Start with Darwin himself: the first volume of his life and letters, edited by his son Francis. In 1901 The Cambridge Natural History surveyed velvet worms, myriapods and the first of the insects. West Virginia’s 1923 bird guide set out to make a state fond of its birds, with instructions for attracting them, while Phil Robinson’s 1897 essays watch the wildlife of garden, orchard and wood. Royal Dixon and Brayton Eddy’s 1925 book gives fish and other water animals a personality, and Wolfgang Wieser’s 1959 monograph describes the microscopic animals of Puget Sound’s beaches.
The first volume of his life and correspondence, edited by Francis Darwin.
The Cambridge Natural History’s fifth volume, in a 1901 corrected reprint.
A 1923 government guide with colourful illustrations and instructions for attracting birds.
Phil Robinson’s essays, in an 1897 New York printing.
A 1925 book of aquarium colour and lively accounts of life under water.
Wolfgang Wieser’s 1959 survey, with an extensive series of detailed line drawings.
More stories
For the botanist: orchids, native fruits, seaweeds and the fungi that attack crops
Plants as scientists catalogued them, from Burma’s orchids to Brazil’s fruits, the seaweeds of the Maldives and the pests of ornamental trees.
For the geologist: what the Earth is made of, and what lived on it
The chemistry of the Earth’s crust, the first land vertebrates, Jurassic fossils from East Africa and the seas off Egypt.
For the physicist: light, atoms and stars
How physics and chemistry read the world by its light and its atoms, from a German handbook of spectroscopy to a Soviet monograph on thorium.
For the tinkerer: machines that compute, dams and farm machinery
Engineering in its own words: the theory of automata, the history of programming languages, the large dam and the mechanised farm.
For the student of medicine: the body, its diseases and how it grows
A doctor’s stories of old medicine, a Baghdad study of liver disease, the anatomy of the ox, the chemistry of nerve cells and how living things take their shape.
For the theatre lover: London, Broadway, Paris and Bangkok
The stage in four cities: Shakespeare’s acting companies, Drury Lane, Broadway in 1936, Lifar’s ballet and Thailand’s classical dance dramas.