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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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