Originally published in the early 1900s. The illustrated contents include: Schoolmen and Herbalists The Wonderful World of the Microscope Science at Court: Buffon and Reaumur Linnaeus and His Life Work The Great Field Trips Lamarck Georges Cuvier Bartram and Michaux Wilderness Birdsmen; Wilson and Audubon Frontier Utopians Goethe and the Romanticists Darwin and Wallace Darwinism and the Man Behind It Fabre and the World of Insects etc. Many of the earliest natural history books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Home Farm Books are republishing many of these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

"A volume for a lifetime" is how The New Yorker described the first of Donald Culross Peatie's two books about American trees published in the 1950s. In this one-volume edition, modern readers are introduced to one of the best nature writers of the last century. As we read Peattie's eloquent and entertaining accounts of American trees, we catch glimpses of our country's history and past daily life that no textbook could ever illuminate so vividly. Here you'll learn about everything from how a species was discovered to the part it played in our country's history. Pioneers often stabled an animal in the hollow heart of an old sycamore, and the whole family might live there until they could build a log cabin. The tuliptree, the tallest native hardwood, is easier to work than most softwood trees; Daniel Boone carved a sixty-foot canoe from one tree to carry his family from Kentucky into Spanish territory. In the days before the Revolution, the British and the colonists waged an undeclared war over New England's white pines, which made the best tall masts for fighting ships. It's fascinating to learn about the commercial uses of various woods -- for paper, fine furniture, fence posts, matchsticks, house framing, airplane wings, and dozens of other preplastic uses. But we cannot read this book without the occasional lump in our throats. The American elm was still alive when Peattie wrote, but as we read his account today we can see what caused its demise. Audubon's portrait of a pair of loving passenger pigeons in an American beech is considered by many to be his greatest painting. It certainly touched the poet in Donald Culross Peattie as he depicted the extinction of the passenger pigeon when the beech forest was destroyed. A Natural History of North American Trees gives us a picture of life in America from its earliest days to the middle of the last century. The information is always interesting, though often heartbreaking. While Peattie looks for the better side of man's nature, he reports sorrowfully on the greed and waste that have doomed so much of America's virgin forest.

Few lives have left so vivid an impression upon a native environment asthat of James Whitcomb Riley, the Hoosier Poet. His folksy, down-home rhymes arestill enormously popular in his native state and beyond. This publication bringsback into print the complete Riley repertoire of more than 1,000 poems, includingsuch all-time favorites as "Little Orphant Annie" (far and away thebest-loved of all Riley characters), "The Raggedy Man," "Our HiredGirl," "A Barefoot Boy," "The Bumblebee,""Granny," and "When the Frost Is on the Punkin."
It issaid that Indiana's best-known poet did not portray but invented the typicalHoosier. Applying imaginative skill, Riley altered and adapted the people around himto suit his purpose. As Jeannette Covert Nolan once put it, the figure who emergedwas "a mellow, humorous rustic, a quaint, bucolic philosopher, unlettered butgifted with an earthy shrewdness, a peasant wisdom, a heart of gold, speaking adrawling, hybrid tongue, a dubious dialect as yet unidentified by anyphilologist."
In his heyday Riley was famous all over the world.Though often called a children's poet, he actually wrote about children for adults, delighting in emotional reminders of an irretrievable past -- perhaps one that neverquite existed. Throughout his life Riley looked back wistfully and sentimentallyupon his childhood days, turning the longings and unfulfilled dreams of youth intoverse. So celebrated was he in Indiana that in many public elementary schools, students were required to memorize and recite one of his poems every week foradmiring audiences of visiting parents.

If I Knew What PoetsKnow
If I knew what poets know, Did I know what poets do, If I knew whatpoets know,
Would I write a rhyme Would I sing a song, I would find atheme
Of the buds that never blow Sadder than the pigeon's coo Sweeter thanthe placid flow
In the summer-time? When the days are long? Of the fairestdream:
Would I sing of golden seeds Where I found a heart in pain, I wouldsing of love that lives
Springing up in ironweeds? I would make it gladagain; On the errors it forgives:
And of rain-drop turned to snow, And thefalse should be the true, And the world would better grow
If I knew whatpoets know? Did I know what poets do. If I knew what poets know.
-- JamesWhitcomb Riley

This is a new release of the original 1957 edition.

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone

Originally published in the early 1900s. The illustrated contents include: Schoolmen and Herbalists The Wonderful World of the Microscope Science at Court: Buffon and Reaumur Linnaeus and His Life Work The Great Field Trips Lamarck Georges Cuvier Bartram and Michaux Wilderness Birdsmen; Wilson and Audubon Frontier Utopians Goethe and the Romanticists Darwin and Wallace Darwinism and the Man Behind It Fabre and the World of Insects etc. Many of the earliest natural history books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Home Farm Books are republishing many of these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

"Even a diehard urbanite would likely be seduced by this extraordinary chronicle of the plant kingdom... " Publishers Weekly

..". much more than the fascinating story of plant life... It is also a book about the resilience of life itself, the mystery and power of the unseen energy appearing in the visible world in a marvelous variety of forms." Audubon Naturalist News

"Here is Mr. Peattie at his superb best.... H]e makes the story of botany and its pursuit as fascinating to the reader as it is to him, and the reading of it a delight." Hartford Times

" Peattie] belongs with Gilbert White, Thoreau, John Burroughs, W. H. Hudson, Richard Jeffries, and John Muir." Mark van Doren

First published in 1939, this beautifully imaginative book is about botany much in the same sense that Walden is about a pond. Part natural history, part biography, and part philosophical reflection, Flowering Earth is written in a warm, lyrical style that made poet-scientist Donald Culross Peattie one of America's best-known naturalist writers."