Collecting Nature

The history of collecting natural history specimens touches upon many aspects of our past. The fascination with nature was at least as important for its view of humanity as for science. One telling example is the Timm Collection at Engelsberg Ironworks, created by the ironworks proprietor Gabriel Casper Timm and his son Paul August in the nineteenth century. This book places the Timm Collection in a larger context so that the reader encounters other collectors, thinkers and scientists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.