Rare Natural History Books

This month's display shows the diversity of the Warren H. Corning Collection of Horticultural Classics by focusing on some of the less botanical natural history books at The Holden Arboretum.

The earliest known natural history book was that written by Pliny the Elder in the first century A.D. which is usually given some variant of the Latin title Naturae historiarum or Historiae mundi. The Corning Collection has the unillustrated Latin editions of 1518 and 1599 as well as the first English translation (by Philemon Holland) which was published as The Historie of the World in 1601.

Our first item on display, however, is the second edition of the Hortus sanitatis or Garden of Health published by Johann Prüss at Strassburg in 1497. Although intended as a medical work, the book, which was first compiled for Jacob Meydenbach, who published the first edition in 1491, it includes an amazing collection of both natural and legendary plants, animals, and minerals - and the folklore about them - as well as their medical uses. The selection of animals is especially interesting with illustrations of unicorns, mermaids, basilisks, monkfish and dogfish with the respective heads of a monk and a dog joining more usual animals. The ancient lore preserved includes the tradition that bears are born formless and then licked into shape by their mothers and that of the pelican being a type of Christ in that it pricks its breast to suckle its young with its own blood among many other stories - which are not easily read today because the text is written in abbreviated Latin.

Turning from the ancient and medieval worlds to more modern times - our next item on display is by one of the most remarkable women to be engaged in the study of natural history - Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717). The descendent of a line of noted artists and engravers, she was fascinated from childhood by insects and their life cycles. This interest formed the primary subject matter of her art which is represented in the current display by her Histoire des Insectes de l'Europe published in 1730 which collects images published by her in a number of works from 1679 to 1730. Besides portraying the phases of the insects' life cycles, the plates also often portray plants associated with them.

One of the most celebrated early illustrated works dealing with the natural history of North America is Mark Catesby's The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands first published from 1731 to 1743, but represented here by the third edition of 1771. The work features magnificent hand-colored plates usually combining images of a plant and an animal, not necessarily related, which has led its few detractors to call it the work with the fish in the trees. Catesby (1638-1749) was an English collector, author, and artist who made several trips to the American colonies. From 122 to 1726, he studied and collected the flora and fauna of the Carolinas, Florida, and the Bahamas which he sent back to his sponsors in England. Upon his return there, he began producing the book currently on display for which he furnished both the text and the majority of the illustrations.

Perhaps the most celebrated illustrator of North American fauna was John James Audubon (1785-1851). The son of a French naval officer and a Creole woman, he was educated in France before moving to his father's estate outside Philadelphia in 1803. He spent his career moving about the country - from Kentucky down the Mississippi to New Orleans, and finishing his later years in upper Manhattan - establishing his reputation as a painter and naturalist. While best remembered for his Birds of America published from 1827 to 1838, his original paintings cover a wide range of subjects including portraits, which supported him in much of his early to middle career, and animals. At one time Mr. Corning owned one of the latter - a particularly uncomfortable painting known as The Trapped Otter which portrayed the animal snarling in pain and anger in a leg trap - which dominated his study at Lantern Court. Although that work is no longer at the Arboretum - his animal studies may still be seen in the rare book room where they provide the illustrations for The Quadrupeds of North America shown here in the quarto version of 1851 to 1854. The work featuring text by the Reverend John Bachman was done in Manhattan during the later stages of Audubon's life when he was increasingly senile. The original edition was published in 30 parts from 1842 to 1845, which was followed by a three volume folio edition published from 1846 to 1854. The quarto edition in our collection, while later, has five plates not found in the previous editions.

A contemporary of Audubon is the author of the next set of items on display. Samuel Constantine Rafinesque, or Rafinesque-Schmaltz(1783-1840), was born in Constantinople, the son of a French merchant and a Greek mother of German descent. Largely self-taught, he displayed a voracious, if somewhat undisciplined, appetite for knowledge in a number of fields, but is best remembered for his efforts in botany and natural history. His career included time spent as a merchant's apprentice, in a Philadelphia counting house, as secretary to the United States Consul to Italy, in various publishing enterprises, in producing medicinal squills, as a tutor, in banking. and eight years as Professor of Botany, Natural History, and Modern Languages at the University of Transylvania in Kentucky.

Always a controversial figure, Rafinesque was constantly experimenting with classification systems as seen here in his 1814 Principes Fondamenteaux de Somiologie in which he set out to reform the classification system for both plants and animals. This intent also manifests itself in the next item on display - his translation and augmentation of the pioneer flora of Louisiana, Florida and Martinique by Claude Robin published as the Florula Ludoviciana in 1817 which retained the natural system of Jussieu used in the original.

A critical point in Rafinesque's career is represented by his Circular Address on Botany and Zoology published in 1816 - which details how he lost his manuscripts and collections in a shipwreck while returning to the United States - and his offer to act as an agent for authors, museums, and collectors, to identify specimens, trade specimens, trade his publications for books and specimens in an attempt to replace the material lost in the wreck. The final Rafinesque article is of more local regional interest - his article "Monographie des Coquilles Bivalves Fluviatiles de la Rivière Ohio" published in 1820 dealing with the mollusks of the Ohio River.

The microscope opened new vistas of natural history and the name most often associated with it is Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723), its inventor. A failed shopkeeper in the cloth trade, Leeuwenhoek spent most of his career as a civil servant for the city of Delft - which provided him with the income to indulge in his experiments. Leeuwenhoek's two main areas of microscopic study seem to have been the study of sexual reproduction and of the transport of system of nutrients in both plants and animals. He is represented in our current exhibit by a section from our incomplete copy of Samuel Hoole's English translation of Leeuwenhoek's Select Works published from 1798 to 1799.

Palaeobotany, the study of fossils of plants, is represented by the 1723 second edition of the Herbarium diluvianum of Johann Jacob Scheuchzer (1672-1733). The author was a Swiss physician who taught medicine and mathematics, was director of the Zurich museum of natural history, and is credited with the abolition of the death penalty fro witchcraft in Zurich. Although preceded by the Welshman, Edward Llwyd, who published several pictures of fossil plants from the collections in the Ashmolean collection in 1699, the first edition of Scheuchzer's work published in 1709 is generally regarded as the first really comprehensive and well illustrated treatise on the subject. The second edition, on display here, is noteworthy for a number of additional plates not found in the first addition. As the title suggests, Scheuchzer another in the long line of pious botanists and physicians who had a strong belief in their religion - leading to his surmise that the specimens discussed had been preserved from Noah's flood. The work was of sufficient importance to establish Scheuchzer as the father of Swiss, and in the views of some, of European palaeobotany.

Our display concludes with two of the main works by one of the most controversial and revolutionary figures in natural history - Charles Darwin (1809-1882). Although the young Darwin studied medicine at Edinburgh and studied for the ministry at Cambridge - he lost interest in both. His interest in nature and friendship with the botanist J. S. Henslow, however, led to his appointment as naturalist on the journey of the Beagle from 1831 to 1836, which was to provide him with the evidence that would lead to his theory of evolution and shape the rest of his career. He is represented in the exhibit by his account of the botany of the voyage from the third volume of the Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of His Majesty's Ships Adventure and Beagle between the Years 1826 and 1836 published in 1839, and by his milestone On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection published in 1859.

This is the text of the exhibit on display in the Rare Book Room in the Warren H. Corning Library and Visitors Center of The Holden Arboretum, 9500 Sperry Road, Kirtland, Ohio 44094, from November 1 through November 28, 2000. ON view from 10 am to 4:45 pm Tuesday through Friday.

Stanley Johnston, Curator of Rare Books, The Holden Arboretum.