ALBERT

Description: For the first time, this book makes available to a wide readership, not only to an educated audience, high-resolution reproductions of all the 258 paintings of gourds of the genus Cucurbita, figuring about a hundred cultivars, kept at the Bibliothèque centrale of the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, made in the 18th century by the talentuous Antoine Nicolas Duchesne, of the Royal Garden in Versailles, a forerunner of genetics and evolution. This book by Dr. Harry Paris, a leading expert of Cucurbitaceae, is written both in English and French and is aimed at scientists (e.g., botanists, geneticists, agronomists, horticulturists, science historians) as well as more general readers including gardeners, above all those very numerous fond of cultivated plants, particularly of Cucurbitaceae. Its large format (320 x 440 mm), the diversity and magnificence of its plates and the beauty of its presentation will also attract bibliophiles. This volume is not only the first publication to contain Duchesne’s naming and classification of the three economically most important species of Cucurbita, it also contains Duchesne’s summary of his investigations with this genus. The plates are accompanied by reprinting of appropriate abstracts from Duchesne’s Essai sur l’histoire naturelle des courges together with, by Harry Paris, commentaries on the illustrations with an analysis of existing published and unpublished documents concerning these plates. As for his work on strawberries, here once again is stressed the unfailing tenaciousness and extraordinary sense of observation of Antoine Nicolas Duchesne coupled with quite original and premonitory evolutionary ideas.

Description: Here, for the first time in English, is Georges Cuvier’s extraordinary “History of the Natural Sciences from Its Origin to the Present Day.” Based on a series of public lectures presented by Cuvier from 1829 to 1832, this first of a five-volume series, translated from the original French and heavily annotated with commentary, is a detailed chronological survey of the natural sciences spanning more than three millennia. It is truly astonishing in its detail and scope. Cuvier was fluent in many languages, English, German, Spanish, and certainly Latin, in addition to French. He was therefore well prepared to investigate and interpret firsthand the scientific literature of Europe as a whole. The work is an affirmation of Cuvier’s vast encyclopedic knowledge, his complete command of the scientific and historical literature, and his incomparable memory. This history is remarkable also for providing in one place a large set of useful references to a vast ancient literature that is not easily found anywhere else. This huge body of information provides us furthermore with unique insight into Cuvier’s concept of the natural sciences, and to the vast breadth and progress of this human endeavor. With this work, Cuvier fills an important gap in philosophical thought between the time of Carl Linnaeus and Charles Darwin.

Description: Never was a man so denied a place in history than Father Charles Plumier. Craftsman, illustrator, and engraver, but best known for his work as a botanist, Plumier devoted the better part of his life to collecting and illustrating plants and animals. Working nearly a century before the great eighteen-century describers of the untold number of new organisms flooding into Europe at the time, the major credit for Plumier's contributions to botany and zoology was given to others. Born at Marseille in 1646, Plumier was initially trained at the Convent of the Minims in mathematics and the physical sciences, but soon turned his attention to natural history, taking on the study of botany with great enthusiasm. He so impressed his superiors as a botanist, as well as through his extraordinary talents as an illustrator and engraver, that in 1689 he was appointed naturalist on an expedition to the French possessions in the Antilles for the purpose of collecting objects of natural history. The great success of this voyage, followed by two additional expeditions to the West Indies, provided a life-long pension, and earned him the title of “Botaniste du Roy.” Often ill and always anxious about the publication of his work, Plumier spent the last years of his life in his cell at the Minim Convent La Place Royale in Paris compiling his notes and drawings and preparing manuscripts for the press. While on his way to Peru to discover the tree that produces quinine, he suffered a sudden attack of pleurisy and died on 20 November 1704 at the age of 58. Plumier’s legacy survives in an enormous body of iconographic material still extant in the collections of the Bibliothèque Centrale du Museum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris. While his botanical contributions have been described in some detail and many of his plant drawings have been published, his influence on zoology has been relatively unexplored and his animal drawings remain largely unpublished until now. This volume, the first of a series of monographs planned for the near future, designed to bring Plumier’s extraordinary work to light, imparts life to images that have been essentially lost from public view for more than three centuries.