Book of the Week: The Sealers and Antarctica

The lure of Antarctica has been captivating humans for hundreds of years, centuries even before the discovery of such a landmass occurred. Discussions about the existence of such a place were proposed as early as the first century AD, when Ptolemy suggested that there must be a giant landmass to the south serving to counterbalance the mass of the giant northern lands (Europe, Asia and North Africa) and preserve symmetry in the world. Following such proclamations, maps constructed as early as the 1500s began portraying a giant continent in the mysterious southern reaches of the globe. However, while belief in the existence of this southern continent permeated antiquity, it was not until the 1800s that confirmation of such a place actually occurred.

The famed Captain James Cook came within seventy-five miles of the illusive landmass in January 1773 before he was forced to abandon the effort in the face of the water's icy threats to his vessels. Later, remarking upon his failure to sight the fabled continent, Cook wrote,
"The risque one runs in exploring a coast, in these unknown and icy seas, is so very great that no man will ever venture further than I have done."
Fortunately, for history's sake, Cook was proven wrong some fifty years later, when the first confirmed sightings of Antarctica occurred. History narrows the first sighting, in 1820, down to three possible candidates: Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen of the Russian Imperial Navy, Edward Bransfield of the Royal Navy, and Nathaniel Palmer, an American sealer. Though somewhat disputed, the first documented landing on Antarctica occurred on February 7, 1821, when the American sealer John Davis set foot on West Antarctica.

Exploration of this great icy land, and conflicting territorial claims, have continued for the nearly two centuries since the confirmed discovery of Antarctica, but many are soon to forget that early extensive interaction with this frozen wasteland cannot be accredited to scientists and the great naval powers of the world, but to sealers who flocked to the "South Shetland Islands," as they called them, to collect fur seal pelts. This week's book of the week, The Voyage of the Huron and the Huntress: The American Sealers and the Discovery of the Continent of Antarctica, documents the extraordinary daring of these early seamen, and their contributions to the scientific knowledge since amassed. As the text so eloquently expresses:

"On this fringe of Antarctic seas, [the sealers] established camp and rendezvous, sailing through the ice-filled channels and along the rocky shores of the desolate islands...here they braved the unknown dangers of the icy, uncharted waters to the south, becoming the first among men to sight, recognize and land where rise the snowy mountains of the last great continent - Antarctica."

This week's Book of the Week, The Voyage of the Huron and the Huntress: The American Sealers and the Discovery of the Continent of Antarctica (1955), was contributed by the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Book of the Week: Botanical Illustrations

The history of botanical taxonomic literature began in a textual format as far back as the 400s B.C. Such prestigious names as Hippocrates, the "father of medicine," and Theophrastus of Eresius, the "father of botany," are among those to have first written about botany. These early writings, however, lacked the illustrations which are so important to botanical (and all other forms of biodiversity, for that matter) identification. Even when illustrations entered the scene, they were rare and costly, as they had to be reproduced by hand. It was the introduction of the printing press that changed this situation, as this allowed woodcuts producing line illustrations to be inserted into botanical books.

Since the introduction of large quantities of botanical illustrations in scientific literature, there have been a great many famous illustrators to contribute to the visual wealth of knowledge recorded in these works. One of the most celebrated is Pierre Joseph Redouté (1759-1840). This Belgian illustrator is credited with developing the technique of hand colored stipule engraving, which has since been widely used in botanical illustrations.

The hand-coloring stipule engraving technique involves applying ink to a copper plate on which an image has been etched, after which the plate is run through a press to imprint the image onto paper. Following this printing, the images are hand colored using watercolor.

Over his career, Redouté produced over 2100 published plates, documenting over 1800 species. The Biodiversity Heritage Library contains many publications to which Redouté contributed, one of which is La botanique de J.J. Rousseau (1805). This publication contains sixty-five plates created by Redouté, documenting a variety of species. These illustrations, along with the thousands of others contributed by Redouté over the years of his career, greatly enhanced the science of botanical investigation, and formed the building blocks upon which subsequent botanical study was built.

This week's Book of the Week, La botanique de J.J. Rousseau :ornée de soixante-cinq planches, imprimées en couleurs d'après les peintures de P.J. Redouté (1805), by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was contributed by the Missouri Botanical Garden.

James D. Dana, meet Charles V. Riley: BHL Books of the Week

Apart from the morbid coincidence of dying in the same year--1895--there's not a whole lot binding these two scientific luminaries together. Minerals and volcanoes on one hand and entomology and horticulture on the other. But, the world is small and the sub-world of scientific publishing even smaller, so onward, ho!

James Dwight Dana (February 12, 1813 – April 14, 1895) was the resident mineralogist aboard the United States Exploring Expedition, commanded by Captain Charles Wilkes. (According to pure rumor and hear-say, Wilkes' oppositional demeanor was the inspiration for Captain Ahab in Herman Melville's classic, Moby-Dick). According to fact-checkable history, however, Captain Wilkes authored a volume on (marine) Meteorology based on his observations while the expedition toured the Pacific. The environment in and around the Pacific also inspired Observations of a naturalist in the Pacific between 1896 and 1899, by H. B. Guppy. Our esteemed Mr. Guppy also wrote Studies in seeds and fruits, an investigation with the balance.

And as we all now know, Charles V. Riley (September 19, 1843 - September 14, 1895) studied botany and horticulture with sufficient vigor and savvy to help save the French wine industry from biological infestations of Phylloxera that threatened production. (click here for more detailed information, in case you missed it in earlier comments).
And, as it turns out, both figures published extensively in the American Journal of Science, but mentioning that sooner would have precluded the whirlwind tour of the collection that we all enjoyed so much!

Titles courtesy various BHL partners and contributing libraries.

Biographical Minute: Charles Valentine Riley

In advance of the upcoming Book of the Week by American entomologist Charles Valentine Riley (our 6th degree as generously provided by Robin Everly, Botany-Horticultural librarian at Smithsonian Libraries), here's a brief primer on his contributions to biodiversity. His resume is long and includes improvements to the French wine industry as well as the citrus crops of the US. Chief among his pursuits was biological pest control. Just before industrial pesticides created their own large scale sets of woes, he was one of the first to successfully practice the introduction of natural predators to pests compromising crops near the end of the 19th century. In 1889, California citrus groves were resuscitated when Charles V. Riley took advantage of Rodolia Cardinalis' appetite for Icerya Purchasi. The vedalia beetle ate the cottony cushion scale who was eating the crops. Riley also figures prominently in the development of the USDA'S Entomological Commission and was the first curator of insects at the Smithsonian Institution. And tragically, his death at an early age was a result of a bicyle accident resulting in a fractured skull.

Click here for some info on organic farming without the use of pesticides! and here for bicycle safety tips!

BHL Book of the Week: Six degrees of BHL

With well over 35,000 titles to choose from, the BHL book of the week selection can sometimes be a daunting task. (Each title more thrilling than the last!) So this week, I decided to play a game with you to arrive at the next selection. We'll dig deep into the repository and maybe find a path to something unexpected. According to our most recent poll, Invertebrate Zoology beats out Botany by a nose as the most popular area of biodiversity research. So, because we need a 1st degree and a 6th degree, and it's cheating to have the one making the connections do the picking, I humbly ask for your participation to test my librarian's mettle. Please suggest (in the comments) an IZ scientist--or even a title--for me to connect with a Botanist's work or otherwise significant figure. Will it work? Will it be neat? I don't know. But even if I find the connections too obscure (no way!) to piece together, we'll all, at the very least, have the excitement of the journey to enjoy.

Book of the Week: Thanksgiving Special!

With the Thanksgiving Day holiday approaching this week, it seemed appropriate to dedicate this week's book of the week to the Thanksgiving holiday staple - the turkey. Thus, this week's book of the week, Turkey Raising by Harry Miles Lamon (1922), served as a practical guide for turkey farmers during the first quarter of the twentieth century.

The turkey's origin is thought to come from the pheasant, as turkeys are thought to have diverged from this line around eleven million years ago. One of the first animals domesticated in America, the bird has had an interesting history in this continent, which included the dedication of two religious festivals held each year by the Aztec people in Mexico to the species, use of the bird in sacred Mayan ceremonies, as well as a long history as a hunted bird of prey among the native peoples in this land.

The name "turkey" has several proposed origins. For instance, some insist that Christopher Columbus called the birds "tuka," which is the Tamil word for peacock, and that turkey is a derivative of this word. Others postulate that Luis de Torres, a physician sailing with Columbus, called the animal "tukki," which means "big bird" in Hebrew. Still others say that the North American Indian name for the birds was "firkee," and turkey is simply a long-standing mis-pronunciation of the name.

There is also some disagreement over where the tradition of eating a turkey at Thanksgiving emerged from. For instance, it is possible that the early settlers of the Mayflower, being influenced by the Northeastern American Indians in their search for food, began hunting this abundant fowl at the instruction of their Native American friends, and that a turkey was actually present at the first Thanksgiving in 1621. Other experts believe that the first use of the turkey in a Thanksgiving meal was actually at the celebration of the English Harvest Home Festival observed by the early colonists at Jamestown.

Regardless of the origin of the use of the turkey at Thanksgiving feasts, guides such as Lamon's Turkey Raising strived to serve as an uncomplicated, concise yet inclusive discussion of the art of turkey raising, and this example includes such information as the history and extent of the industry, guidelines for mating and showing turkeys, tips of egg incubation, marketing, and insect, disease and predatory animal control. One interesting source of information within the book is a breakdown of the prices paid to producers of turkeys from the years 1915-1920 in various areas of the country. For example, on Nov. 15, 1915 in Texas, turkey meat fetched 11.3 cents per pound, while the same date and year in Washington, D.C. demanded an 18 cents per pound price. Constrastingly, on November 15, 1920 in Texas, a pound of turkey meat was worth 25 cents, and in Washington it earned 38 cents per pound. The national average for a pound of turkey meat in 1915 was 14.8 cents, while it raised to 31.8 cents per pound by 1920.

As you celebrate Thanksgiving this year, whether you do so with turkey, tofurkey, or some other food completely, consider taking a look at this interesting delve into the early history of turkey raising in the United States. Happy Thanksgiving!

This week's book of the week, Turkey Raising by Harry Miles Lamon (1922), was contributed by The University of California Digital Library.

BHL Evolution: New Look, More Content

The Biodiversity Heritage Library is coming into a new era complete with a new look, new content, and new features. The first, most obvious, change will be the adoption of a new BLUE color scheme. Users will not be faced with the need to adapt to a new UI environment; we’re simply changing color as a way of marking BHL’s evolution. BHL is evolving in three distinct ways with regard to its content and features:

• The BHL collection has added over 21,000 new titles (that’s over 28,000 new volumes) as a result of ingesting open access texts scanned by Internet Archive, bringing the total collection (to date - 17 Nov 2009) to 69,000 volumes! Users will now have access to biodiversity related content from the major university and research institutions that have partnered with the Internet Archive such as the California Digital Library. By aggregating biodiversity literature into its collection from other sources, BHL is increasing its ability to serve as a definitive resource for access to the world’s biodiversity literature.


• New links to documentation and user tutorials are being added. These links are part of a new website (actually a wiki) dedicated to providing users with more information about the BHL project overall, its history, member institutions, and developments for the future. Still in its early stages of development, the new wiki will serve as a one-stop-shop for communication about the BHL collection, as well as its tools and services.


• BHL taxonomic name data now have direct links to Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) pages via a new EOL icon, such as this page on the Orca, Orcinus orca, online at http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/7869924. When viewing the “Names on this page” panel in the BHL Portal, an EOL icon will appear next to the taxon or binomial linking to the corresponding page on the EOL website. Users will be merely a click away to EOL content!

The new content and features are just the beginning of BHL evolutionary adaptations to come. As a digital library organism within its WWW environment, it is sensitive to the changing needs of its users. Whether mutating from brown to blue or doubling its collection, or undergoing small incremental changes with the development of its new wiki for documentation and user tutorials, the BHL will work to serve its users through the exciting new eras to come. Let us know what you think.

--Bianca Lipscomb
Collections Coordinator