Pliny’s Natural History is an astonishingly ambitious work that ranges from astronomy to art and from geography to zoology. Mingling acute observation with often wild speculation, it offers a fascinating view of the world as it was understood in the first century AD, whether describing the danger of diving for sponges, the first water-clock, or the use of asses’ milk to remove wrinkles. Pliny himself died while investigating the volcanic eruption that destroyed Pompeii in AD 79, and the natural curiosity that brought about his death is also very much evident in the Natural History — a book that proved highly influential right up until the Renaissance and that his nephew, Pliny the younger, described ‘as full of variety as nature itself’. John F. Healy has made a fascinating and varied selection from the Natural History for this clear, modern translation. In his introduction, he discusses the book and its sources topic by topic. This edition also includes a full index and notes. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Excerpt from Illustrated Natural History The present volume is but a brief digest of a large mass of materials, derived either from personal experience, from the most recent zoological writers, or from the kindness Of many friends, who are familiar with almost every por tion of the world, andto whom my best thanks are due. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Excerpt from Observations Upon the Natural History of Epidemic Diarrhoea The causative agencies from which springs the plentiful harvest of child mortality in large cities may be conceived as a felted mass of rootlets almost inextricably intertwined. Those of poverty, bad housing, bad feeding, and neglect, may be severally recognized, but the extent of their interrelations with actual respiratory and alimentary disease - those to which the greater part of the mortality is referred - can be traced only with difficulty. It is the object Of this work to aid ln the labour of cutting away the matrix and entangling fibres and to lay bare the hidden ramifications of at least one important causative agency - epidemic diarrhoea. This affection - if we accept provisionally the more novel and generally favoured conception. As to its nature - is revealed as something very like an ordinary infectious disease, and one which permeates all classes, while the excessive mortality it gathers round itself in urban centres must be regarded as something superadded, owing to the vicious circle it forms with those baneful conditions of slum life mentioned above. On the other hand, its peculiarly intimate association with the circum stances of domestic life, from the continual faecal pollution of the interior of the household by infants and others, tends to make it more so than other affections of the kind peculiarly a class disease, and an especial scourge of dirty neighbourhoods. Dirty towns may however be saved from excessive mortality by a high percentage of breast feeding. A notable point in the interesting comparison that can be drawn between diarrhoea and typhoid fever is that, in accordance with their peculiarly opposite age-incidence curves, the marked and habitual depositing of infectious excreta within the household in the former disease may make the question of water-closet versus conservancy pan a matter of far less importance than in the latter. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Excerpt from The New Natural History, Vol. 1 N correspondence and in the course Of my lectures I have been asked a great many times to name some reliable text-book that would serve as a guide in the study of American Zoology, and hitherto, I have been unable to do so. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.