Before color charts, naturalists had no shared vocabulary, so a German mineralogist named Abraham Werner built one and the Scottish painter Patrick Syme expanded it in 1814 — 110 colors, each with a hand-painted swatch and three references: A mineral, a plant, and an animal that show it. Verdigris green is the tail of a small long-tailed green parrot. Darwin took a copy on the Beagle and used it for five years to describe everything he saw. The reissue reproduces the whole thing. It’s a working tool, a beautiful object, and a window into how people saw before photography.
Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours