{"id":1137,"date":"2023-02-10T00:38:01","date_gmt":"2023-02-10T04:38:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/consummate-19th-century-scottish-natural-history-illustrations-of-birds-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2023-02-10T00:38:01","modified_gmt":"2023-02-10T04:38:01","slug":"consummate-19th-century-scottish-natural-history-illustrations-of-birds-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/consummate-19th-century-scottish-natural-history-illustrations-of-birds-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Consummate 19th-Century Scottish Natural History Illustrations of Birds \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

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From pigeons to parakeets, an uncommonly beautiful celebration of biodiversity.<\/h2>\n

By Maria Popova<\/h3>\n
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Birds populate our metaphors, our poems, and our children\u2019s books, entrance our imagination with their song and their chromatically ecstatic plumage, transport us on their tender wings back to the time of the dinosaurs they evolved from. But birds are a time machine in another way, too \u2014 not only evolutionarily but culturally: While the birth of photography revolutionized many<\/a> sciences<\/a>, birds remained as elusive as ever, difficult to capture with lens and shutter, so that natural history illustration has remained the most expressive medium for their study and celebration. <\/p>\n

To my eye, the most consummate drawings of birds in the history of natural history date back to the 1830s, but they are not Audubon\u2019s Birds of America<\/em> \u2014 rather, they appeared on the other side of the Atlantic, in the first volume of The Edinburgh Journal of Natural History and of the Physical Sciences, with the Animal Kingdom of the Baron Cuvier<\/em><\/a>, published in the wake of the pioneering paleontologist Georges Cuvier\u2019s death.<\/p>\n

Hundreds of different species of birds \u2014 some of them now endangered, some on the brink of extinction \u2014 populate the lavishly illustrated pages, clustered in kinship groups as living visual lists of dazzling biodiversity. <\/p>\n

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