A gorgeous example of a natural historian’s field notes. This belonged to August F. Foerste, an American geologist and paleontologist.

From the original article at the Field Book Project website:

Field notes are well known to be essential, primary material that provide details about collections and expeditions that aren’t found in published material or specimen labels. Field notes can also contain diary entries, poems, and sketches which give insight into the lives of the researchers themselves. In our last post, we briefly highlighted some of the candy and drink preferences of some of the researchers in our collections.

One of these researchers is August F. Foerste. In his Specimen notebook, Ohio, 1887-1888, with no explanation, we find a list of several different candy recipes, including chocolate creams, lemon drops, and Neapolitan creams. Brings up quite a few questions. Who gave him the recipes? Was this the only paper he had available to write them down? Did he try to make them? …
What we can determine is that they were written down in 1888 when Foerste was completing his master’s degree at Harvard University.

Read more at: Field Book Project

Collection highlights, news, interviews, and other treasures uncovered by the Field Book Project. The Field Book Project is an initiative to increase accessibility to field book content that documents natural history. Through ongoing partnerships within and beyond the Smithsonian Institution, the Project is making field books easier to find and available in a digital format for current research, as well as inspiring new ways of utilizing these rich information resources.