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The Reverend Gilbert White was the curate of the village of Selborne, a village in Hampshire, from 1784 to his death in 1793, living most of his life in the village. The book is in the form of a collection of letters to two friends, discussing the natural history of the areas that he knew, and natural history in general. White's intense curiosity and his love for the world about him flow through his simple, straightforward style, and a gentle sense of humour colours many of his anecdotes. (Summary by Peter)...

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Nature

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Pleasant non-fiction journey into the backwoods of the New England coastal countryside by the first president of the Connecticut Audubon Society, circa 1900. (Summary by BellonaTimes)...

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Nature

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volunteers bring you 12 recordings of The Desert by Mathilde Blind. This was the Fortnightly Poetry project for January 10th, 2010.

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Fiction, Nature, History, Myths/Legends, Poetry

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Vóór Adam's tijd is het verhaal van een jongen die droomt dat hij het leven leidt van een vroege mensachtige, Australopithecus. Het verhaal geeft een vroege visie op de menselijke evolutie weer. Het grootste deel van het verhaal wordt verteld door het prehistorische alter-ego van de jongen, één van de holenmensen. Naast de holenmensen waren er de geavanceerdere vuurmensen, en de primitievere bomenmensen. Ook wilde dieren, zoals een sabeltandtijger, spelen een rol. Samenvatting van Wikipedia...

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Historical Fiction, Nature

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Geology is a science of such rapid growth that no apology is expected when from time to time a new text-book is added to those already in the field. The present work, however, is the outcome of the need of a text-book of very simple outline, in which causes and their consequences should be knit together as closely as possible,—a need long felt by the author in his teaching, and perhaps by other teachers also. The author has ventured, therefore, to depart from the common usage which subdivides geology into a number of departments,—dynamical, structural, physiographic, and historical,—and to treat in immediate connection with each geological process the land forms and the rock structures which it has produced. (from book preface)...

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Instruction, Nature, Science

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Life on the Mississippi is a memoir by Mark Twain detailing his days as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River before the American Civil War. (Summary from Wikipedia)...

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Nature, Biography, Memoirs

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What this Book is About There is a commonly held view that the incidence and scale of disasters is increasing in the modern world although some disagreement on whether the incidence of events, such as Tsunamis, earthquakes, fires, floods etc., that can give rise to disasters is increasing. The view is understandable, both population and their built environment are increasing so more is at risk and this trend of increased risk will continue while populations continue to rise. As the World Bank Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) enumerates this: ‘Natural disasters are becoming more costly: in constant dollars, disaster costs between 1990 and 1999 were more than 15 times higher ($652 billion in material losses) than they were between 1950 and 1959 ($38 billion at 1998 values) The human cost is also high: over the 1984–2003 period, more than 4.1 billion people were affected by natural disasters. The number affected has grown, from 1.6 billion in the first half of that period (1984–93) to almost 2.6 billion in the second half (1994-2003), and has continued to increase. Although disasters caused by natural events occur throughout...

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List of figures, table & Abbreviations ix Acknowledgements x What this Book is About 1 Chapter 1 - Key Concepts 7 Disaster Risk Reduction 7 Risk 10 Fast and Slow Onset Disasters 11 Resilience 12 Systems Thinking 13 Self-organising Systems 18 A System for Disaster Risk Reduction 21 Evaluation of Natural Disasters 22 Chapter 2 –Components of Disasters and NRM 27 Economic Analysis – Five Forms of Capital 27 The Significance of Context 31 Ecosystems Functional Analysis ...

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We also have a religion which was given to our forefathers, and has been handed down to us their children. It teaches us to be thankful, to be united, and to love one another! We never quarrel about religion....

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Nature, History, Religion, Westerns

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The Chemical History of a Candle is a series of 6 lectures on chemistry presented to a juvenile audience in 1848. Taught by Michael Faraday - a chemist and physist, and regarded as the best experimentalist in the history of science - it is probably the most famous of the Christmas Lectures of the Royal Society. Taking the everyday burning of a candle as a starting point, Faraday spans the arc from combustion and its products, via the components of water and air (oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon), back to the type of combustion that happens in the human body when we breathe. The final lecture On Platinum describes a then new method to produce large quantities of Platinum. It was delivered before the Royal Institution on February 22, 1861. (Summary by Availle.)...

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Nature, Science

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Nature Near Home is one of many books on natural history by John Burroughs. It is full of simple observations about rural scenes and charming stories about animals, plants, and even people! Burroughs loves the creatures around him and derives great pleasure from his walks and studies in nature’s scenes. (Summary by Edith Phern)...

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Essay/Short nonfiction, Nature

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The Elements of Botany is one of seven in a Series of First Books of Natural History Prepared for the Use of Schools and Colleges. It is a succinct little textbook that presents a solid introduction to plant science. (Summary by A.Gramour)...

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Nature, Science

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Richard Jefferies (1848 – 1887) was born and spent his childhood on a farm at Coate,Wiltshire. He joined the ‘Wiltshire and Gloucestershire Standard’ in 1868 and also started to write articles and pamphlets on various agricultural issues and local history topics. He is best known for his depiction of English rural life in essays, books of natural history, and novels. This classic of English nature writing gives an idea of the life of a gamekeeper in southern England in the second half of the nineteenth century. (Summary by AJM)...

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Animals, Nature, Biography

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volunteers bring you 21 recordings of Seaside by Rupert Brooke. This was the Weekly Poetry project for August 19, 2012. Rupert Chawner Brooke (middle name sometimes given as Chaucer was an English poet known for his idealistic war sonnets written during the First World War, especially The Soldier. He was also known for his boyish good looks, which were said to have prompted the Irish poet W. B. Yeats to describe him as the handsomest young man in England ( Summary from Wikipedia )...

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Fantasy, Nature, Sea stories, Poetry

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The White Heart of the Mojave recounts a 1920's adventure in the wind and sun and big spaces of Death Valley by two independent minded women, Edna Brush Perkins and Charlotte Hannahs Jordan. Both women were early feminists, Edna as chairwoman of the greater Cleveland Woman's Suffrage Party (1916-18). At the end of the Great War, the two friends wanted nothing more than to escape to the solitariness of some wild and lonely place far from city halls, smokestacks, national organizations, and streets of little houses all alike. Their vacation started as a long motor drive through the backwoods of California (Charlotte's husband, Ned, owned the Jordan Motor Car Company). It ended with a month long trek through Death Valley in an old milk wagon drawn by a horse and a mule. Edna's descriptions of the desert are superb and from the heart--the dunes were very beautiful, with knife-edged tops ridged in pure, clean lines from which fringes of fine sand blew up like the wind tossed manes of white horses. This is a great listen for anyone who likes first-hand accounts of adventure in the Great Outdoors. (Summary by Sue Anderson)...

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Memoirs, Nature, Travel

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Dies ist das erste Buch, in dem Alfred Wegener seine Theorie der Kontinentalverschiebung darlegt. Zeit seines Lebens wurde diese Theorie größtenteils abgelehnt, und geriet nach seinem Tod in Vergessenheit. Erst Jahrzehnte später wurden seine Ideen als wahr erkannt und auf verschiedene Arten nachgewiesen. Alfred Wegener war ein deutscher Meteorologe, Geo- und Polarwissenschaftler. Er starb auf seiner dritten Expedition nach Grönland. (Zusammenfassung von Availle)...

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Nature, Science

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Robert Sterling Yard was an American writer, journalist, and wilderness activist. Born in Haverstraw, New York, Yard graduated from Princeton University and spent the first twenty years of his career in the editing and publishing business. In 1915, he was recruited by his friend Stephen Mather to help publicize the need for an independent national park agency. Their numerous publications were part of a movement that resulted in legislative support for a National Park Service (NPS) in 1916. Yard worked to promote the national parks as well as educate Americans about their use. Creating high standards based on aesthetic ideals for park selection, he also opposed commercialism and industrialization of what he called America's masterpieces. In 1935, he became one of the eight founding members of The Wilderness Society and acted as its first president from 1937 until his death eight years later. Yard is now considered an important figure in the modern wilderness movement. In the preface to this book, published in 1919, he writes, In offering the American public a carefully studied outline of its national park system, I have two principal...

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Nature, Science, History

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Do you enjoy birdwatching? Would you like to learn a little more about the early conservations efforts to protect wild birds? In the Preface to The Bird Study Book, Pearson tells us “This book was written for the consideration of that ever-increasing class of Americans who are interested in acquiring a greater familiarity with the habits and activities of wild birds. Attention is also given to the relation of birds to mankind and the effect of civilisation on the bird-life of the country. ” An avid ornithologist, T. Gilbert Pearson (1873-1943) was a co-founder in 1905 of the National Association of Audubon Societies of which he was first secretary and then president for many years. He was also a pioneer of the conservation movement in the United States, international bird protection and broad nature education for school-aged children. (Audubon Magazine. 42: 370–371. Nov-Dec 1943)...

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Animals, Nature, Science

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volunteers bring you 15 recordings of Petals by Amy Lowell. This was the Weekly Poetry project for November 27, 2011. Amy Lawrence Lowell (February 9, 1874 – May 12, 1925) was an American poet of the imagist school from Brookline, Massachusetts who posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926. Lowell was born into Brookline's prominent Lowell family, sister to astronomer Percival Lowell and Harvard president Abbott Lawrence Lowell. She never attended college because her family did not consider that proper for a woman, but she compensated with avid reading and near-obsessive book collecting. She lived as a socialite and travelled widely, turning to poetry in 1902 after being inspired by a performance of Eleonora Duse in Europe. In the post-World War II years, Lowell, like other women writers, was largely forgotten, but with the renaissance of the women's movement in the 1970s, women's studies brought her back to light. According to Heywood Broun, however, Lowell personally argued against feminism. Her poem, “Petals” is published in her collection A Dome of Many-Colored Glass (1912). (Summary adapted from Wikipedia by Bob Go...

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Instruction, Nature, Philosophy, Poetry

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The Outline of Science was written specifically with the man-on-the-street in mind as the target audience. Covering scientific subjects ranging from astronomy to biology to elementary physics in clear, concise and easily understood prose, this popular science work is largely as relevant today as when first published in 1922. In this second volume (of four), we learn about microscopy, and the intricate workings of the human body and mind. The major part, however, is devoted to the Natural History of birds, mammals, and insects. (Summary adapted from the first volume by Availle.)...

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Nature, Psychology, Science

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A collection of short nonfiction works in the public domain. The essays, speeches and reports included in this collection were independently selected by the readers, and the topics encompass history, government, military history, science, philosophy, sports, nature and religion. (summary by J. M. Smallheer)...

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History, Nature, Philosophy, Religion, War stories, Science, Politics