Science Art: Science-Gossip cover page, Dec. 1899.

Scientific illustration as branding, with an owl as a decorative element arching its wings over pictures of telescopes, engineering tools, weasels and salamanders, biology, astronomy, botany and ichthyology as a low-flying bird seizes a fish by its head inside the decorative, almost art-nouveau border.
Scientific illustration as branding, with an owl as a decorative element arching its wings over pictures of telescopes, engineering tools, weasels and salamanders, biology, astronomy, botany and ichthyology as a low-flying bird seizes a fish by its head inside the decorative, almost art-nouveau border.

This is the cover page of Science-Gossip magazine, “an illustrated monthly record of nature, country lore, & applied science.”

There are articles in here about Departmental Snubbing of Science and Dendritic Crystals in Paper, and there are ads for X-Ray generators and fossils, and there’s a section called “Transactions” about which researchers are moving to which labs and what happened at which recent society meeting.

In other words, it’s a lot! It seems only right that the cover page have so much of everything on it. Owls, weasels, crayfish, and water lilies, telescopes and alembics … four seasons of natural phenomena.

I discovered the publication via Nemfrog who linked to one (partial) issue at archive.org.