CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA. – Thomas Jefferson recorded weather observations, experimented with plant species, kept a pet mockingbird, and turned the entry hall at Monticello into a veritable natural history museum with elk and moose antlers, a grizzly bear claw, and the fossilized jaws of a mastodon.

Jefferson wrote with lyrical flair about the landscapes of his mountaintop home, as he did in a 1786 letter to his friend Maria Cosway: “How sublime to look down into the workhouse of nature, to see her clouds, hail, snow, rain, thunder, all fabricated at our feet!”

Jefferson’s deep interest in the natural world – from the flora and fauna of Albemarle County to the exotic specimens gathered by Lewis and Clark on their trek to the Pacific – and how it shaped his life as a philosopher, farmer, and Founding Father is the subject of A Passion for Nature: Thomas Jefferson and Natural History.

Written by Keith Thomson, A Passion for Nature (148 pages, $14.95) is the 15th title in the Monticello Monograph Series published by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.

Professor emeritus of natural history at Yale University and a senior research fellow at the American Philosophical Society, Thomson was a visiting fellow at Monticello’s Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies in 2007. He has authored 12 books on evolution, paleontology, and the history of science.

The Monticello Monograph Series was established in 1993 to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Jefferson’s birth. The series’ softcover books, which are designed and written for a wide audience, address various aspects of Jefferson’s interests and accomplishments.

The Thomas Jefferson Foundation, the private, nonprofit corporation that has owned and operated Monticello since 1923, regularly publishes both scholarly studies and general-audience books about Jefferson, his life and times, and Monticello. These publications can be purchased at selected bookstores, at the new Monticello Museum Shop in the Thomas Jefferson Visitor Center, through the Web site monticello.org, and by telephone at (800) 243-1743.

The University of North Carolina Press of Chapel Hill, N.C., is the exclusive trade distributor for Thomas Jefferson Foundation publications.