El 8 de marzo es el Dia Internacional de la Mujer: Es un honor felicitarlas por sus logros, visión, energía, y amor por la vida y la familia. March 8th more »
Category: Collection Highlights
Maria Sibylla Merian was the daughter, sister, and wife of artists and engravers. She lived a most unconventional life: she became an artist herself, left her husband to join a more »
Art Daily.org, "The First Art Newspaper on the Net" recently featured two Libraries exhibitions, Picturing Words: The Power of Book Illustration and The Art of African Exploration on its website. more »
Picturing Words: the Power of Book Illustration is currently on display in the National Museum of American History. From the Illustrating Natural History section: Das Mineralreich (The Mineral Kingdom) Reinhard more »
The Cooper-Hewitt Library is celebrating the release of Shedding Light on New York: Edward F. Caldwell Collection, a new online database on Saturday, February 28th. Margaret Caldwell, great granddaughter of more »
Portrait of Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882), BiologistOriginally uploaded by Smithsonian Institution “The cultivation of natural science cannot be efficiently carried on without reference to an extensive library.” (1)– Charles Darwin, more »
The scientific names assigned to animals often have intriguing origins, which can be revealed by books in the Smithsonian Institution Libraries’ collections. The Pallas’s Cat of central Asia, for instance, is named after German naturalist Peter Simon Pallas (1741-1811), the first person to publish a detailed description of the animal. Although he was not fully aware that the curious creatures he had seen during his travels were a new species, Pallas’s account and his accompanying illustration were definitive enough to establish the foundation for the scientific record. Pallas spent much of his life in Russia, where he conducted expeditions in search of new and unusual animals and plants. In his account, Travels through the southern provinces of the Russian Empire in the years 1793 and 1794 (originally published in German in 1799-1801), he speculated that the mysterious felines known today as the Pallas’s Cat (Felis manul) were the half-wild offspring of a local nobleman’s pet:
