By training an apothecary and botanist, Belon is also recognized by modern science as the founder of comparative anatomy and embryology in animals. He was one of the first naturalist-explorers, and his observations made this book the most thoroughly documented account of the eastern Mediterranean at the time. First published in 1553, Observations was re-printed the following year with illustrations. This woodcut accompanies the first scientific description of the giraffe, known in medieval bestiaries as the "cameleopard."

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Bloch’s work is one of the high points in the history of ichthyology, both graphically and taxonomically. It is still in use as a standard reference for identification. Bloch described fishes from all over the world, relying on numerous contacts around the globe. In all, he listed more than 169 new species. A French edition, published in Berlin in 1785–97, allowed the work to reach a wider audience. Various engravers produced the plates in a remarkably consistent style over a 12-year period. The Smithsonian is one of only nine institutions in the world to hold a complete set of the original German editions and one of only two libraries to hold both the German and the French.

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Early voyagers to the polar regions often saw the northern lights, a remarkable luminous display that some considered to be mists emanating from the earth. Capron was one of the first scientists to discuss the chemical and physical nature of the phenomenon. By the 1950s, it was accepted that the northern lights are caused by the interaction of high-energy electrons from the Sun with atoms in the Earth’s upper atmosphere.

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Destined by his family for the clergy, Charles Darwin served, unpaid, as the official naturalist on the H.M.S. Beagle's surveying voyage to South America (1831-36). Only later, after his return, did the significance of his observations lead Darwin to his revolutionary conclusions. He was not the only scientist to advance the theory of evolution, but he spent 20 years working out its operation through the processes of natural selection before publishing Origin in 1859. The book caused a sensation, and although the fact of evolution is irrefutable, the controversy over the mechanism continues unabated.

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As an old man, only two years before his death, Darwin wrote: "March 16 1880 / Down House . . . / Dear Sir / I must send one line to thank you for thinking to send me the article on inheritance, which is a subject which always interests me. Dear Sir / Yours faithfully & [ ? ] / Ch. Darwin"

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In Renaissance times, medical treatments were based on botany, but the herbals and other books available to practitioners often inaccurately identified plants. German physician Leonhart Fuchs deplored this lack of knowledge and produced his book to rectify it. Fuchs compiled the text from various classical sources but added his own field observations. The work is famous for its more than 500 woodcut illustrations, drawn by Heinrich Füllmaurer and Albrecht Meyer and cut by Veit Rudolf Speckle. The Smithsonian Libraries copy is uncolored, which accentuates the extraordinary beauty of line achieved by the artists and demonstrates the Renaissance shift to the accurate observation and drawing of plants from life. English artist and designer William Morris owned a copy of Fuchs’s book and clearly took inspiration from it for some of his own designs.

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Shortly after the invention of the telescope, Galileo in 1609 constructed one for himself and turned it to the heavens. He quickly published this brief account of his amazing discoveries, the first work of modern observational astronomy. In it, Galileo describes his revolutionary sightings of craters on the Moon, individual stars in the Milky Way, and the four largest moons of Jupiter. Publication of Sidereus nuncius triggered a chain of events that shook the foundation of European thought and launched an intellectual voyage that would take us deeper into the universe. This copy is from the collection of Herbert McLean Evans (1882-1971), a pioneer in collecting books about the history of science.

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Systema cosmicum is the Latin translation of Galileo’s great 1632 treatise, Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo . . . (Dialogue concerning the two chief world systems). Galileo set the Dialogo as a conversation among three people about the problems and merits of the classical Earth-centered model of the solar system versus the newer Sun-centered one. Galileo’s endorsement of the latter arrangement so infuriated papal authorities that he was kept under house arrest for the remainder of his life. He first published his treatise in Italian as an appeal to the larger public, and then again in 1641, in Latin, the language of the intellectual world. This copy was previously owned by the Dutch Protestant theologian Alhart de Raedt (born 1645), who annotated the book extensively.

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In contrast to the bestiary tradition, the physician and scholar Konrad Gesner managed to re-establish the natural sciences on a recognizably scientific footing of observation, experimentation, and deduction. His encyclopedic work, compiled from folklore, ancient and medieval texts, and correspondence with a wide network of scholars, travelers, and natural philosophers, was tempered by his skepticism and an emphasis on direct observations. This copy, a mix of Zurich and Frankfurt imprints, is in a uniform blind-stamped pigskin binding dated 1599.

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A founder of the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain, James Glaisher described the first recorded balloon ascensions undertaken specifically for scientific research. Glaisher and his colleagues studied atmospherics and meteorology, and they nearly died from asphyxiation and hypothermia when their balloon rose too high.

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This volume is a republication of Robert Goddard's pioneering research in liquid-fuel rocket development. Goddard, considered the founding father of modern rocketry, laid the groundwork for America’s space program. The Smithsonian supported his research beginning in 1916 and published his first publication on rocketry in 1919. The Institution, despite mockery from skeptics, published further research in 1936.

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This volume is one of several published by Emperor Hirohito (1901-1989), a skilled collector and an avid and lifelong marine biologist. With its complex seabed and warm and cold currents, Sagami Bay is a site well known for its diverse marine life. Hirohito himself collected the crabs illustrated in this volume and identified them in his palace laboratory using the work of Mary Jane Rathbun, a 19th-century Smithsonian scientist. Today, scientists at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center on the Chesapeake Bay refer to this catalog of the emperor’s research collection in their work.

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Like all of Gould's works, The Birds of New Guinea, completed by Richard Bowdler Sharpe after Gould's death in 1881, is both beautiful and scientifically important. In it are described and illustrated many exotic species of birds, including the birds of paradise unique to New Guinea -- bowerbirds, parrots, and others previously unknown to Western science. Its 310 hand-colored lithographs were largely the work of William Hart, who produced the final watercolors based on Gould's sketches and transferred them to the printing stone. This and other volumes donated in 1980 by conservationist and broadcast magnate John H. Phipps enriched and complemented the already fine collections that support ornithological research within the Institution.

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Although an important reference work in ornithological taxonomy, Gray’s Hand-list is not in itself rare. This copy, however, was owned and annotated by Elliott Coues (1842-1899), the premier American ornithologist of the period, after the Smithsonian’s Spencer F. Baird (1833-1889). Coues, as a boy, had studied informally under Baird and worked with the expedition collections at the Smithsonian throughout his life. Books interleaved to provide space for annotations, linking the text to specimens in museum collections and to related taxonomic works, are not uncommon in the Smithsonian Libraries holdings. In an inscription, Coues exhorted later owners of this copy (who included book collector Evan Morton Evans and ornithologists John Eliot Thayer and Robert Cushman) to continue the annotations.

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A great pioneer in the study of the stars, William Herschel was appointed private astronomer to the king of England in recognition of his 1781 discovery of the planet Uranus. In this paper, he made his first, not entirely successful attempt at a scientific explanation of the structure of the Milky Way galaxy, opening a debate that continues to this day. The folding plate illustrates his concept of how the galaxy would appear to an outside observer. Herschel also claimed that dim nebulous patches in the sky were galaxies just like our own.

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Hevelius’s personal observatory in Danzig was the best-equipped facility of its kind in the world. A champion of the "long-focus" telescope, sometimes more than 100 feet in length, Hevelius was an expert builder who constructed many of his own instruments. The first volume of this work describes his "celestial machines" in great detail, and its engravings often depict Hevelius using the devices, frequently in concert with his wife and collaborator, Elisabetha. This book was in the collection of Herbert McLean Evans (1882-1971), a pioneer in collecting books about the history of science.

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Curator of experiments at the Royal Society of London, Hooke published his Micrographia (literally, "Little Drawings") to record a series of observations he had made with a microscope. Like Galileo’s Sidereus nuncius, the Micrographia presented a wealth of new observations with dramatic visual effect, exerting an enormous influence on the development of science. Hooke was the first scientist to use the word "cell" and to speculate on its function. The detailed plates in Micrographia were so popular that they were reprinted continually in other books up to the 1800s.

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Importing and cultivating rare and exotic plants from newly explored regions of the world was popular throughout late 18th-century Europe. Jacquin, a Dutchman of French extraction, produced many of the great florilegia, or flower books, of the period during his career with the Austrian imperial gardens and natural history collections. Collectively his works described a multitude of new species and some 2,700 plates of plants, many of them never before depicted. This four-volume folio, published in fewer than 200 copies, contains 500 detailed engravings of plants from South Africa, the Americas, and other distant regions, all of which were grown in the royal gardens of Schönbrunn in Vienna.

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Imposing mathematical harmony on the skies, Kepler proposed that the planetary orbits nested one inside the other, with each planet (at the time, thought to be six) alternating with one of the five Platonic "solids" (geometric figures such as the cube). This elegant model addressed both the number of planets and the spacing of their orbits. Kepler’s idea, while not fully worked out, attempted to clarify the spatial organization of the solar system while arguing that geometry was an innate part of the divine plan of creation.

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Ley, a paleontologist, engineer, and theorist on conditions on other planets and space, edited this book of essays written by famous rocket scientists, including Hermann Oberth, Walter Hohmann, and Guido von Pirquet.

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World explorers brought back to Europe so many exotic plant and animal specimens that chaos loomed for the 18th-century naturalists attempting to identify, classify, and communicate what they had gathered. Linnaeus made a great contribution to science by developing systems of classification and nomenclature to organize these processes. His principles of organization, especially his system of binomial nomenclature, provided essential tools for making sense of the natural world. The practice of taxonomy (naming and classifying species) and systematics (the classification of species into higher groups) continues at the National Museum of Natural History today and still relies on Linnaeus’s classic work. The tenth edition (1758-59), which the Libraries holds in multiple copies, was chosen as the starting point for zoological nomenclature. This much rarer copy of the second edition is from the library of Lorenz Oken (1799-1851), a renowned German natural scientist.

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Though trained as an engineer, Martinet was another of the great 18th-century engravers, producing hundreds of plates for Brisson’s Ornithologie and Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, among other works. Carrying on the success of his ornithological illustrations, he and his son engraved and issued independently at least two series of bird plates from the 1770s into the 1790s. The 174 numbered plates in this volume are especially charming for their delicate coloring and occasional Parisian backgrounds.

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Maria Sibylla Merian, the daughter, sister, and wife of artists and engravers, lived a most unconventional life: she became an artist herself, left her husband to join a Protestant sect, and voyaged at the age of 50 to the Dutch colony of Surinam in South America. Merian, who worked professionally under her own name, spent two years in the rain forest observing, collecting, and drawing insects and plants. Despite a few errors, her Metamorphosis, published after her return, is a masterpiece of both art and science. In a vivid, pleasingly ornate artistic style, she was the first to record the full life cycle of many species of butterflies and moths.

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When Newton presented his concepts about the behavior and characteristics of light, particularly his assertion that white light is composed of a spectrum of colors, he posed a number of questions intended to stimulate further research. In the 1718 revision of his 1704 work, Newton extended his original 16 queries to 31; these discourses were considered the most provocative parts of the book. Through the queries, Newton speculated that a fluid, or "aether," pervaded all of space and provided the medium through which light could travel. Robert Smith (1689-1768), Plumian Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge University and author of the most influential textbook on optics in the 1700s, owned this copy and annotated it heavily.

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In the 18th century, entomology became a fertile field for artists as well as scientists. Illustrated by Jacob Sturm (1771–1848), one of the period’s best entomological artist/engravers, with more than 2,600 hand-colored plates of individual, lifesize insects, Panzer’s work was issued in 109 parts over a 17-year period. Issued as a serial publication, a common pattern for illustrated natural history works in the 18th and 19th centuries, complete sets are scarce. The Smithsonian Libraries has one of them, in contemporary bindings.

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Pearson, a famous southern naturalist, was one of the founders and later president of the National Association of Audubon Societies (now the National Audubon Society). Pearson, who also founded the International Council for Bird Preservation, established many school libraries throughout his native North Carolina by donating natural history books to school superintendents. His early work on bird conservation is important to the mission of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center at the National Zoological Park as well as to the history of the conservation movement in the United States. The Smithsonian Libraries copy is signed by author.

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Willem Piso served as the physician of the Dutch settlement in Brazil from 1636 to 1644 and was a pioneer in tropical medicine and pharmacology. He studied the herbal medicines of the indigenous people and advocated many of their health practices. Searching the jungle for medicinal plants, he was the first European to grasp the usefulness of native treatments using ipecacuanha, sassafras, sarsaparilla, guaiacum, and other plants. His findings constitute the first part of the Historia naturalis Brasiliae; the second and larger part is a broader natural history of the region by Georg Marggraf, Piso’s assistant, and includes the first illustrations and descriptions of a variety of New World animals.

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Regiomontanus, one of the first publishers of astronomical material, developed an almanac series that was popular enough to continue after his death. The almanacs contained planetary positions for a particular year as calculated from astronomical tables, freeing astronomers from performing the laborious task themselves. This 1499 copy contains numerous annotations to the almanac and its eclipse predictions.

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Austrian astronomer Georg Peurbach began a new Latin translation in 1460 of Ptolemy’s compendium of Greek astronomical knowledge, and Regiomontanus, a German astronomer and mathematician, completed it before 1463. The authors clarified obscure passages and offered a concise and comprehensible summary of the Almagest. The work, the first appearance in print of Ptolemy’s treatise, had an unprecedented impact on Renaissance astronomers and played a key role in the development of modern astronomy. The Smithsonian copy is heavily annotated and contains numerous mathematical drawings.

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In 1762, a large fireball entered the Earth’s atmosphere and exploded over Germany. Silberschlag provided a good description of the event along with engravings of meteors, the fireball’s path, and its ultimate fiery explosion. Not until the 1800s did scientists begin to concede that fireballs and meteorites might have extraterrestrial origins. Prior to that, it was difficult to conceive how boulders could fall from the sky, and many believed that meteorites were simply rocks struck by lightning.

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James Louis Macie Smithson was a gentleman scientist, educated at Oxford and interested in chemistry, mineralogy, and geology. His 27 scientific papers, published in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions and Thomson’s Annals of Philosophy, include this one on the mineral (a form of zinc carbonate) that was later named "smithsonite" in his honor. Smithson bequeathed $550,000 in gold as well as his library and personal effects to the United States, but many items were lost in a devastating fire in 1865. Approximately 115 titles survived, including several copies of this corrected offprint, and they are now in the Smithsonian Libraries Special Collections.

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Piazzi Smyth was the first astronomer to seriously advocate that astronomical observations would be greatly improved if done at high altitudes. His report to the British Admiralty on his expedition to the Canary Islands greatly influenced the next generation of astronomers, including Samuel P. Langley (1834-1906), third Secretary of the Smithsonian, to whom he sent this copy. It includes annotations by the two men as well as a pasted-in spectrum by Piazzi Smyth and a letter from him to Langley.

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Elegantly combining art and science, Spalowsky’s Prodromus presents descriptions of new mollusk species accompanied by strikingly beautiful illustrations, some of them painstakingly layered with gold and silver leaf under watercolor to reproduce the effect of iridescence. This book, in the 1801 issue with a contemporary binding, is one of the rarest published works on mollusks.

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This book is unique in the Smithsonian Libraries collections in its artistic portrayals of many birds of the Chesapeake Bay. The author, a naturalist who lives along the shores of the bay, recorded much about the habits of these and other birds for more than 30 years. Taylor’s ornithologically accurate, full-color drawings depict rarely seen birds that inhabit the area. With each drawing, Taylor gives a natural history of the bird, the effects of encroaching development, and efforts to maintain the bird’s habitat.

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Embraced as a precursor to the modern environmentalist movement, Thoreau’s work emphasizes an appreciation of nature for itself rather than as a resource to be exploited -- a sharp departure from the prevailing economic and religious views of the period. Thoreau inscribed and gave this copy to Spencer F. Baird, a young natural scientist who had been selected just a few years earlier as an assistant secretary for the museum of the newly founded Smithsonian Institution. Baird had been introduced to Thoreau by Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1847.

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