The Romance of Natural History, Second Series

In which the author bids you welcome to a world still trembling with mystery. Philip Henry Gosse, the Victorian naturalist who once wrestled a rattlesnake in Alabama and watched the sea serpent curl through Caribbean waters, guides readers through a planet both familiar and alien. This sequel to his popular natural history odyssey opens with a quiet devastation: the contemplation of extinction, the death of species, the long silence where a voice once called. Yet wonder prevails over sorrow. Gosse carries us across continents, from the steppes of Mongolia where wolves hunt in winter darkness to the forests of Ceylon where a devil-bird screams in the night. He catalogs the known and the suspected, the dissected and the merely glimpsed. Here are creatures that science acknowledges, and creatures that science suspects the author of inventing. The sea serpent. The giant snake. The African unicorn. In Gosse's hands, the boundary between zoology and romance dissolves entirely. This is natural history before the word 'naturalist' became a career and not a calling; when a single devoted observer could still believe the world held secrets worth dying for.