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The Best of the Nautilus: A Bicentennial Anthology of American Conchology
The Best of the Nautilus A Bicentennial Anthology of American Conchology Author:R. Tucker Abbott Here is a treasury of nostalgic and often humorous writings taken from the first 40 years of America's oldest mollusk journal, covering the late pioneering period of 1886 to 1927. The noted malacologist and editor, R. Tucker Abbott, has carefully gathered a wide-ranging series of over 100 articles that depict the lore and e... more »xcitement of shell hunting in the United States. Revealing commentaries by Dr. Abbott put the articles in today's perspective. He gives interesting biographical notes on several dozen leading malacologists of the nineteenth century.
Join Charles Hedley on his first helmet dive on a coral reef in Australia in 1894; come with Frank C. Baker with a boatload of students down the Mississippi in 1902 to find freshwater pearly mussels; read about land snails that stopped a train, and river snails that clogged the water mains in Hannibal, Missouri, in 1895. Laugh at Abe Loche, a policeman of Atlantic City who was felled by a clam dropped on his head by a seagull in 1925. You'll smell wood smoke and breakfast bacon when you read James Ferriss' accounts of land shell collecting in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee.
The Nautilus is a journal devoted to the interests of malacologists. It was born in Philadelphia in '1886 and has lived through 90 years of American science from the times of boisterous pioneering through the lean days of The Depression of the 1930's, to today's age of oil spillage and river damming. Here is an entrancing anthology of the best of The Nautilus that every student of environmental protection and every lover of shell collecting will want to add to his library of good books.« less