The English naturalist Philip Henry Gosse (1810 88) travelled to Jamaica in 1844 and stayed for eighteen months to observe the diverse wildlife there. Upon his return he described his findings in a trilogy of books. The first two examined the island's birds - he has been hailed as the 'father of Jamaican ornithology' - but he used the present work, first published in 1851, to describe all the other forms of life on the island, from beetles to fruit trees. Lamenting that natural history was too often presented as a 'science of dead things', Gosse made his investigations come alive in this work...

Philip Henry Gosse (1810 88) is best remembered today for the portrait given by his son Edmund in his autobiographical Father and Son. In his own day, he was famous as a natural historian, and his books were extremely popular. (His Naturalist's Sojourn in Jamaica is also reissued in this series.) In 1857, Gosse moved from London to Devon, where he spent the rest of his life. This 1865 book offers essays about various aspects of the geography and natural history of the West Country. There are some digressions (one chapter is on the woods of Jamaica), and reminders of the two great Victorian...

The English naturalist Philip Henry Gosse (1810-88) spent nine months in 1838-9 in a small town in Alabama where he was the teacher at the local school. His time there was unhappy because of the widespread abuse of slaves he witnessed, the support of the practice by his fellow Methodists being particularly distressing. However, he loved the beauty of his surroundings, and the abundant wildlife, and in 1859 he published this account in the form of nineteen letters. Gosse recounts in detail his voyage from Philadelphia to Mobile, Alabama, and the environment around his new home in the hills,...