In 1815, the naturalist Constantine Samuel Rafinesque (1783–1840) previewed three new species of cetaceans – Delphinus dalippus, Physeter urganantus and Oxypterus mongitori – that he intended to de...

Although Charles and Emile Parzudaki were well-connected natural history dealers of nineteenth-century Paris, many aspects of their life and work remain unknown. The example of two letters from Emi...

At the continental scale, ecological research effort is not spatially uniform. We used a century-long bibliometric database of the journal Emu – Austral Ornithology to index the spatial patterns in...

Alois Humbert was the first scientist employed by the Musee academique de Geneve, but his career as a whole has a much closer resemblance to his “gentleman scientist” contemporaries such as Henri d...

The essay explores the life and legacy of Henry Thomas Soppitt, focusing on his elucidation of the life cycle of the rust fungus Puccinia bistortae (F. Strauss) DC. It focuses on the impact this di...

Mycology is a relatively small and young discipline that has yet to achieve the institutional presence of similar disciplines such as botany and zoology. Because of this, mycological histories are ...

The sloth (Folivora) is a mammal from Central and South America that struck the early modern (c.1500–1800) European naturalists as especially odd. Hence, descriptions and depictions of this animal ...

Attention is drawn to the contributions of Frederick William Flattely (1888–1937), noting the wide range of his natural history publications. He is best known for his ground-breaking guidebook on s...

For two decades, John James Audubon (1785–1851) travelled widely and frequently while working on his illustrated natural history volumes – still highly prized today for their aesthetic and scientif...

The Royal Navy surgeon Robert McCormick (1800–1890) took part in three mid-nineteenth century British Polar expeditions, two to the Arctic and one to the Antarctic. Of the two Arctic voyages, the f...

Harry Pasley Higginson, a railway engineer from Yorkshire, northeast England, is one of the people credited with the first discovery of mid-Holocene dodo (Raphus cucullatus) bones at Mare aux Songe...

Most of the approximately 75 known eggs of the extinct great auk (Pinguinus impennis) are in public museums, with a few in private collections. A small number of these eggs has sustained damage, ei...

A recently discovered hand-coloured geological map of Norfolk and Suffolk is probably the work of Richard Cowling Taylor (1789–1851). It was originally published by Laurie & Whittle in 1811 and lat...

Three Goodsir brothers, John, Henry (“Harry”) and Robert, from Fife, Scotland, all shared an early interest in marine zoology in the early 1800s. They all went on to receive medical training, with ...

Franz Scheidl created approximately 800 botanical illustrations published in Vienna as coloured copperplate engravings in Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin's Hortus botanicus Vindobonensis and Florae Aus...

Exchange of duplicate specimens was an important element of the relationship between metropolitan and regional museums in the period 1870–1940. Evidence of transfers of botanical museum objects suc...

Robert McCormick (1800–1890) took part in three mid-nineteenth-century British Polar expeditions, two to the Arctic and one to the Antarctic. The latter, from 1839 to 1843 and led by James Clark Ro...

Robin John Tillyard was the pre-eminent Australian entomologist of the first half of the twentieth century and a world authority on fossil insects. In May 1936, he set off on a six week, 5,000-kilo...

John Robertson Henderson was born in Scotland and educated at the University of Edinburgh, where he qualified as a doctor. His interest in marine natural history was fostered at the Scottish Marine...

Marine ecologist Edward Flanders Ricketts made three trips in the early 1930s to British Columbia, Canada, before publication in 1939 of his Between Pacific Tides, the classic marine ecology text f...

For 25 years, from 1831 into 1856, the English zoologist William Yarrell was both a friend and adviser to Charles Darwin. He was regarded by Darwin as a wise and eminent naturalist of the older gen...

In 2009, the State Library of New South Wales acquired a collection of 201 letters written by the Royal Navy officer John Septimus Roe. Dating between 1807 and 1829, these letters cover Roe's time ...

John Martyn's Methodus plantarum circa Cantabrigiam nascentium was printed in 1727 and was given to his friends and students, but not offered for sale. It has hitherto been thought that the 24 prin...

Carlisle Museum's Natural History Record Bureau, Britain's first local environmental records centre, collected and collated records, mainly of birds but including also mammals and fishes, from amat...

Gabrielle Maud Vassal and her husband Joseph Marguerite Jean-Baptiste Vassal, a physician in the French Colonial Service, supplied bird and mammal specimens from French Indochina and later from Fre...

In the early to mid-twentieth century, women had limited opportunities to develop and practice as scientists and, when they did, were often marked out: regarded as odd or remarkable because they we...

Edward Walter Wade (1864–1937), author of The Birds of Bempton Cliffs (1903, 1907), is almost unknown. He worked as a clerk for the family timber company in Hull and in his spare time visited Bempt...

In November 1828, King George IV presented to the menagerie of the Zoological Society of London a pair of Tibetan Mastiffs (Canis lupus familiaris) sent from Nepal by Brian Houghton Hodgson, the As...

The Sheals taxidermy business in Belfast became famous for the quality of their work. Three of their order books survive, recording jobs done for named customers from January 1897 to December 1911,...

Edward Neale was a pupil of Joseph Wolf. His first oils and watercolours were exhibited in 1858, and his first published work appeared in 1862 in John George Wood's The Illustrated Natural History....

The attempt to found a museum in Geneva faced many challenges, but the nature of the city also provided some unusual opportunities. Against a background of the French Revolution, political upheaval...

A previously unnoticed publication by Alfred Russel Wallace has come to light concerning an important nineteenth-century natural science discussion: whether the continental and oceanic portions of ...

Myrmecological texts that circulated in Britain in the nineteenth and early twentieth century can be interpreted, from the perspective of the post-colonial theory of Orientalism, as belonging to a ...

In 1982, in the course of transferring the archive of the De Paoli family of Porciorasco to the Museo Contadino di Cassego (eastern Ligurian Apennines), a manuscript herbal dated about 1598 was dis...

In the 1870s, Richard Owen of the British Museum received a consignment of vertebrate fossils from Basutoland (Lesotho), which were sent to him by Dr Hugh Exton from Bloemfontein, and he published ...

John Adams was a member of a long line of landed gentry from Pembrokeshire, Wales. At a young age, he became a Fellow of the Linnean Society and read four papers before his untimely death by drowni...

A collection of 267 late-eighteenth-century miniature botanical illustrations, painted in Perthshire, Scotland, by Lady Charlotte Murray (1754–1808) is described. The drawings are arranged accordin...

Since the inception of the British Museum (Natural History) in 1881 (now the Natural History Museum, London), the collection, development and mounting of fossils for scientific study and public exh...

In Britain, a tradition of scientists actively communicating new developments in their fields with the general public has existed since the Victorian era. During the early twentieth century there w...

Philipp Franz von Siebold (1796–1866) was one of the earliest European naturalists to live in Japan. Through most of the nineteenth century, however, until the 1860s, movement of foreigners within ...

Investigation of the provenance of a herbarium gathering of Kissenia arabica (Loasaceae) at the Natural History Museum, London, reveals it to be part of the likely earliest extant herbarium collect...

In the 1790s, newspapers in Britain, Ireland and the United States carried brief reports about the activities of Maurice Spillard, described as a “celebrated English pedestrian traveller”. Spillard...

Brian Houghton Hodgson's “Zoology of Nipal” is one of the great “what ifs” of nineteenth-century natural history. The product of over 20 years' research, incorporating thousands of pages of notes a...

Encouraged by naturalists Robert Jameson and Joseph Banks, whaler William Scoresby became an expert on the natural and physical processes at work in the European Arctic. Original letters between Sc...

In 1853, the American botanist John Torrey described a new genus of pitcher plant, naming it Darlingtonia (Sarraceniaceae). The plant had been collected near Mount Shasta in California in 1841 by W...

The rediscovery of the original, unedited Latin manuscript of Georg Wilhelm Steller's “De bestiis marinis” (“On marine mammals”), first published in 1751, calls for a new translation into English. ...

With the publication of his Preface to Lyrical Ballads in 1798, WilliamWordsworth announced his break with the “gaudiness and inane phraseology” of his poetic predecessors (The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser [1974], 143) Wordsworth’s Preface is often cited as a foundational expression of what would subsequently come to be known as British romanticism

Hugh Miller FGS (1850–1896) wrote a set of three memoirs on his father Hugh Miller (1802–1856), geologist, writer and newspaper editor. The first two are successive versions of a text written about...

When compiling his seminal work, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789), Gilbert White relied on a number of natural history books in order to manage and accumulate information. One...

When she was only 22 years old, Katherine Sophia Baily published, anonymously, a pocketable account of the native flora of Ireland. While her name was not on the title-page, it was evidently not a ...

William and Mary (nee Crage) Pool spent the decade from 1865 to 1875 in Madagascar as missionaries employed by the London Missionary Society. For amusement, Mrs Pool collected lichen and plant spec...

The malacological collection catalogued by Giovanni Canestrini at the end of the nineteenth century is an important historical collection, including thousands of marine shells belonging to nearly 8...

Over the course of his 14-year career at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History, artist and engraver John Conrad Hansen rendered hundreds of beautiful and accurate scientific illustrations of an...

George Charles Deering, born Georg Karl Dering (or perhaps Doring) in Dresden about 1690, practised as a physician in Nottingham from 1735 until his death in 1749. He was the author of an early flo...

Hasso von Wedel, usually “H. Wedel” on specimen labels, settled on the northwestern Caribbean coast of Panama in the province of Bocas del Toro in 1898 and sustained himself mainly through the prod...

Attention is drawn to the contribution made by Alexander Morrison Stewart to the natural history of the Paisley area in the early part of the twentieth century. From humble beginnings and while wor...

This paper examines the rise and fall of Carl Linnaeus's ideas on living contagion, focusing on his work with plant smut diseases. Early in his career, Linnaeus named a plant altered by anther-smut...

William Smyth, unable to get work in a New Zealand museum, ran a commercial taxidermy business at Caversham, Dunedin, from about 1873 to 1911 or 1912. His two decades of correspondence with Thomas ...

Until 1897, when William Clarke produced his First records of British flowering plants, there was no publication where one could see the date and source of the discovery of all of the native plants...

Understanding and exploiting marine microbial biodiversity is a huge task. Integral to this is the capacity to identify and maintain exemplar taxa ex situ, so that they may be studied or utilized. ...