Kenneth Spencer Research Library

The only image of St. Petersburg more plentiful in western books about 19th century Russia than the bronze horseman, is the ice hill, or “flying mountain,” a peculiarly Russian entertainment that may have something to do with the fact that Petersburgers are flatlanders. Paris, Rome, Athens, and Lawrence have their high points, hogbacks, and hills, but at no point on the delta on which Peter built his city is there a spot over thirty feet above sea-level. Of all the ailments that have plagued that city – typhoid fever, typhus, cholera, giardia, influenza, malaria, diphtheria, syphilis, smallpox, and the common cold – altitude sickness has not been one of them, and actually the hill provides some relief from high barometric pressure if not from a queasy stomach.

Scenes in Russia; Describing the Manners, Customs, Diversions, Modes of traveling, &c. of the Inhabitants of that Country. London: printed for J. And E. Wallis, 1814. Call Number: Children 5310  (click image to enlarge).

This contraption seems to be a combination of ski-jump and roller coaster: each person climbs into a small 4-wheeled shallow sided box at the top of a platform and careens downhill on a track. Sometimes ridges (moguls?) are added to increase velocity coming down enough to send them up the other side. When the River Neva is frozen the flying mountains are erected on the ice.

Adapted from the Spencer Research Library exhibit, Frosted Windows: 300 Years of St. Petersburg Through Western Eyes.

Sally Haines
Rare Books Cataloger

In his book on the viper, Nouvelles experiences sur la vipere, Parisian apothecary Moyse (or Moïse) Charas takes to task Italian physician, naturalist, and poet Francesco Redi (1626-1697), for his scientific study of viper bites, the first such research ever. Charas was of the opinion (and not alone in it) that venom per se was harmless and that death was caused by poisonous spirits injected into the victim by the mind of an infuriated viper. Charas’s title-page shows two vipers entwined as in the caduceus, or staff of Mercury, one of the symbols of the medical profession. The Aesculapian staff, after the Greco-Roman God of medicine and healing, Aesculapius, is branched at the top with a single snake twined around it; it is the official insignia of the American Medical Association.

Charas, Moyse (1618-1698). Nouvelles experiences sur la vipere.
A Paris: chez l’auteur et Olivier de Varennes, 1669. Ellis Omnia B30.
Click image to enlarge.

Charas recommended viper as a staple of the diet and as a preventive and cure for a good many diseases. His 17th century compatriot and contemporary Pierre Pomet (1658-1699) recommended distilled salts of viper to prevent measles, smallpox, plague, and scurvy, and to cure gout, rheumatisum, and venereal disease. Viper heart was prescribed for mealcholia. In another book, Trakat über den Theriak, Charas extols theriac, an anti-leprosy medicine made from powdered snake and used since antiquity; in medieval Europe the powder was formed into tablets, stamped with a snake image, and used against the bubonic plague. But that ain’t nothin’; our American frontiersmen gladly bought greasy-kid-stuff from snake-oil salesmen who took their money and swore the oil would grow hair back on their heads and cure the goiter to boot.

On the added engraved title-page of the Spencer Library’s copy (pictured above) is the inscription of the book’s former owner, French pharmacist and botanist Jean Leon Soubeiran (1827-1892). Soubeiran was the author of books on materia medica from all the kingdoms of nature–plant, animal, and mineral–including one on the venom of poisonous snakes.

Sally Haines
Rare Books Cataloger
Adapted from her Spencer Research Library exhibit and catalog, Slithy Toves: Illustrated Classic Herpetological Books at the University of Kansas in Pictures and Conservations.

The bullfrog, Rana catesbeiana, is the largest frog in North America. However, even as flat as he looks on this plate, he’s an unlikely candidate for road pizza on your plate, because although he’s an amphibian, the adult bullfrog tends to stay in his moist habitat and not to venture out onto dry land. Unfortunately for him, in this country, he’s one of the few species large enough to provide a satisfactory meal of frog legs for Homo sapiens.

James Petiver (1663 [or 4]-1718).  Gazophylacii naturæ & artis,: decas prima-[decima]. In quâ animalia,
quadrupeda, aves, pisces, reptilia, […] descriptionibus breviubs & iconibus illustrantur. Londonii: Ex Officinâ
Christ. Bateman ad insignia Bibliæ & Coronæ, vico vulgo dict. Pater-Noster-Row., MDCCII. [1702-1706?]
Call Number: Ellis Aves E116 item 2. Click image to enlarge.

James Petiver, known primarily as a botanist and as one of the founders of British entomology, went to considerable expense to have ships’ captains and surgeons supply him with specimens of natural history from around the world for his museum. In the Gazophylacium, one of Petiver’s rarest and most interesting productions, the figures of reptiles and amphibians, plants, shells, insects, birds, and other animals are displayed together on the same plate. It was the intention of both author and publisher that the text be pasted down on the versos of the plates facing the appropriate plate, with dedication mounted at the foot of each, as in the Spencer Library’s copy; however, in most states of the work, text is simply printed on the back of each plate.

Sally Haines
Rare Books Cataloger
Adapted from her Spencer Research Library exhibit and catalog, Slithy Toves: Illustrated Classic Herpetological Books at the University of Kansas in Pictures and Conservations

No kidding, there really was a seven-headed hydra, and it took an 18th century St. George to slay it:  Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus. In Hamburg, Germany, Linnaeus exposed as a fake the specimen of a seven-headed hydra that its owner, the mayor of Hamburg, had been trying to sell–and his asking price was high. This curious critter had been looted from a church in 1648 after the Battle of Prague and had come into the mayor’s hands. Even the king of Denmark had supposedly made an unsuccessful bid for it. The mayor found he was having to lower his price, which had been falling steadily when Linnaeus tactlessly published his findings that the jaws and feet were those of a weasel and that carefully joined snake-skins covered the body. Fearing the mayor’s revenge for rendering his hydra worthless, the Swede made a hasty exit from the city. The Kenneth Spencer Research Library holds a significant collection of Linnaeus and Linnaeana (follow the link and scroll down for a brief description of the collection).

Historiae Naturalis de Serpentibus, by Joannes Jonstonus (1603-1675). Heilbronnae: apud Franciscum
Iosephum Eckebrecht, 1757. Call Number: Ellis Omnia E26 item 2. (Click image to enlarge.)

Jonstonus (or Jonston, sometimes Johnstone) was a naturalist of Scottish descent born in Poland. After studying botany and medicine at Cambridge, he settled in Leiden in order to indulge his interest in natural history. His writings are criticized as laborious compilations, and the copper-plate engravings are mostly copies from Belon, Rondelet, Gessner, and others.

Sally Haines
Rare Books Cataloger
Adapted from her Spencer Research Library exhibit and catalog, Slithy Toves: Illustrated Classic Herpetological Books at the University of Kansas in Pictures and Conservations (print copies of the exhibition catalog are available at KU Libraries).

Friedrich von Adelung was a Prussian historian, linguist, and bibliographer, a.k.a. Fedor Pavlovich Adelung, when he pulled up roots and moved to Russia at age 26. He was dubbed patron saint of Russian librarians when he compiled – with statistician K. Storch – a five-year review of Russian literature, 1810-1811, that marked the beginning of Russian bibliographical statistics. He also wrote a literary review of travelers to Russia up to 1700, Western and otherwise; compiled a universally celebrated bibliography of Sanskrit, 1811; and assembled another bibliography of foreign maps of Russia, 1306-1699.

Siegmund Freiherr von Herberstein: mit besonderer Ruecksicht auf seine Reisen in Russland,
by Friedrich von Adelung (1768-1843). St. Petersburg: N. Gretsch, 1818. Call Number: C135

This portrait of Sigmund von Herberstein is from Adelung’s biography of that early German traveler to Russia. Among other important bibliographical works, Adelung published, in 1827, the Austrian Augustin von Meyerberg’s account of his travels in Russia in 1661 and 1662. Adelung died during his presidency of the Petersburg Academy of Sciences.

Sally Haines
Rare Books Cataloger
Adapted from her Spencer Research Library exhibit, Frosted Windows: 300 Years of St. Petersburg Through Western Eyes.