Book of the Week: The Botanical Register (1815-1828)

The 14 volumes of The Botanical Register that Botanicus has scanned and made available online are my featured ‘book’ this week.   The botanical images in The Botanical Register are well worth a look and there are approximately 90 of them in each volume. It is easy to look at just the ‘plates’ using the Pages list on the left side of the page. On the right side of the page is a control panel for zooming in or out and downloading. It is easy to move around the image by simply dragging the view window.  I am gleaning images for my desktop slideshow to play on my second monitor while I write!

Botanicus is a freely accessible, Web-based encyclopedia of digitized historic botanical literature from the Missouri Botanical Garden Library. There is a wealth of material on the site. A short list of some others I’ve enjoyed recently includes:

Orchid Albums from the late 1800s

Journal et flore des jardins

Abbildung und Beschreibung blühender Cacteen

The Botanist's Repository for New and Rare Plants

Rumphia

Historia fisica, politica y natural de la isla de Cuba

Annales de Flore et de Pomone

Gleanings of the Week Ending November 12, 2011

The items below were the cream of the articles from this past week!

1. 25 Inspiring Pictures of Snow - beautiful!
2. Castles in the Desert: Satellites Reveal Lost Cities of Libya - now if the country could become safe enough to find out more about them from the ground.
3. 5 Foods Threatened by Climate Change - Arrgh! Chocolate is one of them!
4. Cave Paintings Showed True Colors of Stone Age Horses - yes - there were spotted horses around at that time so the paintings are realistic rather than symbolic
5. Nature Notes: The Black Oaks Of Yosemite National Park, The Video - great visual about how the Indians processed the acorns for food
6. Impact of Space Weather - now that we are more dependent on satellites (for things like GPS), maybe we should be paying more attention 
7. New System of Intelligent Management of Street Lighting Enables 80% Savings in Energy - makes sense to only power lights when you need them, just like at home
8. Condors in Grand Canyon – 3 chicks - one has already died but the other two seem to be thriving; bit about trash being a potential threat quite depressing
9. Why we need public libraries is the future - for a subset of the reasons we need them today but very real and long term (it's not about books)