Book Review

In The Environmental Imagination (1995), the literary historian Lawrence Buell shows how important for writers such as Henry David Thoreau the detailed representation of individual facts and species as items in a real landscape, not just as abstractions, could be. Although Margaret Welch does not list Buell's wide-ranging and stimulating study in the bibliography of The Book of Nature, which she describes as "a social history of natural history in the United States," she too is intrigued by the extent to which American naturalists relied more than their European colleagues on situating the objects of their attention in three-dimensional landscapes. Welch suggests that American practitioners of natural history fell back on the richness of the flora and fauna of New World scenes in part because they lacked the compensatory richness of European specimen collections. One distinctive product of American naturalists in the period was the "life history," a form of presentation that tended to place objects of knowledge against the background of supposedly actual environments.

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