Tall Ship 2 by Clara Drummond

The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes

I started to read this book in order to learn more about the voyages of discovery and because it had an entire chapter on my great hero Joseph Banks, so far it has been an enlightening and magical book. Here is a small excerpt:

‘the second scientific revolution’…was a movement that grew out of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment rationalism, but largely transformed it, by bringing a new imaginative intensity and excitement to scientific work. It was driven by a common ideal of intense even reckless, personal commitment to discovery………Romantic science can be dated roughly, and certainly symbolically, between two celebrated voyages of exploration. These were Captain James’s Cook’s first round-the-world expedition aboard the Endeavour, begun in 1768, and Charles Darwin’s Voyage to the Galapagos islands aboard the Beagle, begun in 1831…..The idea of the exploratory voyage, often lonely and perilous, is in one form or another a central and defining metaphor of Romantic Science.”

Wild Flower by Clara Drummond

The Jewel House by Deborah E. Harkness

This book describes a community of Natural Scientists living in Elizabethan London:

“..behind garden walls , inside the apothecary shops, and within the well appointed houses of the merchants lived an important community of naturalists. Lime Street was the English outpost of a Europe-wide network of students of nature- including plant hunters, gardeners, rock and fossil collectors, and scholars interested in animals and insects- who eagerly studied the marvelous and manifold properties of the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms.”