Digital Collections from
The Ewell Sale Stewart Library
Natural History Art and Pictoral Works
The Ewell Sale Stewart Library of the Academy of Natural Sciences houses many rare, beautiful, and important works on the natural sciences, books that most people will never see in their lifetimes. These books were published over the last five centuries, and document the discovery of plant and animal species by early explorers as they traveled the world. By publishing the pages from these books digitally and providing access on the web, the Library hopes to share them with scientists, scholars, and the public.
The following online exhibits are currently available:
- Delight for the Eye and the Mind: Books on mollusks and their shells
- Drawn from the Deep: The fish in science, art, and the imagination
- Edward Lear's Nature: The remarkable natural history illustrations of Edward Lear
- Foul and Loathsome Creatures: Herpetology in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries
- Humboldt Bicentennial: A celebration of the bicentennial (2004) of Alexander
von Humboldt's 1804 visit to Philadelphia. - Nature's Great Masterpiece: Western understanding of the elephant from the 16th through 19th centuries
- Philadelphia Trees: Botanical art in the late 18th and early 19th centuries
- What Eyes Would Be: Microscopes from the 17th to 19th centuries
Other online exhibits, including "Fairy Tale World of Henry McCook: Illustrations of Anthropomorphic Arthropods in the 19th Century", will be added on an ongoing basis. One previous selection from Digital Collections, "Women of the Academy", will be presented as a separate online exhibit in the near future.
The images on these web pages were captured using equipment provided by the Albert M. Greenfield Foundation. Information about the Greenfield Imaging Center, the Library's Image Reproduction and Image Permission services, and its Digital Library can be found on the web pages of The Ewell Sale Stewart Library.