Reading the Natural World
Read More![Illustration of a boops boops commonly called a bogue.
<br><br>
<b>Author:</b> Guillaume Rondelet<br>
<b>Title:</b><i> Libri de piscibus marinis </i> [Book of marine fish] (Lyon, 1554) <br>
<b>Shelfmark:</b> F.9.27 <a href="http://idiscover.lib.cam.ac.uk/permalink/f/1nnjft8/44CAM_ALMA21416669940003606"> (catalogue record)</a>](https://photos.smugmug.com/Exhibitions/ThomasSmith/World/i-X8gBsR6/0/3e253738/M/F.9.27-002-M.jpg)
Illustration of a boops boops commonly called a bogue.
Author: Guillaume Rondelet
Title: Libri de piscibus marinis [Book of marine fish] (Lyon, 1554)
Shelfmark: F.9.27 (catalogue record)
Illustration of a boops boops commonly called a bogue.
Author: Guillaume Rondelet
Title: Libri de piscibus marinis [Book of marine fish] (Lyon, 1554)
Shelfmark: F.9.27 (catalogue record)
![Guillaume Rondelet was a French professor of medicine. In this book he traces sea creatures’ common names back to classical sources like Aristotle and Athenaeus, giving bibliographical references in the margins. Smith underlines or reiterates names as they appear in Greek, English and French. In his notebooks Smith recorded details of his own fish-keeping, including an inventory of all the fish in his ponds.
<br><br>
<b>Author:</b> Guillaume Rondelet<br>
<b>Title:</b><i> Libri de piscibus marinis </i> [Book of marine fish] (Lyon, 1554) <br>
<b>Shelfmark:</b> F.9.27 <a href="http://idiscover.lib.cam.ac.uk/permalink/f/1nnjft8/44CAM_ALMA21416669940003606"> (catalogue record)</a>](https://photos.smugmug.com/Exhibitions/ThomasSmith/World/i-TBCbXkm/0/9af51d2b/Ti/F.9.27-001-Ti.jpg)
![Illustration of a boops boops commonly called a bogue.
<br><br>
<b>Author:</b> Guillaume Rondelet<br>
<b>Title:</b><i> Libri de piscibus marinis </i> [Book of marine fish] (Lyon, 1554) <br>
<b>Shelfmark:</b> F.9.27 <a href="http://idiscover.lib.cam.ac.uk/permalink/f/1nnjft8/44CAM_ALMA21416669940003606"> (catalogue record)</a>](https://photos.smugmug.com/Exhibitions/ThomasSmith/World/i-X8gBsR6/0/3e253738/Ti/F.9.27-002-Ti.jpg)
![Here Thomas Smith supplements the text with his own knowledge. Rondelet states that the herring dies quickly out of water. In a rare English annotation, Smith has written ‘Hinc [hence the] proverb: as dead as a herring.’
<br><br>
<b>Author:</b> Guillaume Rondelet<br>
<b>Title:</b><i> Libri de piscibus marinis </i> [Book of marine fish] (Lyon, 1554) <br>
<b>Shelfmark:</b> F.9.27 <a href="http://idiscover.lib.cam.ac.uk/permalink/f/1nnjft8/44CAM_ALMA21416669940003606"> (catalogue record)</a>](https://photos.smugmug.com/Exhibitions/ThomasSmith/World/i-fFWcX4v/0/b80c81f0/Ti/F-009-27-006-Ti.jpg)
![‘Hinc [hence the] proverb: as dead as a herring.’
<br><br>
<b>Author:</b> Guillaume Rondelet<br>
<b>Title:</b><i> Libri de piscibus marinis </i> [Book of marine fish] (Lyon, 1554) <br>
<b>Shelfmark:</b> F.9.27 <a href="http://idiscover.lib.cam.ac.uk/permalink/f/1nnjft8/44CAM_ALMA21416669940003606"> (catalogue record)</a>](https://photos.smugmug.com/Exhibitions/ThomasSmith/World/i-MVmbpqf/0/95c41622/Ti/F-009-27-007-Ti.jpg)
![Smith’s copy of Dioscorides’ compendium of herbal medicines is bound in calfskin decorated with roses and a border of plants and birds. On the fore-edge Smith has drawn a blossoming plant. The loss of a sixteenth-century commentary on this text caused Smith a great deal of grief: ‘He was very conversant in the commentaries of Matthiolus upon Dioscorides, and had interspersed his own book of Matthiolus, with many notes and observations of his own. It was a book that was never wont to go from him. But some body it seems once had stollen it, which grieved him not a little, complaining to his friends, that he had rather have lost a far better thing… By his conversing in these books, we may judge of his learning that way.’ (Strype, The life of the learned Sir Thomas Smith (London, 1698) pp. 213-14).
<br><br>
<b>Author:</b> Dioscorides Pedanius of Anazarbos<br>
<b>Title:</b><i> De medica materia libri V </i> [On medical materials] (Cologne, 1529) <br>
<b>Shelfmark:</b> F.9.29(1) <a href="http://idiscover.lib.cam.ac.uk/permalink/f/1nnjft8/44CAM_ALMA21415587160003606"> (catalogue record)</a>](https://photos.smugmug.com/Exhibitions/ThomasSmith/World/i-bMt8rw6/1/b785235a/Ti/_MG_4809-1-Ti.jpg)
![<b>Author:</b> Dioscorides Pedanius of Anazarbos<br>
<b>Title:</b><i> De medica materia libri V </i> [On medical materials] (Cologne, 1529) <br>
<b>Shelfmark:</b> F.9.29(1) <a href="http://idiscover.lib.cam.ac.uk/permalink/f/1nnjft8/44CAM_ALMA21415587160003606"> (catalogue record)</a>](https://photos.smugmug.com/Exhibitions/ThomasSmith/World/i-8GLBsVQ/0/0c07e977/Ti/_MG_4812-4-Ti.jpg)
![<b>Author:</b> Dioscorides Pedanius of Anazarbos<br>
<b>Title:</b><i> De medica materia libri V </i> [On medical materials] (Cologne, 1529) <br>
<b>Shelfmark:</b> F.9.29(1) <a href="http://idiscover.lib.cam.ac.uk/permalink/f/1nnjft8/44CAM_ALMA21415587160003606"> (catalogue record)</a>](https://photos.smugmug.com/Exhibitions/ThomasSmith/World/i-L55LC6f/0/e34a18a1/Ti/_MG_4813-5-Ti.jpg)
![Horologiographia, by the sixteenth-century German scholar Sebastian Münster, is a practical guide to the design and construction of sundials. It was celebrated both for the accuracy of Münster’s calculations and for the beauty of the woodcut illustrations, some of them attributed to Hans Holbein the Younger. Smith has written ‘inscriptio zodiacii’ in the margin, noting that Münster uses zodiac symbols to indicate the month of the year. The seventeenth-century sundial in Old Court uses this same design. Münster’s Cosmographia was the first German-language description of the world. It was one of the most popular works of Smith’s era – here is his own copy - and thirty-five editions were produced within a century of its publication.
<br><br>
<b>Author:</b> Sebastian Münster<br>
<b>Title:</b><i> Horologiographia</i> [On the measurement of time]
(Basel, 1533)
<br>
<b>Shelfmark:</b> D.20.39 <a href="http://idiscover.lib.cam.ac.uk/permalink/f/1nnjft8/44CAM_ALMA21416595580003606"> (catalogue record)</a>](https://photos.smugmug.com/Exhibitions/ThomasSmith/World/i-Lz7p8pc/0/2483ebcf/Ti/_MG_4803-1-Ti.jpg)
![<b>Author:</b> Sebastian Münster<br>
<b>Title:</b><i> Horologiographia</i> [On the measurement of time]
(Basel, 1533)
<br>
<b>Shelfmark:</b> D.20.39 <a href="http://idiscover.lib.cam.ac.uk/permalink/f/1nnjft8/44CAM_ALMA21416595580003606"> (catalogue record)</a>](https://photos.smugmug.com/Exhibitions/ThomasSmith/World/i-qkrDsv2/0/79f9323a/Ti/_MG_4804-2-Ti.jpg)
![<b>Author:</b> Sebastian Münster<br>
<b>Title:</b><i> Horologiographia</i> [On the measurement of time]
(Basel, 1533)
<br>
<b>Shelfmark:</b> D.20.39 <a href="http://idiscover.lib.cam.ac.uk/permalink/f/1nnjft8/44CAM_ALMA21416595580003606"> (catalogue record)</a>](https://photos.smugmug.com/Exhibitions/ThomasSmith/World/i-V4C9vgN/0/0c7ebfbb/Ti/_MG_4805-3-Ti.jpg)
![<b>Author:</b> Sebastian Münster<br>
<b>Title:</b><i> Horologiographia</i> [On the measurement of time]
(Basel, 1533)
<br>
<b>Shelfmark:</b> D.20.39 <a href="http://idiscover.lib.cam.ac.uk/permalink/f/1nnjft8/44CAM_ALMA21416595580003606"> (catalogue record)</a>](https://photos.smugmug.com/Exhibitions/ThomasSmith/World/i-zk7kzNV/0/13f5648e/Ti/_MG_4806-4-Ti.jpg)
![<b>Author:</b> Sebastian Münster<br>
<b>Title:</b><i> Horologiographia</i> [On the measurement of time]
(Basel, 1533)
<br>
<b>Shelfmark:</b> D.20.39 <a href="http://idiscover.lib.cam.ac.uk/permalink/f/1nnjft8/44CAM_ALMA21416595580003606"> (catalogue record)</a>](https://photos.smugmug.com/Exhibitions/ThomasSmith/World/i-h3T2xQ2/0/9ab71137/Ti/_MG_4807-5-Ti.jpg)