by Elisabeth Hehenberger
Two collections hosted on the AQUAPARADOX website contain valuable and rare monographs on protists as downloadable pdf documents.
The oldest work dates back to 1813 (Lesueur C. A. 1813. Mémoire sur quelques nouvelles espèces d’animaux mollusques et radiaires recueillis dans la méditerranée près de Nice. Nouveau Bulletin des Sciences par la Société Philomathique de Paris 3: 281-285), and in general there can be found a wealth of publications from the late 19th/early 20th century.
One collection focuses on tintinnid ciliates, dinoflagellates (including parasitic dinoflagellates), Radiolaria and diatoms, while the second collection contains more general works about protists and/or that do not focus on one group only. Many of monographs are unfortunately not automatically searchable, however, most do contain very detailed tables of content (which are not necessarily in the beginning, some have to be found in the back of the book).
In addition, pdf to OCR text converters work well at least on some tested works, generating searchable files (e.g. a free tool on github here that can also deal with different languages) and simplifying translation into the language of choice – not all texts have been written in English.
While, of course, many of the taxon names have changed since the publication of these monographs, their drawings (or paintings) can be extremely detailed and are sometimes one of the very few depictions of an underdescribed taxon.
Finally, many of these treatises are also an entertaining read, written with loving dedication towards the wonderfully diverse world of protists.
