Mark Catesby begins part publication in London of The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands, containing the figures of birds, beasts, fishes, serpents, insects, and plants ... together with their descriptions in English and French, the first published account of the flora and fauna of North America, and the first work of natural history to use folio-size coloured plates.[2]
Pierre Bouguer publishes Essai d'optique sur la gradation de la lumière, defining the quantity of light lost by passing through a given extent of the Earth's atmosphere, thus making some of the earliest measurements in photometry and becoming the first known discoverer of what is now known as the Beer–Lambert law.[5]