The Research Library has been part of the American Museum of Natural History
since its founding in 1869.
In fact, the first books entered the collection when the Museum was still
housed at the Central Park Armory prior to 1877.
Natural Histories came about
because we wanted to let people outside of the Museum know about the rich
rare book collection contained here.
The Rare Book Collection is comprised of over 14,000 volumes used by
researchers from all around the world. Many unique or unusual or hard to find
volumes
can only be found here.
Natural Histories contains
40 essays written by one of the Museum's curators, librarians,
or scientific associates
based on 40 works contained in the Museum's rare book collection.
And each essay
is accompanied by multiple illustrations from that work. In figuring out which
works to include
we wanted examples that weren't
incredibly widely known. We wanted to find some hidden gems within the
collection. We also wanted to cover all of the scientific disciplines
studied at the Museum.
So, the works contained in this volume begin in the 16th century
and continue up to the early 20th century.
In the days before photography and other forms of documentation developed,
original art
was the only way to capture
the likeness
of organisms, people, or places
and therefore was the only way to transmit or share this information. So
a natural history illustration
would enable someone
who'd never seen an elephant to try to begin to understand what an elephant
looked like and
and how its unusual features might function.
You might wonder why
modern scientists would need to look at an old book. What are they looking for?
In a lot of cases they're looking for an early description or the first
description a specific species.
In some cases the species described in some of these volumes are extinct.
So, the only way scientists can see these species is to
take a look at one of these volumes and examine the illustrations.
In the earliest days of scientific illustration many of the illustrators had
never even seen the
object
of their work. It was described to them. That could work...
but it also might not.
This is one of the volumes
from Conrad Gessner's
Historia Anamalium from the 16th century. You can see woodcut
illustrations
of some animals
that would have been hardly known
to readers in Europe
in the 16th century.
Here's a fairly good depiction of a walrus, recognizable as a walrus because of
his large front teeth.
But he also seems to have an additional fin behind his forelegs. So, it's not
the best but it tells us something about what animals were being discovered
at this time.
This is Hooke's Micrographia
from 1667. Micrographia consists of 60 essays by Hooke
and many spectacular illustrations.
The illustrations depict comment objects and animals, but seen through a microscopic
view.
This was the first time many people
had seen any of these
familiar
objects through a microscope. They were able to see
such things as the head of a fly,
spores of mold on a piece of bread,
even crystals in the author's own frozen urine.
Imagine their horror upon seeing this microscopic view of a louse clinging to a
single hair.
Maria Sybilla Merian was the well known
18th century artist
who took the unusual step at the time as a woman
of traveling to Dutch Suriname
to collect
and illustrate
insects,
their life cycles,
and the plants they live on.
The fanciful frontispiece depicts Merian
attended up by a troupe of cherubs
who are assisting her in her collection
of plants
and insect specimens.
As we start to digitize our collection, versions that are available online are
excellent conveying the content but
one really has to view the volume in person to appreciate
the illustration that went into creating these fantastic works.