Not so very long ago, the new volume “Ponds, Pools, and Puddles” by Jeremy Biggs and Penny Williams found its way from Devon to my post box in Oregon. The 148th volume in the series, this most recently published volume takes, as I’m confident you could easily guess, as its subject the ecology of the smaller-than-lake sized bodies of fresh water as they appear in the U.K.
Having recently read that a new volume of the New Naturalist Library was soon to be available, I had an intuition that Mark Avery already had a copy of it and would soon be publishing one of his Sunday Book Reviews about it. So paying a visit to his blog today I was not on the least surprised to discover that the subject of his most recent review is, of course, David Wilkinson’s “Ecology and Natural History,” New Naturalist Library volume 143.
Upon discovering the subject of Mark Avery’s most recent Sunday Book Review, I found myself suddenly musing upon one of Rembrandt’s most famous paintings, “Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer” (also sometimes known as “Aristotle with a Bust of Homer”) for indeed, in this review we have one significant figure of, in this case, modern British natural history and conservation, musing over – here, a new addition to – the embodiment of an older collection of works to which his own owe something of their own foundation.