Robert Haselkorn

conservation measures and the sustainable use of biodiversity. The society is the custodian of Linnaeus’ original library and collections and is creating a digital archive, enabling full global access. While such moves are occurring with many collections, the value of the new book is the listing of many much less well-known collections, which will not, in the near future, be available electronically. And while well-known people, such as Audubon, are well represented, many much lesser-known naturalists feature in Bridson’s book. Charlotte Tancin, librarian at the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, welcomes the new volume. She notes that researchers increasingly look online for what they want and often don’t delve further. The new book “is organised for maximum usability to reduce the likelihood that researchers will miss relevant works,” she says. Bridson died at the beginning of the year before the volume was published. The first edition took nine years of work and was published in 1994 and Bridson worked from then on to produce the greatly expanded new volume. Gren Lucas, treasurer of the Linnean Society said that the book would be “a most fitting memorial to a life spent in the service of natural history worldwide”. edition written by Linnean Society bibliographer Gavin Bridson, with an additional 5,300 references. It provides a comprehensive catalogue of more than 1,100 pages of source information including: collected biographies of naturalists and natural history artists, key library resources and catalogues; core bibliographies for the history of natural history, exploration, voyages and travel; resources for the history of botany and zoology; and references for natural history illustrations featuring many highlights from the Linnean Society’s collections. Bridson was spurred to create the more extensive new edition following plaudits for the first volume. Science historian Janet Browne at Harvard University wrote: this “volume has just about everything a historian of natural history could want in the reference line”. It is particularly fitting that the Linnean Society has backed this work, as Carl Linnaeus is seen as the person who had the most impact on taxonomy and brought some order to the human cataloguing of the natural world. His binomial system for naming, ranking, and classifying organisms is still in wide use following its eighteenthcentury introduction. The system today provides the fundamental framework for knowledge of the world’s species that has proved crucial for effective On the record: A picture by the naturalist John James Audubon of the American nightjar, Whip-poor-will, is one of the illustrations in the new volume of The History of Natural History. (Photo: Copyright Linnean Society of London www.linnean.org.) Q & A