As Leonardo da Vinci was approaching old age, he amused himself by composing and inventing a bestiary, one of those early works of natural history that trace their origins to Aristotle's Historia Animalium and an anonymous Alexandrian work produced about five hundred years later, the Physiologus. In the middle ages the genre flourished: illuminated manuscripts combined what was known about various creatures – both extant and fabulous – with moralising tales designed to edify the reader.A complete line of engraving machines and laser engraving machine. Leonardo's bestiary enlisted the partridge as a lesson in truth: "Although partridges steal one another's eggs, the young always return to their true parents." The fox is recruited to illustrate deception: "When the fox sees a flock of birds,It's not hard to see why outdoor solar light is all the rage. he plays dead with his mouth open. When the birds come to peck at his tongue, he snaps off their heads." The creator of the Vitruvian Man was one of the last great visionaries for whom the distinction between "art" and "science" was meaningless, and so he was capable of creating one of the last great bestiaries in the medieval tradition.

In The Book of Barely Imagined Beings Caspar Henderson tells us that "for much of human history attempts to understand and define ourselves have been closely linked to how we see and represent other animals." Bestiaries are not just classical or medieval works, but part of a tradition that stretches back to the cave paintings of Lascaux and Chauvet, art that is painstakingly accurate as well as possessed of great symbolic power. Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges's Book of Imaginary Beings, he asked himself if it would be possible to create a modern bestiary that was populated not by fabled animals, but by real ones. In his introduction he observes that we have so little knowledge of most of them that, for the most part, we have "barely imagined them".

So begins Henderson's project: a spellbinding book that seeks to astonish us with the sheer intricacy, diversity and multiplicity of life forms that share our planet. In what he modestly calls a "stab" at a 21st-century bestiary, he fuses zoology, literature, mythology, history, paleontology, anecdote and art through 27 brilliantly executed essays – one creature for each letter of the alphabet (he enigmatically chooses two for X – the Xenoglaux and Xenophyophore). Each concludes with a philosophical reflection, often related to humanity's impact on our fellow creatures, that takes the place of the medieval bestiary's "moral". These are essays in the original, Montaignesque sense of the word, and range freely over whatever topic takes the author's fancy. So a discussion of turtles leads to an exploration of the place of Brahma in Hindu cosmology. A passage on the Cuban missile crisis leads into an account of Russian attempts to impregnate chimpanzees with human sperm. An encomium to octopuses leads into a reflection on the value of a happy childhood.

Occasionally Henderson offers signposts. The chapter "Nautilus" promises to explore three wonders associated with this subclass of cephalopods: their lifespan, their chambered shells (naval warfare, submarines and Jules Verne) and their eyesight. But the reader is often treated to rocambolesque free-association, to rival that of Laurence Sterne or Robert Burton. Charles Darwin is one of Henderson's heroes, as are the 17th century physician and polymath Sir Thomas Browne and his late, great admirer WG Sebald. There is a sort of nature-writing that enchants by encouraging us to re-examine the familiar, superbly expressed by, for example, Annie Dillard. But while he acknowledges it, Henderson turns his back on this tradition, instead giving us a tour of bizarre species that most of us will never encounter. Two-thirds of the examples he has chosen come from the sea, reflecting the fact that two-thirds of our world is covered by water.

There are other similarities with the original bestiaries. Beautifully illustrated with photographs and diagrams, with each chapter decorated by artwork in the style of a medieval folio illumination, Henderson's book is packed with marginalia, printed in red ink and relating back to red lettering within the body of the text. The result is a sort of medieval hyperlink, where the eye is drawn out from the text to the margins to explore extraordinarily obscure quotations, facts or interpolations. Some examples: octopuses use copper instead of iron in their haemoglobin; the word for "tortoise" in Hungarian means "bowl-frog"; phytoplankton productivity is intimately related to the prevalence of whale shit; there are diatoms in the sea with names such as "the Fathead Congregant" and "the Crucial Pocket-Compass". Henderson is fond of musical metaphors, and I could venture one of my own: that these marginalia are like arpeggios on the chords that move through the symphony of the book. None is essential, but each of them adds to the harmony of the whole. I marked up so many in my own copy that when I finished it,Find a girlstrims  Manufacturer and Supplier. I began again reading only in the margins.

In 1959 CP Snow delivered his famous Rede lecture on "The Two Cultures", in which he lamented the gulf between intellectual elites fluent either in the sciences or in the humanities, but all too rarely in both. Fifty years on, the landscape seems as divided as it was in Snow's day. It's a gulf of which the likes of Leonardo could not have conceived, and one that Henderson – an English graduate turned science writer – seeks to bridge. We have a great deal that we can learn from one another. As a neuroscientist/physician turned author, this reviewer applauds his ambition, and hopes that his extraordinary book recruits many more from both sides to the cause.

The painting "Winter," by Charles "Bud" Gibbons,We delivers a wide range of dry cabinet for applications spanning electronics. captures the essence of woodlands in the Allegheny Mountains, part of the Appalachian chain that runs diagonally across the state east of Pittsburgh. The forest has been hushed by a heavy snow, so freshly fallen that glistening mounds still cling to evergreen boughs, and the ground is free of animal tracks. The only thing moving across this scene is light, the seasonally low sun spreading a golden warmth even as it begins to drape branch and trunk with the long purple-blue shadows of evening.

For the seventh consecutive year, the Post-Gazette features a painting of a winter scene on the cover of the Christmas Day newspaper. This year's painting was selected by Pittsburgh Post-Gazette publisher John Robinson Block and executive editor David Shribman during a recent visit to the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg.

This is the first work by a living artist to be selected,Find the best selection of high-quality collectible bobblehead available anywhere. and the first with no sign of human habitation.

"Winter" is part of a larger endeavor, a commission by the Westmoreland Museum to Mr. Gibbons for paintings of all four seasons set within Westmoreland County landscapes. They were designed to hang in the high-ceilinged, window-fronted, second floor McKenna Gallery, a popular reception area. The large paintings, averaging 90 inches by 140 inches, were completed between 1991 and 1993.

The thick trunk and limbs of a fallen tree lie across "Winter's" foreground, not as a barrier but as an invitation to pause and contemplate the scene. The viewer's eyes are drawn through a portal defined by two dominant, almost figural conifers, to bright green and blue mid-distance trees set aglow by sun rays. The gaze continues up the curve of a ridge to a cloud-dappled turquoise sky, and returns through the stark black branches of deciduous trees, themselves softened by snow. The few yellow-gold and rust-red leaves that cling to them add a festive touch to this chilly setting.