The Oxbow (The Connecticut River near Northampton), by Thomas Cole, 1836.

The Oxbow (The Connecticut River near Northampton) (detail), by Thomas Cole, 1836. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Mrs. Russell Sage, 1908.

Book of Nature

Volume 1, Number 3 | summer 2008

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Birds and Flowers of Spring and Summer, by Kano Eino, late seventeenth century.

Preamble

Messages in a Bottle

By Lewis H. Lapham

Nature is the only artist, the wonder of her collected works formed by their reflections in the mirrors of the human imagination.

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Painting of the flower garden dancing in her garden, surrounded by others

Funhouse Goddess

By D. Graham Burnett

It has never been easy to decipher what nature is trying to tell us, but that hasn’t stopped us from filling in the blanks. A look at the sexual politics of natural law theories.

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Map

Clearing the Inventory

Mining gold, chopping timber, tapping oil, fishing oceans.

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1667 | London

Distance Inexpressible

John Milton on living under a cloud of unknowing.More

1687 | Cambridge

Law of the Land

Isaac Newton’s rules for investigating phenomena.More

c. 1846 | Walden Pond

Survival of the Fittest

Henry David Thoreau observes the kingdom of the ants. More

Charts & Graphs

Suburban Warfare

An index of suburban danger.

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American poet Anne Bradstreet.

German writer and statesman Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Black and white photograph of Emily Dickinson sitting next to a desk.

Color photograph of writer and editor Garret Keizer.

Photograph of American writer and naturalist Henry Beston.

Photograph of British writer and journalist Simon Winchester.

The temple bell stops but I still hear the sound coming out of the flowers.

—Basho, c. 1690

Engraving of William Shakespeare from the first folio edition.

Black and white photograph of Friedrich Nietzsche with a huge mustache.

William Shakespeare & Friedrich Nietzsche

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Lapham’sDaily

Roundtable

Lapham’s Quarterly Is on Hiatus

By Lapham’s Quarterly

But the American Agora Foundation is already planning for the future. More

The Colosseum, attributed to Robert Eaton, c. 1855.

DÉjÀ Vu

Monumental Mistakes

2023:

Fitness instructor carves his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum.

c. 1850:

Thompson of Sunderland makes his mark on Pompey’s pillar.

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Terracotta funerary plaque, Greek, Attic, c. 520 BC.

The World in Time

Robert D. Kaplan

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with the author of The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power. More

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