John Strachan’s introduction teaches the language of early Welsh texts. Augusto Marinoni’s 1955 edition draws the Sicilian words out of Angelo Senisio’s medieval Declarus. Gunnar Jarring recorded and translated Uyghur stories and histories for his Eastern Turki series, Silvio Pieri read the history of the Arno valley in its place names, and Nathaniel Ingersoll Bowditch, a Boston lawyer, collected remarkable surnames and wrote about where they came from.

John Strachan’s introduction to the language of early Welsh texts.

Augusto Marinoni’s 1955 edition of the Sicilian words in Senisio’s Declarus.

Two parts of Gunnar Jarring’s Eastern Turki series, 1946 and 1951.

Silvio Pieri’s study of the place names of the Arno valley, 1919.

A Boston lawyer’s collection, in its enlarged second edition of 1858.
More stories
For the naturalist: birds, insects, fish and Darwin’s own letters
How people looked at animals, from Darwin’s letters to a state’s bird guide and the smallest creatures on a Puget Sound beach.
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.



























