I thank Patrick Fitzgerald, my editor at Columbia University Press, for his early and strong support for this project, as well as two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments. Bridget Flannery-McCoy, associate editor for the sciences, and Milenda Lee, senior designer at Columbia, offered their wonderfully helpful advice and thoughts in the preparation of this volume, as did Columbia editors Kathryn Schell and Irene Pavitt. Anita O’Brien provided expert copyediting skills. Curtis Johnson gave useful input on chapter 4. Gloria E. Bader and E. N. Genovese read the manuscript in great detail, supplying excellent critiques on language, syntax, and content, and provided suggestions for titles. For this I am especially grateful. Edward Cell read and commented on the completed text.
A wealth of information came from other people. Giulia Caneva freely shared with me her ideas and interpretations of the vegetal friezes on the Ara Pacis. David McLoughlin inspired me to relate the apse mosaic in San Clemente to the Ara Pacis vegetal frieze. Sara Magister similarly directed me to the vegetal-motif mosaic occupying the apse in the narthex, or antechamber, to the Baptistery of the Papal Archbasilica of St. John Lateran. Luca Dejaco kindly provided a copy of the Bell’Italia article on the floor mosaic of the Cathedral of Otranto. John van Wyhe introduced me to the work of Anna Maria Redfield. Thanks to Malcolm Kotter for alerting me to the evolutionary trees in George William Hunter’s A Civic Biology.
A number of online sources proved immensely helpful: the American Museum of Natural History Darwin Manuscripts Project, the Biodiversity Heritage Library, the Darwin Correspondence Project, Darwin Online, and Google Books. I greatly appreciate the American Philosophical Society Library, the Cambridge University Library, the Huntington Library, and their staffs for allowing me to use materials in their collections. I thank San Diego State University Interlibrary Loan for obtaining copies or originals of materials used in this book.
Acknowledgments for the use of images are provided in the captions of respective figures. Other images not acknowledged either are not under copyright or are photographs by the author. Images not under copyright come from a private library, from Biodiversity Heritage Library, from Google Books, or from Wikimedia Commons.