Libraries & Reference Works
Looking to impress your friends with your expansive knowledge of historical events, philosophical concepts, obscure words, and more? We may be biased, but it seems fair enough to say that reference works such as dictionaries, encyclopedias, and textbooks have provided such a service for years (in some cases, hundreds or even thousands of years). You can look for them at your local public library, which likely stores books, manuscripts, journals, CDs, movies, and other sources of information and entertainment.
Libraries & Reference Works Encyclopedia Articles
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E.O. Wilson
E.O. Wilson American biologist recognized as the world’s leading authority on ants. He was also the foremost proponent of sociobiology, the study of the genetic basis of the social behaviour of all animals,...
Georges-Louis Leclerc, count de Buffon
Georges-Louis Leclerc, count de Buffon, French naturalist, remembered for his comprehensive work on natural history, Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (begun in 1749). He was created a count...
Pliny the Elder
Pliny the Elder Roman savant and author of the celebrated Natural History, an encyclopaedic work of uneven accuracy that was an authority on scientific matters up to the Middle Ages. Pliny was descended...
Carolus Linnaeus
Carolus Linnaeus Swedish naturalist and explorer who was the first to frame principles for defining natural genera and species of organisms and to create a uniform system for naming them (binomial nomenclature)....
dictionary
Dictionary, reference book that lists words in order—usually, for Western languages, alphabetical—and gives their meanings. In addition to its basic function of defining words, a dictionary may provide...
Library of Congress
Library of Congress, the de facto national library of the United States and the largest library in the world. Its collection was growing at a rate of about two million items per year; it reached more than...
Avicenna
Avicenna Muslim physician, the most famous and influential of the philosopher-scientists of the medieval Islamic world. He was particularly noted for his contributions in the fields of Aristotelian philosophy...
almanac
Almanac, book or table containing a calendar of the days, weeks, and months of the year; a record of various astronomical phenomena, often with climate information and seasonal suggestions for farmers;...
Conrad Gesner
Conrad Gesner Swiss physician and naturalist best known for his systematic compilations of information on animals and plants. Noting his learning ability at an early age, his father, an impecunious furrier,...
Newberry Library
Newberry Library, independently governed and funded research library located in Chicago and founded in 1887. Free and open to the public, the Newberry concentrates on the humanities. Its core collections...
James D. Dana
James D. Dana, American geologist, mineralogist, and naturalist who, in explorations of the South Pacific, the U.S. Northwest, Europe, and elsewhere, made important studies of mountain building, volcanic...
Claude Bernard
Claude Bernard, French physiologist known chiefly for his discoveries concerning the role of the pancreas in digestion, the glycogenic function of the liver, and the regulation of the blood supply by the...
Noah Webster
Noah Webster American lexicographer known for his American Spelling Book (1783) and his American Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vol. (1828; 2nd ed., 1840). Webster was instrumental in giving American...
John Ray
John Ray leading 17th-century English naturalist and botanist who contributed significantly to progress in taxonomy. His enduring legacy to botany was the establishment of species as the ultimate unit...
Paracelsus
Paracelsus German-Swiss physician and alchemist who established the role of chemistry in medicine. He published Der grossen Wundartzney (Great Surgery Book) in 1536 and a clinical description of syphilis...
Georgius Agricola
Georgius Agricola German scholar and scientist known as “the father of mineralogy.” While a highly educated classicist and humanist, well regarded by scholars of his own and later times, he was yet singularly...
Benjamin Spock
Benjamin Spock American pediatrician whose books on child-rearing, especially his Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946; 6th ed., 1992), influenced generations of parents and made his name a household...
Ptolemy
Ptolemy an Egyptian astronomer, mathematician, and geographer of Greek descent who flourished in Alexandria during the 2nd century ce. In several fields his writings represent the culminating achievement...
Albrecht von Haller
Albrecht von Haller Swiss biologist, the father of experimental physiology, who made prolific contributions to physiology, anatomy, botany, embryology, poetry, and scientific bibliography. At the University...
John James Audubon
John James Audubon ornithologist, artist, and naturalist who became particularly well known for his drawings and paintings of North American birds. Audubon’s name is associated with a number of bird-related...
Athanasius Kircher
Athanasius Kircher Jesuit priest and scholar, sometimes called the last Renaissance man, important for his prodigious activity in disseminating knowledge. Kircher learned Greek and Hebrew at the Jesuit...
al-Bīrūnī
Al-Bīrūnī Muslim astronomer, mathematician, ethnographist, anthropologist, historian, and geographer. Al-Bīrūnī lived during a period of unusual political turmoil in the eastern Islamic world. He served...
Library of Alexandria
Library of Alexandria, the most famous library of Classical antiquity. It formed part of the research institute at Alexandria in Egypt that is known as the Alexandrian Museum (Mouseion, “shrine of the...
Folger Shakespeare Library
Folger Shakespeare Library, research centre in Washington, D.C., for the study of William Shakespeare, his contemporaries, and Elizabethan society and culture. The library, with more than 240,000 books...
Asa Gray
Asa Gray American botanist whose extensive studies of North American flora did more than the work of any other botanist to unify the taxonomic knowledge of plants of this region. His most widely used book,...