Solander, the Swedish taxonomer names Edwards as preeminent among contemporary ornithologists, and pronounces himself happy to have lived to see the Englishman’s work with his own eyes (Linnaeus 1759). On the completion in 1764 of Edwards’s Gleanings of Natural History, Linnaeus would send his congratulations for having introduced to science “so very many extraordinarily rare birds, such a number as no one else has ever discovered or ever will, or far less will ever illustrate them so vividly that your birds are lacking only their song. They will sing your fame for as long as there are birds and men. Thanks to them, you have become an immortal ornament to our age…. Count me among your sincere admirers!” (Linnaeus 1765).

So great was Linnaeus’s respect for his English colleague that he had hung his portrait on the wall of his cabinet, where it served as a daily reminder of Edwards’s accomplishments (Linnaeus 1758b). Paintings, prints, and written descriptions passed between the two men almost non-stop, including both published and unpublished works (see, e.g., Edwards 1757 and Edwards 1760). The fact that Edwards sent Linnaeus “black”—that is to say, uncolored—plates from the Gleanings suggests that his gift was more than a simple ornamental courtesy, submitted instead for serious study.

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In addition to his own significant accomplishments, George Edwards played a major role in preserving and promoting the works of Mark Catesby, whom he outlived by nearly a quarter of a century. The connection of the two men was both a personal and a professional one: not only did Catesby share certain of his specimens with Edwards (Edwards 1747), but he was so generous as to offer to teach Edwards, his “nearest rival” and his “good friend” alike, to etch his own plates for publication (Mason 1992). In turn, Edwards would see a second, posthumous edition of Catesby’s Carolina through the press beginning in 1754—and he would serve as his friend and mentor’s literary and artistic executor, preparing Catesby’s Nachlaß for auction to the benefit of the elder artist’s widow (McBurney 2015).

Edwards was clearly ideally situated to serve as the point of transmission between his two friends Catesby and Linnaeus, particularly so, of course, after Catesby’s death in 1749. With no convenient access to Carolina, the great Swede would quite naturally have relied on his London colleague’s intimate familiarity with Catesby’s work. Edwards, however, was not a transparent conduit, passing Catesbiana on to Upsalla verbatim. Instead, much of what he provided Linnaeus—and much of what is attributed in the Systema straightforwardly to “Catesby”—was in fact decidedly second-hand, filtered through Edwards’s own use, and in some cases his own reassessment, of Catesby’s American material in his ornithological works.

This should be unsurprising given the structure, chronological and geographic, of the network binding Linnaeus, Catesby, and Edwards, but until now it seems that the citations to “Catesby” in the Systema have been accepted at face value, as direct and unmediated references to that author’s Carolina. That assumption explains the persistent puzzlement in the scholarship as to “why Linnaeus omitted a number of Catesby’s birds” from the 1758 edition of the Systema, birds Catesby had illustrated, described, and published a generation earlier (Stevens 1936). O.A. Stevens counted ten such mysterious omissions, birds present in the first edition of Catesby’s Carolina but for some reason not taken over into the 1758 Systema.

If we accept that Linnaeus was not making direct use of Catesby but was instead relying on Edwards’s reception of Catesby, the matter is easily explained: of the ten species of Catesbeyan birds Linnaeus ignored, all ten—the Blue-winged Teal, Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, Hairy and Downy Woodpeckers, Tufted Titmouse, Gray Catbird, American Robin, Red-Winged Blackbird, Orchard Oriole, and Indigo Bunting—had also been excluded from Edwards’s Natural History of Birds. Had Linnaeus directly consulted Catesby’s Carolina, he would have had no reason to leave those species aside; depending entirely on Edwards, however, he would have had no reason to even suspect their existence.

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That this was in fact the true chain of transmission—from Catesby to Edwards to Linnaeus, and not, as has long been assumed, directly from Catesby to Linnaeus—is demonstrated as well by the twisting career of the Painted Bunting in the ornithological works of all three authors.

As pointed out above, Linnaeus’s account of this species in the 1758 Systema introduces certain inconsistencies with his claimed source, Catesby’s Carolina. First, Linnaeus asserts that the female Painted Bunting is blue with a white belly, turning gray in the colder season; Catesby had described her quite differently, as dull-colored and sparrow-like, with an overtone of green. Linnaeus then goes on to cite Catesby’s Plate 44 as the authority for his description; in fact, though, that plate depicts only the male Painted Bunting, while the bird Linnaeus mistakes for the female, in reality a male Indigo Bunting, is shown on the following Plate 45.

These errors, at first regard trivial, are in fact revelatory of George Edwards’s crucial role as the link between the ornithologies of Catesby and Linnaeus. In his Natural History, published the year after Catesby’s death, Edwards corrected what he believed was his friend and mentor’s misapprehension. Edwards wrote that the tricolored bird of Catesby’s Plate 44—a Painted Bunting—and the blue bird of Plate 45—an Indigo Bunting—“are both the same; the one not arrived at its perfect Colour, and the other perfect…. This Bird in its first State resembles a Hen Sparrow, its second is Blue, and its last as the above described [that is to say, the particolored adult male Painted Bunting], with many intermixed Stages between each of these” (Edwards 1750).

In London, Edwards had studied a cageful of buntings of various colors, brought to Lady Anson from Mexico by Admiral Knowles; the conclusions he drew about the species’ plumage sequence were affirmed by his friend and patron John Monro (Edwards 1750). Linnaeus’s citation to “Catesby” notwithstanding, it was Edwards’s assessment of the buntings as “both the same,” and not Catesby’s original identification of two distinct species, that entered Linnaeus’s Systema in 1758.

Edwards must be held responsible, too, for Linnaeus’s erroneous reference to Catesby’s Plate 44 for the “female” of the Painted Bunting (in fact, the male of the Indigo Bunting). As already noted, the plate published as number 44 in Carolina depicts only a male Painted Bunting—but a watercolor painted in preparation for that plate, one of the unpublished works the sale of which Edwards facilitated on Catesby’s death, shows two birds sharing a perch in a magnolia (RL 25875). The upper individual is a brightly colored male Painted Bunting; the lower is an adult male Indigo Bunting. Each is labeled, in Catesby’s hand, as an apparently distinct species: the Painted Bunting as “Tricolor. Ligurinus,” the Indigo as “Linaria Cœrulea.” At least the upper inscription antedates the trimming and mounting of the sheet. Most tellingly, Catesby also numbered his painting, “44.”

That number is clearly a reference to the Plate 44 that Catesby would subsequently publish in his Carolina. Plate 44 depicts only one bird, an adult male Painted Bunting. That bird is clearly based on the individual in Catesby’s earlier painting, now perched somewhat more steadily in a somewhat more decorative magnolia. The Indigo Bunting figured in the painting was also taken over into the published work, but on a separate plate—Plate 45—where it balances tremulously on the leaf of a trillium.

Linnaeus’s citation to Catesby’s Plate 44 for his description of the female Painted Bunting makes sense only if it in fact refers to the preliminary painting, not to the published plate. The painting certainly passed through Edwards’s hands as he prepared the Catesby estate for auction, and it is reasonable to conclude that the information he supplied Linnaeus was based on that “44,” not on the published plate assigned that number. The painting’s confrontation of the two buntings—in spite of Catesby’s labels—could be read as confirmation of Edwards’s theory of conspecificity, a theory he had illustrated himself, wordlessly, in a whimsical 1732 painting depicting what we now recognize as a Painted and an Indigo Bunting posed intimately on the same branch.

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In reliance on Edwards’s initial understanding of the species’ status and plumages, Linnaeus again identified the male Indigo Bunting as a female Painted in the eleventh, 1760 edition of the Systema naturae (Linnaeus 1760). The truth would out, however, and in 1766, in what was the first major revision since 1758, the twelfth edition of the Systema “split” the buntings to recognize the Indigo as a separate species, Tangara cyanea, for the first time; describing only the adult male (“blue, with blackish rectrices”), Linnaeus now cites the correct text page and plate from Catesby’s Carolina (Linnaeus 1766).

Linnaeus’s change of view had been preceded, half a dozen years earlier, by another reassessment of the buntings: that in George Edwards’s Gleanings of Natural History. In the second, 1760 volume of this continuation of his Natural History of Birds, Edwards provided a new and accurately labeled plate of the Painted Bunting, showing both a colorful adult male and a female, the latter “wholly of a parrot green colour” (Edwards 1760b).

The addition of the female figure, and Edwards’s description of the other, non-adult and non-male age and sex classes “as plain-coloured as a hen Sparrow” (Edwards 1760b), reveal that his rethinking was the result of a renewed consultation of Catesby’s Carolina, which had described the female Painted Bunting in much the same words. This is no coincidence. Just as Linnaeus’s earlier “lump” of the Indigo and Painted Buntings was the result of his relying on Edwards’s interpretation of Catesby, so too did his “split” of the two birds in 1766 reflect Edwards’s re-evaluation of their status.

No one can deny the significance of Mark Catesby’s work to the natural historical enterprise of the eighteenth century in general, or to the Linnaean tradition specifically. But an examination of the other bird species attributed by the Systema to “Catesby” would likely confirm what the case of the buntings so cogently suggests: that not Catesby but his “good friend,” pupil, and literary executor George Edwards was Linnaeus’s direct source for the North American birds credited to him.

Works Cited

Adler, K. 2015. “Ctesby’s Fundamental Contributions to Linnaeus’s Binomial Catalogue of North American Animals.” Pp. 251-264 in Nelson, E. Charles, and David J. Elliott, eds. The Curious Mr. Catesby: A “Truly Ingenious” Naturalist Explores New Worlds. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

Albin, E. 1738. A Natural History of Birds. Vol. 3. London: privately published.

Catesby, M. 1729 [1731]. The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands. Vol. 1. London: privately published.

Edwards, G. 1747. A Natural History of Birds. Vol. 2. London: College of Physicians.

——-. 1750. A Natural History of Birds. Vol. 3. London: College of Physicians.

——-. 1757. George Edwards to Carolus Linnaeus. October 15, 1757. In Linnaean Correspondence. 

——-. 1760a. George Edwards to Carolus Linnaeus. August 12, 1760. In Linnaean Correspondence. 

——-. 1760b. Gleanings of Natural History. Pt. 2. London: College of Physicians.

James, T.E. 1933. “George Edwards, F.R.S. (1694-1773): An Eighteenth-century Naturalist.” Science Progress in the Twentieth Century (1919-1933) 27.107: 486-493.

Jarvis, C.E. 2015. “Carl Linnaeus and the Influence of Mark Catesby’s Botanical Work.” Pp. 189-204 in Nelson, E. Charles, and David J. Elliott, eds. The Curious Mr. Catesby: A “Truly Ingenious” Naturalist Explores New Worlds. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

Lederer, R. 2019. The Art of the Bird: The History of Ornithological Art Through Forty Artists.

Linnaeus, C. 1736. [L5980. Carl Linnaeus to Johannes Burman.] The Linnaean Correspondence. Ferney-Voltaire: Centre international d’étude du XVIIIe siècle. On line at linnaeus.c18.net.

——-. 1750. “En Indianisk sparf.” Kongliga Swenska vetenskapsacademiens handlingar ser. 1, vol. 11: 278-280.

——-. 1758a. Systema naturae. 10th ed. Vol. 1. Stockholm: Lars Salvius.

——-. 1758b. Carolus Linnaeus to George Edwards. March 20, 1758. In Linnaean Correspondence. On line at tinyurl.com/LynnEdw1758.

——-. 1759. Carolus Linnaeus to George Edwards. April 12, 1759. In Linnaean Correspondence. On line at tinyurl.com/LinnEdwApr1759.

——-. 1760. Systema naturae. 11th ed. Vol. 1. Halle/Saale: Johann Jacob Curt.

——-. 1764. Carolus Linnaeus to George Edwards. April 12, 1764. In Linnaean Correspondence. On line at tinyurl.com/LinnEdw1764.

——-. 1766. Systema naturae. 12th ed. Vol. 1. Stockholm: Lars Salvius.

Mason, A.S. 1992. George Edwards: The Bedell and His Birds. London: Royal College of Physicians.

McBurney, H. 2015. “Mark Catesby’s Preparatory Drawings for The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands.” Pp. 141- 154 in Nelson, E. Charles, and David J. Elliott, eds. The Curious Mr. Catesby: A “Truly Ingenious” Naturalist Explores New Worlds. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

Stevens, O.A. 1936. “The First Descriptions of North American Birds.” Wilson Bulletin 48: 203-215.

Stone, W. 1929. “Mark Catesby and the Nomenclature of North American Birds.” Auk 46: 447-454.

Recently, we spent three weeks on student placement at Museums Victoria Library and were fortunate enough to be involved with the digitisation of the beautiful title The birds of Norfolk & Lord Howe Islands and the Australasian South Polar quadrant by Gregory M. Mathews. It was an eye-opening experience, making us aware of the patience and attention to detail that is a necessity for book digitisation.

In order to get suitably high resolution scans, a Zeutschel OS 16000 scanner is primarily used for Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) digitisations at Museums Victoria. The Australian branch of the project, BHL Australia, digitises the collections of 25 organisations across the country. It is hosted by Museums Victoria and funded by the Atlas of Living Australia.

As this title was rare, it was essential to handle it gently, and to protect the spine from excessive pressure. To ensure minimal impact, we wore gloves when in contact with the book, and scanned one page at a time. We scanned all right-hand pages first, before turning the book around and repeating the process for the left-hand pages. The glass pane normally used to pin pages down on ordinary books can’t be used on rare books, so getting pages to lie flat was a challenge in itself! This digitisation project has given us a chance to see a lot of this beautiful title, with its multitude of breathtaking illustrations.

Both of us are currently working towards the Master of Information Management qualification at RMIT University. Being involved with the BHL project has been invaluable to our understanding of the challenges and importance of digitisation. As digital technology continues to develop and evolve, digitisation provides exceptional opportunities for further access and research. As such, digitisation is likely to play a significant role in our careers in information management into the future, and we are highly grateful to have had the opportunity to be involved in such a project.

The birds of Norfolk & Lord Howe Islands and the Australasian South Polar quadrant is a remarkable guide to the birds of some of Australia’s more outlying territories, specifically Norfolk and Lord Howe Islands and areas of the Antarctic. Published in 1928, the title contains detailed description and distribution information for a number of species, as well as beautiful illustrations of each bird. Many of the species covered in the book were extinct when the book was published, while others became extinct in the decades afterwards. This adds to the unique nature of this title. Only 225 copies of this work were produced, and around 57 are currently held in library collections worldwide.

The book was written by noted ornithologist Gregory Macalister Mathews. Born in 1876, Mathews grew up in Australia before moving to England, where his interest in birds became an obsession. Over his life Mathews contributed to a significant number of ornithological works, but none drew more attention than his Birds of Australia (which is also available on the BHL website, the final volumes of which were digitised by the BHL Australia project at Museums Victoria). During the creation of Birds of Australia, he regularly worked 16 hour days, and through the course of this work he acquired 30,000 skins and around 5,000 books.

Despite dedicating much of his life to their study, Mathews “was not really interested in the living bird”, and was “essentially a bibliophile” (Kloot, 1986). Mathews stressed that The birds of Norfolk & Lord Howe Islands was not a supplement to his far more famous Birds of Australia, but he did believe that the birds discussed should be considered part of any list of Australian birds. Certainly, it follows the same format, has the same publisher and should be considered a related work.

The birds of Norfolk & Lord Howe Islands includes 45 hand-coloured lithographs and monochrome plates, with this work being one of the last publications worldwide to include hand-coloured plates (Pasquier & Farrand 1991). These were the work of two illustrators — Henrik Grönvold and Frederick William Frohawk.

Grönvold was a well-known Danish naturalist and lithographer who predominately illustrated birds and their eggs. Born in 1858, he worked on a wide range of ornithological works, including Birds of Africa and The British Warblers, and he created a remarkable 600 plates for Mathew’s Birds of Australia.

Frederick William Frohawk was born in 1861 and had an interest in illustration and natural history from an early age, catching a rare pale clouded yellow butterfly at the age of seven. Despite losing virtually all sight in one eye during his school years, he went on to become a noted illustrator of butterflies and birds. Among his notable works is The complete book of British butterflies, which he both wrote and illustrated.

References

Kloot, T 1986, ‘Mathews, Gregory Macalister (1876–1949)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/mathews-gregory-macalister-7517

Pasquier, R. F., & Farrand, J., Jr 1991, Masterpieces of Bird Art: 700 Years of Ornithological Illustration. Abbeville Press. pp. 180–181.

This post was originally published on the Smithsonian Libraries’ blog. It is reproduced with permission from the Author, Alexandra K. Newman.

Be sure to join Alexandra Newman for a behind-the-scenes look at Elizabeth Gould’s work in the Natural History Rare Book Library at the Smithsonian Libraries during a Facebook Live broadcast produced as part of the #HerNaturalHistory campaign: 22 March @ 1pm ET via https://www.facebook.com/SmithsonianLibraries.

Author’s note: Elizabeth Gould was a 19th century artist responsible for some of the most historically significant images of birds ever published. She was also a devoted wife and mother. It is sometimes difficult to reconcile both of these aspects of her life through our modern lens of 21st century social issues and feminism; it can be tempting to paint her story as that of a woman repressed by antiquated gender roles, and to speculate on her career trajectory had she not tragically died shortly after the birth of her eighth child. However, while history strives to be objective, it impossible to completely purge our modern sentiments from the retelling of her story, so it is important to strive to tell it based on documentary evidence rather than speculation. Elizabeth’s life was very eventful for being so short, as we shall soon see, so it is not difficult to craft an exciting biographical narrative for her. The difficulty comes, instead, from trying to ensure that she maintains a degree of agency in her own story. I have tried to write this post in such a way that is respectful to both Elizabeth and the time in which she lived.

The beautiful lithographs produced by Elizabeth Gould show lively birds of all shapes and colors performing mating displays, protecting their young, and interacting with their environments. A far cry from the dead-bird-on-stick approach to book illustration of the 18th century and prior, Elizabeth’s birds are reminiscent of the more dynamic figures depicted by John James Audubon; in fact, distinguished ornithologist Prideaux John Selby proclaimed “I like [Elizabeth’s illustrations] as well as Audubon’s.”[1] However, it is not Elizabeth’s name on the title page of A Century of Birds from the Himalaya Mountains (for which she lithographed 80 plates) or on the ‘Birds’ volume of The Zoology of the Voyage of the H. M. S. Beagle (for which she lithographed all 50 plates); rather, it is that of her husband, John. A respected taxidermist and ornithologist, John was also a master of marketing, putting out numerous large-format lithography plate books over the course of his career. But John’s artistic skill was not up to the task of such a grand undertaking; instead, he relied on the artistic talents of others, including his wife, to carry his work to new heights.

Elizabeth Gould, nee Coxen, was born in 1804 to a military family in Ramsgate, England. One of eleven children, and the only daughter to survive to maturity, information on how she and her siblings spent their childhood is unfortunately sparse; however, by age 22, Elizabeth had obtained a position as governess to the 9-year-old daughter of the Chief of the Office of the King’s Proctor in London. Being able to work as a governess for aristocracy implies that Elizabeth was highly educated, which was not unusual for middle- and upper-class women of the period: as part of this education, she would have been taught foreign languages, music, as well as to draw and paint in watercolor, genteel pursuits that earned a young lady the epithet of being “accomplished.”

However, the fact that she had to seek employment also implies that her family could not financially support an unmarried daughter. Indeed, she was not overly fond of the job—between teaching the young girl French, Latin, and music, Elizabeth wrote to her mother that her duties as a governess were “miserably-wretched dull,” and that she feared she would soon become “very melancholy.”[2] Thus, her marriage to John Gould when she was 24 in 1829 has been characterized as a “rescue” by some authors.[3] In reality, the rescuing went both ways.

John’s career in ornithology was on the rise at the time of his and Elizabeth’s wedding—by 1828, he had been appointed Curator and Preserver at the Museum of the Zoological Society of London. In 1830, a collection of Himalayan bird skins came across his desk for preservation, which his colleague, N. A. Vigors, was in the process of describing. Familiar with the new printing technology of lithography through the work of one Edward Lear, John put forward a proposal for an illustrated book to show off the new and interesting species contained in the collection. Fully aware that his own artistic abilities did not lend themselves to the subtle medium of lithography, John brought the project to Elizabeth, who at first did not grasp the gravity of her husband’s request. “But who will do the plates on stone?” she reportedly asked. “Why you, of course!” John replied matter-of-factly.[4]

No record exists of how Elizabeth felt about suddenly being designated the family draughtswoman. However, executing her new role cannot have been easy for her from a purely physiological standpoint: pregnant with her and John’s first child, she nevertheless spent hours transferring her specimen drawings onto stone in anticipation of the publication of the first batch of plates for the work. She gave birth to a son, John Henry, only days after the plates were sent to subscribers.[5]

As previously stated, Elizabeth’s name is absent from the title page of what became A Century of Birds from the Himalaya Mountains; her contribution is briefly mentioned in the preface of the work, which simply states that her “well-known abilities” were employed in “delineating these birds.”[6] Each of the plates bears a small artist’s credit on the lower left—“Drawn from nature on stone by E. Gould”—but none of them feature her signature. Edward Lear, who John enlisted to teach Elizabeth lithography methods, incorporated his signature into much of his work, so it is somewhat curious that she elected not to sign her pieces.

Her work was well-received in ornithological circles, and N. A. Vigors was so impressed by her artistry that he named a species of colorful sunbird in her honor. But it was John who received the lion’s share of professional accolades. The success of Century spurred John to undertake a much larger survey of European birds, which he initiated while the final parts of Century were still being delivered to subscribers. This ambitious publication, which became the 448-plate Birds of Europe, required John and Elizabeth to travel extensively in continental Europe, visiting natural history collections and observing and collecting specimens in the wild. Being able to see living, moving birds enabled Elizabeth’s artistic talent to improve immensely; it is during this publication that she truly began to show the lively interactions between males and females of species, and incorporating movement into her figures that made them look as though they could fly off of the page at any moment.

However, the artist credit on the lower left corner of the plates of Birds of Europe does not just bear Elizabeth’s name. Instead, her initial E. is preceded by a J., as John claimed artistic credit for the composition of the designs.

This line would remain the norm throughout the rest of the publications they worked on together. In his preface to Birds of Europe, John describes how Elizabeth drew and lithographed the pieces, but credits himself for the “sketches and designs.”[7] Documentary evidence tells a different story. The Ralph Ellis Collection, housed at the University of Kansas’ Kenneth Spencer Research Library, contains a number of sketches that indicate that, rather than arranging the composition, John would either make minor changes to or simply approve Elizabeth’s sketches that became the final designs.[8]

Observation, drawing, printing, and publication of Birds of Europe took a total of five years, during which Elizabeth gave birth to five more children, only three of whom survived infancy. Also during this time, John employed Elizabeth to draw the plates to accompany his text on the bird specimens brought back by the young naturalist Charles Darwin from the voyage of the H. M. S. Beagle. Among these specimens were the now-famous Galapagos finches, which Darwin referred to when formulating his theory of natural selection in his 1859 On the Origin of Species. Elizabeth’s name is completely absent from the plates.

The work that truly established John Gould as a master of ornithological publication was Birds of Australia, published over eight years from 1840-1848. After his experience with Birds of Europe, John had realized the importance of field observation to the quality of his publications. He subsequently arranged for Elizabeth, their eldest child John Henry, their nephew Henry Coxen, zoologist John Gilbert, servants, and himself to make the voyage to Australia in 1838, a trip that was in part made possible by Elizabeth’s family. Her two brothers, Charles and Stephen, had established farms in New South Wales, and had already sent a number of Australian bird specimens back to the Goulds for description and lithography, and the Gould party even used their property as a base for the latter months of their two year stay in the colony.

It is this period of Elizabeth’s life that is most well-documented, thanks to the letters she wrote to her mother in England, as well as her travel diaries. It was also likely one of the most difficult periods of her life. Forced to leave three of her children behind to accompany John on his scientific pursuits, she was distraught; she was so emotionally plagued by the prospect that she was nearly unable to board the ship on the day of their embarkation.[9] It is unclear how John finally managed to persuade her to go up the gangplank, but it is clear from her correspondence that she remained deeply concerned about the wellbeing of the children, the youngest of whom was only six months, as well as her mother.

Rather than being entirely maudlin, her letters also contain anecdotes of John’s collecting prowess (“he has already shown himself a great enemy of the feathered tribe”), her reluctance to participate in a ball held for the Queen’s birthday (“Don’t fancy I attempt dancing—no, no. I am well content to look on.”), and the ambiance of a campsite in New South Wales (“where nature appeared in her wild luxuriance”).[10] What they do not discuss, unfortunately, is her art. Her surviving sketches and the lithographs they became have been left to speak for themselves.

When the Goulds returned to England in August 1840, they brought back sketches, specimens, and another child—Elizabeth gave birth to a son, Franklin, in Tasmania. The first part of Birds of Australia was due to be published in December of that year, so John and Elizabeth quickly got to work on the text and lithography. Elizabeth had managed to transfer 84 of her drawings onto stone by August 1841, but tragically, she would not live to see the project through to completion. A few days after giving birth to an eighth child, Sarah, Elizabeth was struck by puerperal fever and passed away. She left John with multitudinous sketches and six children. There is no record of how this affected John emotionally. However, he memorialized her in the best way he knew how: he named a multicolored finch in her honor, and described her devotion to the family publication pursuit in the accompanying text.

Elizabeth’s life is inexorably linked and influenced by that of her husband John. The way he credited (or rather, failed to credit) her contributions is objectively bad practice, and some of John Gould’s other collaborators denounced him years later; notably, upon hearing of John’s death in 1881, Edward Lear wrote that John “owed everything to his excellent wife, and to myself, without whose help in drawing he had done nothing.” However, researchers combing Elizabeth’s correspondence and diaries have found no record of her dissatisfaction with the process. It is frustrating that such a talented woman has left behind so little in the way of information about her feelings toward her art; but the delicacy and care by which she portrayed her subjects can convey nothing else than love.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library holds many of Elizabeth Gould’s works, including the Smithsonian Libraries’ copies of A Century of Birds from the Himalaya Mountains, The Birds of Australia, and The Birds of Europe, for anyone to view and appreciate for themselves. You can also browse a collection of her artworks in the BHL Flickr.

Facebook Live at Smithsonian Libraries: The Art of Elizabeth Gould

You can learn more about Elizabeth Gould and see a selection of her works during a behind-the-scenes tour at the Natural History Rare Book Library at the Smithsonian Libraries with Alexandra Newman.

When? Friday, 22 March @ 1pm ET

Where? https://www.facebook.com/SmithsonianLibraries

References

[1] Isabella Tree. The Bird Man: The Extraordinary Story of John Gould. London: Ebury Press. 2004.

[2] Chisolm, Alec. 1964. “Elizabeth Gould: Some “New” Letters.” Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 49(5): 10.

[3] Roslyn Russel. The Business of Nature: John Gould and Australia. Canberra: The National Library of Australia, 2011.

[4] Richard Bowdler Sharpe. An Analytical Index to the Works of the Late John Gould, F. R. S., with a Biographical Memoir and Portrait. London: Henry Sotheran, 1893.

[5] Russel, 2011.

[6] John Gould. A Century of Birds from the Himalayas. London, 1831.

[7] John Gould. The Birds of Europe. London, 1837.

[8] Melissa Ashley. “Elizabeth Gould.” John Gould: Bird Illustration in the Age of Darwin. 2014. https://exhibits.lib.ku.edu/exhibits/show/gould/about/elizabeth_gould

[9] Ibid.

[10] Russel, 2011.

As an early work in the history of Linnaean taxonomy, Beredeneerde catalogus van eene, by uitstek fraaye en weergaalooze verzameling, zoo van inlandsche als uitheemsche vogelen, viervoetige en gekorvene dieren (i.e. Vroeg’s Catalogue, 1764) by Adrian Vroeg is the source of dozens of new species of birds [1]. Published just six years after the 10th edition of Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae — considered the starting point of zoological nomenclature — the work is extremely rare, with only a handful of copies known to exist worldwide.

Because of the work’s age and rarity, first-hand access to the title has been difficult, and many researchers have had to rely on secondary sources for Vroeg’s names, which may have introduced errors or even overlooked the priority of a name established by Vroeg.

“It is absolutely rare that the scientific community gets access to such an early work in which new names were established after 1758,” explains Dr. Francisco Welter-Schultes of the Zoological Institute of Göttingen University in Germany. “Imagine being able to finally view an original spelling of a name that might not have been verified for more than 100 years. Generations of scientists never reliably saw the correct spellings of these names.”

Between 2008-2011, during his time on the BHL Europe project, Welter-Schultes served as the Lead of the Project Group for AnimalBase, which “was originally established to link the early literature with the names of the animals described therein” [2]. The database provides original and corrected spellings of names, type localities, citations for the original descriptions, and, where, possible, links to digitized copies of these descriptions in the literature — many from the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

A major reference for the Project Group’s work was Sherborn’s Index Animalium (1902), “a compendium of zoological taxonomic species nomenclature from 1758 to 1850” [3]. Where possible, the Project Group compared the Index with the original works to verify the accuracy of the names and make any necessary corrections. If it was not possible to consult the original work, the Group had to rely on Sherborn’s Index.

The question, of course, is whether Sherborn himself was able to verify every name against the original source or whether he, too, had to rely on secondary sources in some instances.

“I knew immediately after realizing the date of Vroeg’s publication that new names which were cited in secondary sources like Sherborn’s Index Animalium were not very reliably cited,” explains Welter-Schultes. “If a work is that rare, then the likelihood is greater that Sherborn may never have seen the original. Did Sherborn just copy errors from other lists, and we just copied Sherborn’s forwarded errors to AnimalBase?”

In the hopes of being able to verify the names published by Vroeg in 1764, Welter-Schultes submitted a scan request to the Biodiversity Heritage Library for Vroeg’s Catalogue in 2010. At the time of the request, no BHL partner library appeared to hold the title. So, the request remained in the queue in the chance that, with the addition of new partners in the future or the growth of existing partners’ collections, it might be possible to digitize the work at a later date.

A few years later, whilst reviewing outstanding requests in the queue, Smithsonian Libraries staff discovered that its Joseph F. Cullman 3rd Library of Natural History had since cataloged the item after it was transferred from the Libraries’ general collections. The Smithsonian Libraries is not only the sole BHL partner to hold this work, but the Libraries’ copy is also one of only a few known copies worldwide, with the others being in Denmark (2), the Netherlands (2), and Germany (1) [4].

The catalog record provides insight into the interesting provenance of the Smithsonian Libraries’ copy of this very rare book, which was previously owned (and donated) by Charles Wallace Richmond, a Smithsonian ornithologist and bibliographer who served as Assistant Curator, Associate Curator, and Curator in the Division of Birds of the United States National Museum (USNM) (now the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History) between 1894 and his death in 1932 [5]. Richmond’s signature can be seen on the verso of the title page, dated Aug. 31, 1905, and a book dealer’s mailing label to Richmond from Frederik Muller & Co. of Amsterdam is bound into the volume.

An avid book collector, Richmond’s personal library consisted of over 200 publications and auction catalogs in German, Italian, French, Spanish, Latin, and English on various natural history topics — many quite rare as Richmond specifically sought out obscure books, particularly those with new species names. Richmond donated the contents of his library to several institutions, including not only the Smithsonian but also the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, the Library of Congress, and the California Academy of Sciences — all of which are BHL partner institutions [6]. His donation of taxonomic books to the Smithsonian became the foundation of the Bird Library at the National Museum of Natural History [7].

Unfortunately, the Smithsonian’s copy of Vroeg’s Catalogue was in need of conservation before it could be scanned. The item was added to the Smithsonian Libraries’ preservation queue, and once the necessary treatments were completed, it was added to the Libraries’ queue for folio digitization.

Finally, in 2018 — eight years after the initial request, Vroeg’s Catalogue was digitized by the Smithsonian Libraries’ digitization team and made freely available online through the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Several Smithsonian Libraries staff members were involved in completing this book’s journey from shelf to screen, including Digital Library staff Jacqueline Chapman, Adriana Marroquin, and Stefaan Hurts; Special Collections staff Leslie Overstreet, Daria Wingreen-Mason, and Alexandra Newman; Cataloging staff Julia Blakely; Preservation staff Katie Wagner; and BHL Secretariat staff Bianca Crowley and Grace Costantino. We extend our thanks to all involved for making this extremely rare book freely available to the world.

And because this work is now easily accessible to researchers, it can be used to empower global research, such as that of Welter-Schultes. His response to Jacqueline Chapman’s email notification that the work had been digitized was swift: “This was really very, very useful. I immediately spent two hours exploring this interesting work.”

With the digital copy of the Smithsonian Libraries’ Catalogue, Welter-Schultes was able to uncover taxonomic errors that had persisted for at least a century and improve the accuracy of the names data available through AnimalBase.

“It was easy for me to verify our data set of names, and in fact it turned out that Sherborn must have relied on a third source,” explains Welter-Schultes. “There were so many inaccuracies in the spellings of the names that we must assume that Sherborn, who in his work (published in 1902) had a very low average error rate, did very probably not extract those names from an original copy of the 1764 work.”

Knowing that their work is so valued and impactful is also very encouraging for the staff who dedicate so much time and energy to addressing the needs of BHL’s user community.

“It is rare that we hear from users that the items we digitize in response to these older requests are so immediately relevant and impactful on current research,” shares Chapman. “And it is so fulfilling!”

Thanks to the efforts of the staff at Smithsonian Libraries and other BHL partners around the world, researchers can now easily access original species descriptions and other rare literature that underpins the work of taxonomists today.

“Today, thousands of names in online data resources are equipped with links to their original descriptions in BHL,” lauds Welter-Schultes. “What we did 10 years ago with AnimalBase was pioneering work — many others followed and did the same. Today, providing a link to a BHL source is something absolutely usual and taxonomists can probably not imagine life anymore without BHL.”

We are grateful to Dr. Welter-Schultes for sharing this example of how BHL is impacting real research today. We also extend our sincere thanks to all of our partners for making BHL the essential resource that it is today. The dedication and diligence of the staff at our partner libraries to support the scientific and research community — whether that involves more straightforward digitization projects or complex, multi-year undertakings —  ensures that the Biodiversity Heritage Library will continue to empower global research for decades to come.

References

[1] AnimalBase. 2018. “Taxa described as new in Vroeg 1764.” Accessed on 29 November 2018. http://www.animalbase.uni-goettingen.de/zooweb/servlet/AnimalBase/list/taxa?from_reference=1908.

[2] AnimalBase. 2018. “About.” Accessed on 29 November 2018. http://www.animalbase.org/.

[3] Smithsonian Libraries. 2018. “About this Project: Index Animalium.” Accessed on 29 November 2018. http://www.sil.si.edu/DigitalCollections/indexanimalium/about/.

[4] Leslie Overstreet, email message to author, 24 September 2018.

[5] Stone, Witmer. 1933. “In Memoriam: Charles Wallace Richmond.” The Auk, 50(1): 1-22.

[6] Smithsonian Institution Archives. 2011. “Record Unit 7382,  Richmond, Charles Wallace, 1868-1932, Charles Wallace Richmond Library Catalog and Lists, 1906-1908 and undated.” Collections, 19 August. Accessed on 29 November 2018. https://siarchives.si.edu/collections/siris_arc_217538.

[7] Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. 2018. “Charles W. Richmond (1868-1932).” Department of Vertebrate Zoology: Division of Birds. Accessed on 29 November 2018. http://vertebrates.si.edu/birds/Hall_of_fame/CharlesRichmond.html.

More volumes from the Wilson Ornithological Society are now on BHL!  Spanning back to 1893, the publications The Wilson Bulletin and The Wilson Journal of Ornithology are a great example of the kind of legacy literature that distinguishes BHL.

The Wilson Ornithological Society is the second largest ornithological society in North America. The organization of professional scientists and dedicated amateurs is named for Alexander Wilson, known as the “Father of American Ornithology”.

The Wilson Journal of Ornithology is a quarterly peer-reviewed journal that replaces its predecessor, The Wilson Bulletin. BHL had previously added some earlier public domain volumes of The Wilson Bulletin (contributed in BHL by the American Museum of Natural History and Smithsonian Libraries), but was able to expand the collection thanks to the Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature (EABL) project, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The Wilson Ornithological Society granted permission to share these titles on BHL with a 5-year embargo on the most recently published volumes, so that now BHL has The Bulletin from 1894-2005 and The Journal from 2006-2010.

The story of the Wilson Ornithological Society begins in 1886 with the ‘Young Ornithologists Association’ founded by L. O. Pindar and J. B. Richards. This group changed names several times, morphing into the Wilson Ornithological Chapter of the Agassiz Association in 1888, to the Wilson Ornithological Club, and eventually the Wilson Ornithological Society (WOS) in 1955. The first five volumes published by the evolving group went by several different titles, all of which are available on BHL (added prior to EABL). They are:

• The Ornithologists’ and oologists’ semi-annual (v. 1-2 and 3.1, 1889-1891, contributed by Smithsonian Libraries)
• The Wilson quarterly (v. 4, 1892, contributed by the American Museum of Natural History)
• The journal of the Wilson Ornithological Chapter of the Agassiz Association (5th volume in WOS series, 1893, contributed by Smithsonian Libraries)

The Wilson Ornithological Society is headquartered at the University of Michigan, where it established the Josselyn Van Tyne Memorial Library in association with the University’s Bird Division Library.

The Wilson Bulletin and the The Wilson Journal of Ornithology were digitized for BHL as a group effort, with digitized volumes contributed by the Ernst Mayr Library of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, the American Museum of Natural History, and The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University.

For a look at digitization behind the scenes, here’s the view from my desk as I work in the Ernst Mayr Library at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology:

These bound volumes (51-122) were pulled from the shelf at the Mayr Library and checked page by page to make sure each was in good condition for scanning: no pages missing or out of order, no extensive damage, and margins wide enough for scanning to capture all of the text. (This is what I do when I’m not writing blog posts!) Some of the volumes were scanned here at the Mayr Library using our Table Top Scribe (see next image), and the rest were sent to Internet Archive scanning facilities. To fill in the gaps where our volumes weren’t suitable for scanning, we reached out to the American Museum of Natural History (v. 51, 54, 76, 86-87, 96) and to The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University (v. 123-124; currently being digitized).

Gratitude to Wilson Ornithological Society for granting permission to share these volumes on BHL, and to the Ernst Mayr Library of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, the American Museum of Natural History and The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University for digitization!

References

Wilson Ornithological Society

William Brewster (1851-1919) was a renowned American amateur ornithologist, serving as a co-founder of the American Ornithologists’ Union, the first president of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, and a curator at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ). As a part of the CLIR-funded BHL Field Notes Project, MCZ has been digitizing Brewster’s journals, diaries, letters, and photographic prints, which are held in Special Collections at the MCZ’s Ernst Mayr Library.

Most of Brewster’s observations are based in New England, where he split his time between two homes in Cambridge and Concord, Massachusetts. Brewster would stay in a cabin by the Concord River to study nature and escape city life in Cambridge. He also took notes when travelling: his notebooks document trips to the southern USA, the Caribbean, and Europe.

Brewster’s writings contain a wealth of information, from data on temperature and weather conditions to descriptions of animal behavior and personal musings. Some of the extensive Brewster collection is already available to view on BHL – here’s a sampling of the kinds of information you’ll find.

In the warmer months, Brewster often camped at Lake Umbagog (north of the White Mountain National Forest, straddling Maine – New Hampshire border), where he spent his days tracking the progress of bird nests around the lake and making other general observations. Here’s a typical example of one of Brewster’s bird lists, recorded at Lake Umbagog in 1907. The larger numbers are dates, with superscripts indicating the number of individuals counted that day. Asterisks tell us that the bird was heard vocalizing. Some additional details are also penned in (for example, he notes that Dendroica pensylvanica, the Chestnut-sided Warbler, was in an apple tree). [1]

Beginning in the 1890s, Brewster’s journals document a transition of focus from mainly specimen-collecting to photography and documenting behaviors. (His journals reveal an interesting story about his increasing ethical conflict and desire to study wildlife without contributing to its decline. You can read more about this in a previous BHL blog post found here.) Earlier in Brewster’s career, his journals list and provide details on species collected – data that is similarly useful to the list above in that it gives an indication of species distribution and abundance. It also corresponds with existing specimens and documents the impact made by scientific collectors of the era.

The kinds of data in these journals diversifies as Brewster started devoting more time to documenting animal behaviors. In many ways, this work seems to have been harder than getting a good shot at a bird. Even with today’s apps and audio libraries, figuring out bird calls can be a challenge. Equipped with just pencil, paper, field glasses and ears, studying bird vocalizations is much trickier, as shown by Brewster’s notes below from 1902. [2] Today, we can represent bird vocalizations visually using spectrograms. In order to translate sounds to text, Brewster listened diligently to invent mnemonics, describe patterns, and make comparisons to other more familiar sounds.

It’s worth mentioning that Brewster’s animal observations weren’t limited to birds, and that a lot of his animal encounters made for interesting stories. Below is a sketch of a moose from Lake Umbagog, observed in August 1869. [3] His impression: “He seemed like some long-forgotten antedeluvian creature which, arousing from a sleep of thousands of years, was wandering aimlessly about in a land so changed that it no longer had any place for such strange monsters.”

As though telling the story to a friend, he recounts following the moose through the wetland in his canoe – sometimes ending up way too close for comfort. After talking to a local guide, he learned that the moose that he’d seen was a mid-sized female, and concluded, “If she was not really a very large one I have no wish to be equally near to a big bull!”

Because he returned to Lake Umbagog year after year, Brewster was able to notice longer-term changes in familiar ecosystems. Increasingly, these changes were man-made disturbances: the clearing of woods, the creation of new roads, and other urbanizing changes. He also recorded how local communities of animals and plants responded after these disturbances. The following passages from Brewster’s field notes document some changes that he saw in the Maine woods as a consequence of logging for paper mills, and include some of his own predictions.

“Where the road passes through the woods … the roadworkers last May cut away the mountain maples, cornels and other shrubs and low trees that made such a beautiful border to the forest clearing in their places a broad belt of bare rocks half covered with the fallen brush wood. This deed of vandalism was performed while I was here and at the time I feared that years must elapse before Nature, with all her diligence, could repair the injury.

“I underrated her powers for already this thicket of road is, if anything, more beautiful than ever. Fire weed, Eupatorium, Impatiens, Asters, Golden rod and several other tall and rank flowering plants have shot up through and almost perfectly concealed the unsightly brush and stone heaps and I have rarely seen a more brilliant or attractive display of wild flowers. The fire weed is especially tall and fine and the jewel weed grows in solid beds yards in extent. Of course the Humming birds had not overlooked such a feeding ground. There were at least three of them there at once including an adult male with blazing ruby throat at which I fired an ineffectual shot.” [4]

In this instance, Brewster noticed that one year was enough time to see plant growth after the woods had been cleared, that the colonizing plants were different from the ones that characterized the location before, and that they had impacted animal life. He penned these observations on ecological succession just a few years before the first scientific paper on this concept was published (“An Ecological Study of the Sand Dune Flora of Northern Indiana”, Henry Chandler Cowles, 1898.). [5]

The following year, he wrote:

“The Lake shore has been sadly marred … by the lumbermen who last winter cut all the spruces and many of the fine, tall white pines all the way from this landing to the deep cove near the Tidswell place. […] Lumbering is a very different business now from what it was twenty years ago. Then only the larger trees were taken; now the pulp mills devour everything and nothing is spared thicker at the base than five inches! […] These changes in the character of the forests must make speedy & considerable changes in the bird fauna. The shore near Crocker’s camp, for instance, has been one of the chief breeding grounds for the Bay breasted Warbler. They will breed there no longer, now that all the spruces are gone.” [6]

Knowing now that local extirpations and even total extinction can occur (this was the decade when the passenger pigeon disappeared from the wild), he would have penned this prediction with heavy heart. To help preserve an area he cared about – his familiar stomping grounds along the Concord River in Concord, Mass. – over time, Brewster purchased 300 acres of the riverfront. His ‘October Farm,’ across the river from Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, is now protected land with trails recently opened to the public – while his writings, notes and photographs preserve the region for us as he knew it in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

(If you’re interested in learning more, I write an ongoing series of blog posts on the Brewster collection on the Ernst Mayr Library blog. You might like to see archival and modern photos of October Farm, Brewster’s property in Concord.)

References

[1] July and August 1907. Journals of William Brewster, 1871-1919 (inclusive). Find this journal on BHL.

[2] June 1, 1902. Journals of William Brewster, 1871-1919 (inclusive). Find this journal on BHL.

[3] August 27, 1896. Journals of William Brewster, 1871-1919 (inclusive). Find this journal on BHL.

[4] August 15, 1896. Journals of William Brewster, 1871-1919 (inclusive). Find this journal on BHL.

[5] ‘Henry C. Cowles’. The University of Chicago Centennial Catalogues. Web accessed: https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/projects/centcat/fac/facch14_01.html

[6] May 15, 1897. Journals of William Brewster, 1871-1919 (inclusive). Find this journal on BHL.