Like many people, my knowledge of Robert Fitzroy has long been limited to the sole fact that he was the captain of the H.M.S. Beagle during Charles Darwin’s famous voyage upon it. I’d read in Darwin’s own writings that he had held Fitzroy in high esteem, as well as passing mentions elsewhere that Fitzroy and […]
After discovering, during my research in the writing of my review of “The Remarkable Life of William Beebe,” that only three of Beebe’s nearly two dozen books were still in print, I set about to discover if the same sorry ratio held true for the works of other noteworthy naturalists. Looking up Marston Bates, author of “The Nature of Natural History” and many other fine books, it was even worse than that – zero of his books were still being printed.