Colonial America presented a new world of natural curiosities for settlers as well as the London-based scientific community. In American Curiosity, Susan Scott Parrish examines how various peoples in the British colonies understood and represented the natural world around them from the late sixteenth century through the eighteenth. Parrish shows how scientific knowledge about America, rather than flowing strictly from metropole to colony, emerged from a horizontal exchange of information across the Atlantic. Delving into an understudied archive of letters, Parrish uncovers early descriptions of American natural phenomena as well as clues to how people in the colonies construed their own identities through the natural world. Although hierarchies of gender, class, institutional learning, place of birth or residence, and race persisted within the natural history community, the contributions of any participant were considered valuable as long as they supplied novel data or specimens from the American side of the Atlantic. Thus Anglo-American nonelites, women, Indians, and enslaved Africans all played crucial roles in gathering and relaying new information to Europe. Recognizing a significant tradition of nature writing and representation in North America well before the Transcendentalists, American Curiosity also enlarges our notions of the scientific Enlightenment by looking beyond European centers to find a socially inclusive American base to a true transatlantic expansion of knowledge.

A pioneer in the strange art and ambiguous science of zo phagy-that is, of studying animals by eating them-British natural historian FRANCIS TREVELYAN BUCKLAND (1826-1880) was a wildly popular speaker and writer of the Victorian era. In his classic four-volume Curiosities of Natural History, published between 1857 and 1872, he shared his love of creatures exotic and mysterious with readers who devoured his charming and erudite essays much in the same way he devoured his animal subjects. "If there is one person that I would have expected to have captured a sea serpent in the 19th century for the sole purpose of eating it, it would be Frank Buckland," writes cryptozoologist Loren Coleman in his new introduction to Buckland's series. One of the founding grandfathers of cryptozoology, the discipline that investigates animal mysteries, Buckland was not "a wild-eyed 'true believer' in anything strange," insists Coleman, but brought, instead, "a skeptical, open-minded approach" to his work. Indeed, here, in the "first series" of Curiosities of Natural History, Buckland's erudition is clear in his animated discussions of, among many other things, the stupidity of newts, French sailors eating rats, skinning a boa constrictor, how a fish might drown, and the cunning of monkeys. This new edition, a replica of the original 1858 third edition, is part of Cosimo's Loren Coleman Presents series. LOREN COLEMAN is author of numerous books of cryptozoology, including Bigfoot!: The True Story of Apes in America and Mothman and Other Curious Encounters.

A pioneer in the strange art and ambiguous science of zoophagy-that is, of studying animals by eating them-British natural historian FRANCIS TREVELYAN BUCKLAND (1826-1880) was a wildly popular speaker and writer of the Victorian era. In his classic four-volume Curiosities of Natural History, published between 1857 and 1872, he shared his love of creatures exotic and mysterious with readers who devoured his charming and erudite essays much in the same way he devoured his animal subjects. "If there is one person that I would have expected to have captured a sea serpent in the 19th century for the sole purpose of eating it, it would be Frank Buckland," writes cryptozoologist Loren Coleman in his new introduction to Buckland's series. One of the founding grandfathers of cryptozoology, the discipline that investigates animal mysteries, Buckland was not "a wild-eyed 'true believer' in anything strange," insists Coleman, but brought, instead, "a skeptical, open-minded approach" to his work. This replica of the original 1858 third edition, is part of Cosimo's Loren Coleman Presents series."