Graphics Editor Kathy Morse has made this issue the best illustrated ever! The articles include many striking images. This issue also includes three very different “Gallery” essays. Robert Marks writes about a satellite image of the Pearl River delta in China; Peter Mancall considers a page from a seventeenth-century English “natural history”; and Brian Black reflects on a photograph of the famous copse at Gettysburg National Historical Park in Pennsylvania. Readers with ideas about possible “Gallery” essays can contact Kathy at kmorse@middlebury.edu.

     Harriet Ritvo’s lead article offers a wonderfully wide-ranging survey of the role of animals in history. Ritvo also provided the cover image—a nineteenthcentury engraving of a collie. As Ritvo explains, the collie was a celebrated example of the power of Victorian breeders to remake animal natures. The engraving first appeared in a work by the pseudonymous journalist and sporting-show critic Stonehenge [John Henry Walsh]: The Dog in Health and Disease (London: Longmans, Green, 1879).

     Though scholars have begun to write the social history of “natural” disasters, most of the work on the subject concerns the recent past. Georgina Endfield, Isabel Fernández Tejedo, and Sarah O’Hara break new ground by exploring the response to droughts and floods in the pre-modern world of colonial Mexico. They find that disasters often intensified class conflict. But they argue that droughts and floods also sometimes encouraged different social groups to cooperate.

     Brett Walker’s article argues that new conceptions of nature were part of the self-conscious modernization program of Japan’s Meiji rulers in the late nineteenth century. To be modern, the Meiji decided, the people of Japan needed to eat beef. Accordingly, the Meiji sought to develop a ranching industry on the island of Hokkaido. That effort led to a systematic campaign to exterminate wolves—a campaign that went against powerful traditions. Because the Meiji relied on American advisers, Walker’s work adds to our understanding of the globalization of western ideas about progress.

     In the mid nineteenth century, the first factory workers in New England often wrote longingly about the countryside they had left behind. Their letters, poems, stories, and memoirs fit the conventions of “romantic” literature. Chad Montrie uses the writings of the mill hands to consider a fascinating question: How did factory work change popular thinking about nature? His article provides a new perspective on the critical transition from agricultural to industrial labor.

SOME TIME AGO, I learned that Michael Kammen was working on a study of the four seasons in American culture, and I am delighted that the book now is out. Like night and day, the seasons are not constants: Their meaning has changed through history. A Time to Every Purpose should inspire environmental historians to pay more attention to the changing ways people have experienced the rhythms of nature. But I hope Kammen’s book will do more than that.

     We experience the seasons through our senses, and I hope that environmental historians will begin to write more imaginatively about smell, hearing, taste, feeling, and sight. In different ways, cultural historians already have shown that the senses have histories. Alain Corbin’s The Foul and the Fragrant is a suggestive study of smell in early modern Europe. Several scholars have written about the “soundscapes” of colonial and nineteenth-century America. Marjorie Hope Nicholson’s classic Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory is essentially a history of a new way of seeing.

     What natural odors do people find pleasing or noxious? Indeed, what smells do people consider “natural”? What sounds are soothing or jarring? What sights seem beautiful or ugly? What elements of nature are comfortable or uncomfortable to touch? Those are important and rich historical questions.

ADAM ROME