Contents: Preface; The culture of natural history: Walking the swards: medical education and the rise and spread of the botanical field class; Natural history in Britain in the 18th century; James Edward Smith and the Natural History Society of Edinburgh; Shells, collecting and the Victorians; Tastes and crazes; The Victorian fern craze: pteridomania revisited; Bricks without straw: reconstructing the Botanical Society of London, 1836-1856; The women members of the Botanical Society of London, 1836-1856; The struggle for specialist journals: natural history in the British periodicals market in the first half of the 19th century; The early professionals in British natural history; On parallel lines: natural history and biology from the late Victorian period; The biological societies of London, 1870-1914: their interrelations and their responses to change; Changing attitudes to nature conservation: the botanical perspective; The lost limb: geology and natural history; The natural history society in Britain through the years; Naturalists in Britain: some tasks for the historian; Biography: J.F.M. Dovaston, an overlooked pioneer of field ornithology; The plagiarisms of Thomas Henry Cooper; The botanical family of Samuel Butler; C.C. Babington, Cambridge botany and the taxonomy of British flowering plants; The discoveries of Druce; Index.