Description: Man's fascination with the natural world is at least as old as Stone Age cave painting, and this book demonstrates the equal vividness with which writers have recorded their observations of the world around them since ancient times. In a wonderful overview of the subject, Richard Mabey charts the development of nature writing from the fabulous imaginings of the medieval bestiaries to the scientific preciseness and philosophical concerns of today's naturalists. Gilbert White is only the best known of an honourable tribe of amateur naturalists whose voices are recorded here, in letters and journals and accounts of expeditions to far-flung regions. Here too are essays and diary entries by poets and novelists as diverse as Coleridge and Orwell, and the scientists, from Linnaeus to Lewis Thomas expressing their growing concern for the environment.

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