JF Ptak Science Books (An earlier post, expanded)
I’m fond of images of trees, but mostly if they are forensic or employed to display relationships between ideas or data. One of my favorites for the former is this great image from Peter Guillet’s Timber Merchant’s Guide. Also, a Table, Whereby, at One View, May Be Seen the Solid and Superficial Measure of Any Square or Unequal Hewed Logs or Plank…1 (printed in Baltimore by J. Longrove in 1823). Guillet was basically a tree dissector, a harvester of wood for the construction of naval ships. His book shows how to make the best—the most efficient—use of various varieties of trees, displaying how to employ different sections of trees for different parts of a ship. The book must’ve been an indispensable handbook down at the mill. At the every least, it certainly introduced a novel way of looking at trees.
This tree2 was a figure drawn by biologist and eminent Darwinian Ernst Haeckel3 (1834-1919), the branch spaces relating to intervals which were unrepresented in the fossil record. The image was perhaps the most popularly successful part of his two-volume double-wristbender—it was a difficult book, not well written or presented, with Charles Darwin himself finding it “impossible to read”.
