ML Archives and Special Collections

Here are a few recently added Special Collections items in honor of Earth Week:

George Marsh’s, Man and Nature (New York, 1864. Call #: SpColl 333.72 M365m) is a landmark in the history of ecology (click to view title page). Considered “the first treatise on environmental history”¹ and “the fountainhead of the conservation movement”² Man and Nature offers a comprehensive overview of the ways humans influenced the natural world. In his preface Marsh makes clear that the book is also a call to action:

The object of the present volume is: to indicate the character and, approximately, the extent of the changes produced by human action in the physical conditions of the globe we inhabit; to point to the dangers of imprudence and the necessity of caution…

Environmental study and activism were only part of Marsh’s life, however. Among other things, he served as American minister to Turkey and published a book advocating the use of camels in the West.

In addition to the 1864 first American edition of Man and Nature, Special Collections also recently acquired a copy of the 1867 American edition as well as two other nineteenth-century items related to conservation, ecology, and land use:

Samuel Dana’s A Muck Manual for Farmers (Lowell, MA, 1842. Call #: SpColl 631.8 D171m) and George Ville’s The School of Chemical Manures (Philadelphia, 1872. Call #: 631.8 V728s) are two early works dealing with the use of chemical manure in agriculture. Not a particularly glamorous topic, perhaps, but one that plays an important role in the history of human manipulation of the natural world.

Dana offered his book as a practical resource (with a practical title) for farmers, and it was one of the earliest works of American agricultural chemistry.

The School of Chemical Manures, published thirty years later, was another important milestone in fertilizer literature, and the image above (click to view enlarged version) offers a graphical depiction of the advantages of using chemical fertilizers.

Samuel Stearns, The American herbal, or Materia medica. Wherein the virtues of the mineral, vegetable, and animal productions of North and South America are laid open, so far as they are known; and their uses in the practice of physic and surgery exhibited…, Walpole, NH: D. Carlisle for Thomas and Thomas and the Author, 1801.

This recent addition to Special Collections is considered the first indigenous American herbal, a type of book that lists plants, their properties, and often, as is the case here, their medicinal uses. The American Herbal is also particularly notable for containing remedies used by Native Americans, although the accuracy of Stearns’ use these remedies is questionable. Most entries in the American Herbal (click here for a sample image) include a plant’s common and scientific name, a list of it’s salient features, and common medical uses and preparations.

As the WebMD of their time, herbals like this one would have been popular among the average user looking for home-medicine advice. But our copy also provides evidence of their professional usefulness too. The front paste-down includes an inscription indicating that the book was a presented as a gift from a doctor in Louisville, Kentucky to a doctor in Harrodsburg on November 16th, 1864.

Stearns himself led an interesting life. According to Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography (not necessarily a completely reliable source) Stearns was a Tory, and during the American Revolution he “suffered greatly from persistent attacks of the Sons of Liberty”. Before publishing the new country’s first herbal, he had already published its first nautical almanac and a number of other medical works.