Keyword: Natural history
How many types of lightning are there, and how did the Victorians perceive and rationalise them? This article by James Broome, first published on The Strand Magazine in 1897, puts together photographs from both observatories and amateurs to show lightning in many of its different forms and shapes, while reflecting… Read more »
Mundus Subterraneus, published in 1664, is the final result of German Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher’s geological investigations. Here we publish an extract from the chapter, De Lapidibus, in which Kircher muses on the cognitive phenomenon which will be later known as pareidolia – seeing faces and figures within natural formations, in… Read more »