Short answers, pulled from the story.
Pliny the Elder died in the year 79 while commanding the Roman fleet at Misenum. He steered his ships toward a cloud shaped like an umbrella pine rising from Mount Vesuvius and perished during that investigation.
The Natural History consists of thirty-seven books divided into ten volumes. These books cover topics ranging from astronomy and geography to zoology, botany, pharmacology, metallurgy, mineralogy, and art history.
Pliny gathered information from approximately two thousand books written by one hundred select authors including Marcus Terentius Varro, Agrippa, Juba, Theophrastus, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Diodorus Siculus. He claimed to have stated twenty thousand facts drawn from these diverse sources.
The oldest surviving manuscript VLF 4 measures forty-one centimeters by twenty-nine centimeters and requires thirty animal hides. It was plain unilluminated despite its size yet free from insect bites.
Printed copies emerged first in Venice in 1469 by Johann and Wendelin of Speyer. A copy printed in 1472 by Nicolas Jenson remains in Wells Cathedral library.