JOSEPH KASTNER - A World of Naturalists

London England, John Murray, 1978. First Edition, Binding: Cloth, Very Good/Very Good. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall 0719534526 Hardback European adventurers and naturalists crossed the Atlantic to share in a kind of Gold Rush in which animals and plants were the ostensible prize; specimens were exchanged (often on a commercial basis); scientific ideas and theories were posed and argued between Europe and America, sometimes based on hoaxes; and Ministers of State, many of them men of science, took leading parts. The author chronicles this adventure with panache and anecdotal richness. We follow John Bartram as he treks endlessly through the Appalachian frontier, searching out specimens to send to collectors in Europe, or for his own garden on the Schuykill; his son William, rejoicing with such eloquence about the Indian maidens and crocodiles he found in Florida that Coleridge is inspired to base parts of Kubla Khan on his account; Jefferson standing up for America against the libels of European savants and sending Lewis and Clark on their dramatic western journey; Charles Wilson Peale excavating giant fossil bones and organising the country's first natural history museum on a money-making basis; Alexander Wilson, and then Audubon, obsessively hunting for birds, studying them and finally recording them in works of art. Friends, rivals, teachers and disciples, these men brought forth a world of knowledge for each other's delight, and for our own; and, through the plants, birds and animals that now bear their names, they also achieved, in the wonderful phrase of an English colleague, 'a species of eternity'. Illustrated. Price clipped on D/J. Owners name inside cover.