Albert's Greenhouse

If you're like me, you read a lot. And if you're like me and you read a lot, you read a lot about plants and natural history. And you might have found that a lot of the best natural history books are about 100 years out of print - written in the 19th century by Victorian plant hunters and explorers who were seeing some things out in the jungle for the first time ever.

These books are often hard to find, being out of print so long. For a while, Project Gutenberg has been scanning some of them in, and has been a great source of text files. Want to read Voyage of the Beagle by Darwin? Or Alfred Russel Wallace's work on the Malay Archipelago, where he independently came up with the idea of evolution by natural selection? It's all right there.

But now, there is even more! Google books now has scans of many of the same books and more, complete with all the pictures and drawings, downloadable by the page, or as a full length PDF. There's Henry Bates work The Naturalist on the River Amazons, Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon and Andes by Richard Spruce, and tons more I'll leave it to you to discover. (Hint: See my page on books for a few more links).

This sort of work is a boon to those of us who just want to read the words of these great explorers, and don't want to spend $1000 on an antique book in high demand by collectors. It's great that we can now get the whole experience, complete with the plates. Hopefully, more books will become available in this format in the future.