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Books: What to Know

How People Thought the World Worked

The plot, the people, the point and the ending — then the Boovie film, where there is one.

Popular Science & Nature

The story in one page
On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection
A man looks at a finch, a pigeon, and a barnacle. Evolution follows.
Charles Darwin · science
The story in one page
Relativity : the Special and General Theory
The architect of modern physics explains how clocks slow down, rulers shrink, and gravity is just geometry in disguise.
Albert Einstein · general
The story in one page
The Voyage of the Beagle
A young naturalist boards a survey ship for five years, encountering jaguars, glaciers, and severe seasickness.
Charles Darwin · travel
The story in one page
The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication
A catalog of how humans have reshaped dogs, pigeons, and peaches, proving that nature is plastic enough to follow our whims.
Charles Darwin · science
In the library
The History of London
Walter Besant · science
The story in one page
Little Masterpieces of Science: Invention and Discovery
Benjamin Franklin flies a kite, and suddenly everyone is trying to build the future.
George Iles · ideas
In the library
The Sceptical Chymist
Robert Boyle · science
The story in one page
The Evolution of Man
A biologist argues that your nine months in the womb repeat the entire three-billion-year history of life on Earth.
Ernst Haeckel · science
The story in one page
The Land of Little Rain
A resident of the California desert charts a landscape where the land, not the law, sets the human limit.
Mary Austin · ideas
The story in one page
The Rivers of Great Britain, Descriptive, Historical, Pictorial: Rivers of the South and West Coasts
A survey of the Severn and its coastal cousins, where medieval abbeys meet the soot of the early Industrial Revolution.
travel
The story in one page
Creative Evolution
Human intelligence was built to handle rocks and tools, making it ironically ill-equipped to understand the fluid reality of living.
Henri Bergson · ideas
The story in one page
The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci
A Renaissance master catalogs everything from the anatomy of an arm to the physics of why the sky is blue.
da Vinci Leonardo · ideas
The story in one page
Ancient Britain and the Invasions of Julius Caesar
Before the Romans landed, Britain was an island of stone tools and Celtic chariots waiting for its first major written record.
T. Rice Holmes · science
The story in one page
The Ancient Stone Implements, Weapons and Ornaments, of Great Britain
Sir John Evans inventories every prehistoric stone tool in Britain, effectively inventing the modern manual of archaeology.
John Evans · science
The story in one page
Argonauts of the Western Pacific
An anthropologist embeds himself in the Trobriand Islands to map a vast, circular economy built on two types of jewelry.
Bronislaw Malinowski · science
In the library
The history of human marriage
Edward Westermarck · science
The story in one page
The Philippine Islands
Magellan arrives, the Dutch attack, and the Emperor of Japan sends a literal shipment of lepers to the Spanish governor.
John F.R.G.S. Foreman · collection
The story in one page
Pharmacographia
A rigorous 19th-century catalog tracking the world's healing plants from their mountain origins to the shelves of British and Indian pharmacies.
Friedrich A. Flückiger · science
In the library
The Ghost-dance religion and the Sioux outbreak of 1890
James Mooney · science

Story guides

The story in one page
The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost'
A Victorian doctor examines how John Milton built a universe using both ancient myths and the latest telescope discoveries.
Thomas Nathaniel Orchard · history
The story in one page
The Voyage of the Beagle
A young naturalist boards a survey ship for five years, encountering jaguars, glaciers, and severe seasickness.
Charles Darwin · Travel

The library

5,123 science & nature

In the library
"Five-Head" Creek; and Fish Drugging in the Pacific
Louis Becke · short story
In the library
"Pennsylvania Dutch," and other essays
Phebe Earle Gibbons · science
In the library
"Sterminator Vesevo" (Vesuvius the great exterminator)
Matilde Serao · science
In the library
"The One" Dog and "The Others": A Study of Canine Character
Frances E. Slaughter · science
In the library
"Wee Tim'rous Beasties": Studies of Animal life and Character
Douglas English · science
In the library
100 Desert Wildflowers in Natural Color
Natt N. Dodge · science
In the library
A bacteriological study of ham souring
Charles Neil McBryde · science
In the library
A Bilateral Division of the Parietal Bone in a Chimpanzee; with a Special Reference to the Oblique Sutures in the Parietal
Aleš Hrdlička · science
In the library
A Bird Calendar for Northern India
Douglas Dewar · science
In the library
A Bird-Lover in the West
Olive Thorne Miller · travel
In the library
A Birder's Guide to North Dakota
Kevin J. Zimmer · travel
In the library
A Book of Birds
Carton Moore-Park · science
In the library
A Book of Dartmoor
S. Baring-Gould · travel
In the library
A Book of Natural History
David Starr Jordan · science
In the library
A Book of Nimble Beasts: Bunny Rabbit, Squirrel, Toad, and "Those Sort of People"
Douglas English · science
In the library
A Book of the Pyrenees
S. Baring-Gould · travel
In the library
A book of the west. Volume 1, Devon
S. Baring-Gould · myth
In the library
A Book-Lover's Holidays in the Open
Theodore Roosevelt · travel
In the library
A Breeze from the Woods, 2nd Ed.
W. C. Bartlett · science
In the library
A Brief Account of Radio-activity
F. P. Venable · science
In the library
A brief guide to the Food Collection
Bethnal Green Museum · reference
In the library
A Brief History of Element Discovery, Synthesis, and Analysis
Glen W. Watson · science
In the library
A Brief History of Forestry.
B. E. Fernow · science
In the library
A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia
Thomas Harriot · travel
In the library
A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I
Augustus De Morgan · science
In the library
A Burial Cave in Baja California
William C. Massey · science
In the library
A Catalogue of Sculpture in the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, British Museum, Volume 1 (of 2)
A. H. Smith · reference
In the library
A Catechism of Familiar Things;
reference
In the library
A century of excavation in the land of the Pharaohs
James Baikie · science
In the library
A century of science in America
Edward Salisbury Dana · science
In the library
A Century of Science, and Other Essays
John Fiske · science
In the library
A Century's Progress in Astronomy
Hector Macpherson · science
In the library
A Check-List of the Birds of Idaho
M. Dale Arvey · science
In the library
A Child's Primer of Natural History
Oliver Herford · poetry
In the library
A Civic Biology, Presented in Problems
George W. Hunter · science
In the library
A Color Notation
A. H. Munsell · science
In the library
A Comparative View of Religions
Johannes Henricus Scholten · science
In the library
A conchological manual
G. B. Sowerby · reference
In the library
A constitutional league of peace in the stone age of America
J. N. B. Hewitt · science
In the library
A Cotswold Village; Or, Country Life and Pursuits in Gloucestershire
J. Arthur Gibbs · travel
In the library
A Course of Mechanical, Magnetical, Optical, Hydrostatical and Pneumatical Experiments
William Whiston · science
In the library
A Critical Examination of the Position of Mr. Darwin's Work, "On the Origin of Species," in Relation to the Complete Theory of the Causes of the Phenomena of Organic Nature
Thomas Henry Huxley · science
In the library
A Critique of the Theory of Evolution
Thomas Hunt Morgan · science
In the library
A decade of negro extension work, 1914-1924
O. B. Martin · science
In the library
A Defence of the Inquiry into Mesmerism & Phrenology
William Armes · science
In the library
A Description of Greenland
Hans Egede · travel
In the library
A Description of the Bar-and-Frame-Hive
William Augustus Munn · manual
In the library
A Dialogue upon the Gardens of the Right Honorouble the Lord Viscount Cobham at Stow in Buckinghamshire
William Gilpin · travel