"Forget not Mee & My Garden. . . ," Peter Collinson wrote his Maryland friend George Robins in 1721. "If you have any Shells, Curious Stones, or any other Naturall Curiosity Remember Mee. I want one of your Humming Birds which you may send dry'd in its Feathers, and any Curious Insect." This theme echoed through Collinson's letters for the rest of his life, along with thanks for rarities received, introductions, cultivation instructions, encouragements, importunings, queries.

Armstrong describes Collinson's correspondence as, "vigorous, brisk, and emphatic."

His letters talk mainly of plants, but there are also antiquities, birds, butterflies, British imperial interests, sheep management in Spain, electricity, weather, fossils, insects, earthquakes, vine culture, Colonial policy, tithes, wars, terrapins, "an Infalible Remedy for the bite of a Mad Dog,' red Indians, astronomy, the making of salt, cheese fairs, the price of wheat, the power of snakes to charm, the Spanish threat to Florida, geology, French expansion," Hints . . . to Incorporate the Germans more with the [Pennsylvania] English. . . , the history of rice growing, premiums to encourage the production of silk, whether swallows migrate or winter-over under water, "Old Hock" as a remedy for gout, thundergusts, magnetism, Bezoar stones, and now and then a Quakerly comment.

This selection of 187 letters is enhanced with over 120 illustrations (portraits and botanical drawings among them) , some by Mark Catesby, Georg Dionysius Ehret, William Bartram, many in color. The edition contains notes and commentary for most letters.

Copepod crustaceans are the most numerous multicellular animals on earth. They occur in every free-living and parasitic aquatic niche. Copepods have been known since the time of Aristotle, yet there has never been a history of the study of copepods. This volume, the first in a planned three-volume series, reviews the discoveries of copepods to 1832, the year that the two distinct branches, the free-living copepods (long-known as insects) and the parasitic copepods (thought to be molluscs or worms) were finally acknowledged as members of the same Class Crustacea. The narrative includes the biographies of 90 early copepodologists and recounts their most important contributions to science. Portraits are included for two-thirds of the subjects, with considerable new material as well as information and illustrations from obscure sources.

Milestones include the first description of copepods (ca. 350 B.C.), the first illustration (1554), the first free-living freshwater copepod (1688), the first explanation of a free-living copepod's metamorphosis (1756), the first permanently named copepod (1758), the first free-living marine copepod (1770), and the first description of a parasitic copepod's metamorphosis (1819). The work ends with a transition to the mid-19th century, previewing numerous personal connections that pointed toward copepodology's Golden Age in the 1890s, to be covered in Volume 2. A final volume will take the history of the study of copepods to ca. 1950.

The American Philosophical Society in conjunction with the Independence National Historical Park announces the publication of the first catalog of the portraits in the INHP collection. These portraits, most of which are exhibited in the Second Bank of the United States, consist of 255 works, 109 of them by Charles Willson Peale. Many were first exhibited in Peale's Museum and included likenesses of heroes of the American Revolution and founders of American government, statesmen, jurists, men of science, art and letters. The collection was enhanced by the addition of the works of notable 18th and 19th Anglo-American artists.

The book is divided into two major sections-a history of the collection dividing it chapters covering works pre-1950, 1850-1900 and 1900-1951, and a catalog. Each catalog entry is enhanced with either a black and white or four-color reproduction and contains a physical description of the portrait, a brief biography of the subject, the circumstance of the portrait's commission and its provenance. The editor and authors made extensive use of the Peale papers and other special collections in the American Philosophical Society Library archives. This study should be useful for museum staff, historians (of American and Art history), and visitors to Independence Historical National Park.

Chemistry as it is known today is deeply rooted in a variety of thought and action, dating back at least as far as the fifth century B.C. In this book, Joseph S. Fruton weaves together the history of scientific investigation with social, religious, philosophical, and other events and practices that have contributed to the field of modern chemistry.

The story begins with the influence of alchemy on early Greek numerology and philosophy, followed by the historical account of chemical composition and phlogiston. The life and work of Antoine Lavoisier receive extensive coverage in Chapter Three, with the remaining six chapters devoted to atoms, equivalents, and elements; radicals and types; valence and molectualr structure; stereochemistry and organic synthesis; forces, equilibria, and rates; and electrons, reaction mechanisms, and organic synthesis.

For the people of Chuuk and for students of religion and Micronesian culture, this book pulls together and makes available in English the somewhat scattered published accounts (largely in German), along with Goodenough's own (as yet unpublished) information about religious beliefs and ritual practices in pre-Christian Chuuk. The materials are presented in a way that seeks to document and illustrate a particular approach, a functional one, to understanding the kinds of human concerns that give rise to religious behavior. Simply to describe traditional beliefs and rituals without the relevant social background information leaves the reader without any feeling for what were the emotional concerns, engendered by life in Chuukese society, that ritual practices helped people address. Ward Goodenough offers a theoretical introduction, the necessary background information about Chuuk and the ways in which members of Chuukese society experienced themselves and their fellows, the world view and overall set of beliefs providing the intellectual framework within which ritual practices were formulated and understood, and the various bodies of ritual practices. He concludes the book with a summary that pulls together how the rituals described appear to related to the emotional concerns that growing up and living in Chuuk tended to create.

Following in the succession of his 25 predecessors, Leon Abbett twice served as governor of New Jersey in the late nineteenth century. A lifelong Democrat, he was a dynamic and visionary party leader who guided the citizens of New Jersey into a new urban industrial age. While he was a machine politician and party boss, he was also a notable reformer. That was a formidable combination for his time.

Grappling with a series of hot political issues and braving the passions and divisions spawned by the Civil War, Abbett was one of the ablest and most intriguing men ever to be governor. Several new ideas were transformed into public policy during his tenure. Both in style and strategy, Abbett represented a sharp break from his predecessors. He was a prime example of a governor who both in crisis and in ordinary times broadened gubernatorial authority. He became both a policy and party leader. In this context, he was an important forerunner to a type of governor that had not yet appeared on the American political stage.

In this comprehensive catalogue of the work of the 15th-century painter and draftsman, Stefano da Verona (1375-ca. 1438), Karet reviews past scholarship and corrects old misunderstandings that produced an inconsistent, heterogeneous and misinformed corpus. Her attributions are based on stylistic arguments, technical analysis, and the relationship of the drawings to a limited number of secure paintings by this important Late Gothic North Italian painter. The restricted but sound body of works Stefano da Verona executed is compiled in rich catalogue entries that include discussions of style, iconography, patronage, paper and sketchbook analysis, important issues of workshop production and of the history of drawings and collectionism. Karet also transcribes and translates 15th-century Italian inscriptions and texts in various dialects found on the drawings. The catalogue includes a group of fully annotated rejected works that touch upon important issues involving drawings by Stefano' contemporaries. The author also reconstructs a sketchbook drafted by Stefano, one of the first artists to preserve his ideas in this way. Karet's Drawings of Stefano da Verona is a significant addition to the history of drawing in the important transitional decades from the Late Gothic to the Renaissance.

Toward the end of February in 1877, a letter from the county council of Telha, a municipio of some six hundred inhabitants located in the Serra da Mattos reported that people were dying from starvation. The previous year's rainy season or "winter" had been sparse, and the harvest, poor. Now, this season's rains still had not appeared. This was the Great Drought-three years of failed rains enshrined in subsequent Brazilian historical memory as the worst drought ever to hit Brazil's northeast. Drought had visited the region throughout its history, with the earliest recorded occurrences dating back to the sixteenth century. Prior to the Great Drought, the last significant drought had taken place in 1844-45. That relatively long interval of good rains made the failure of rains in 1877 even more devastating, for it caught the provinces of the north totally unprepared.

Despite all this official concern, the numerous academic studies, ambitious plans, and publicly-funded projects, the specter of periodic droughts producing dislocation and death continues to haunt the region. As Nancy Schepper-Hughes affirms, "if there is one raw and vital nerve among Nordestinos [northeasterners] it is their horror of drought . . . and thirst." Northeasterners see drought as both a cause and symbol of their region's relative underdevelopment, and claim that this reflects a longstanding pattern of government favoritism toward the south. In this view as well, the northeast has been exploited by southern business and financial interests, drained of both its people and capital. Outside the region, the derisive terms "drought industries" and "drought industrialists" express a widely-held belief that northeastern politicians have shamelessly exploited drought to provide patronage for their cronies, waxing rich off the misery of the ignorant masses. This supposedly explains the long history of failed attempts to "solve" the drought problem.

This collection of memoirs by refugees from Nazi Germany is a rich source of autobiographical information on the Nazi era. Housed at Houghton Library of Harvard University, it consists of 263 files containing the memoirs of approximately 230 people who lived in Germany or Austria during the 1930s. The stories of the memoirists encompass an almost bewildering range of human experience. The authors come from Danzig and Berlin, from central Germany and the Southwest, from Munich and from Vienna. They are Jews and Catholics and Protestants, and mixtures of these all-too-neat categories in their origins and marriages. They are peddlers and professors, machinists and lawyers, private housewives and public activists. They are conservatives and liberals and Communists. The strongest common bond was their exile.