Natural Histories - Scientific illustration on display

Natural history illustration is a wonderful art. It can really kind of very subtly highlight the features that are very important for particular species in a way that a photograph can't necessarily. Natural Histories came about because we wanted to let people outside the Museum know about the rich rare book collection contained here. Scientific illustration serves many purposes. Obviously in the days before photography and other forms of documentation developed, drawing or original art was the only way to capture the likeness of certain organisms, people or places, and therefore was the only way to transmit or share this information with others. this is Hooke's Micrographia from 1667. This was the first time many people had seen any of these familiar objects through a microscope Of the published works based on expeditions, none is better known than The Zoology of the Voyage of the Beagle. Charles Darwin was a member of this trip, and acted as the editor for the published work. While many of the illustrations are depicted on small, hand-colored lithographs some illustrations such as this reproduction of a Toxodon skull, an extinct South American mammal, were deemed too important to show at a reduced scale and were produced in their natural size. We don't know who created these beautiful, beautiful depictions of fish, but clearly whoever it was they were working extremely closely under the guidance of Marcus Bloch this is probably been preserved for about 30 years even of the you know a couple of months the specimen has lost its collar so one of the great advantages of having a really good scientific I'm illustration is that the hand depict that color and you can actually count the number of spines from the I to the dorsal fin and they would match these and that's how we know that he was right this is diet on History X I'll re Sevilla marion was the well-known eighteenth-century illustrator travel to Dutch Suriname and collected an illustrated many other the in sex she found there I'll ok in figuring out which works to include wheel 18 examples that were at incredibly widely known we wanted to find some some hidden gems within the collection we also wanted to show our range oven works and the printing processes contained therein home I hope this collection and images will give an understanding of the origins of the science behind these works and a better appreciation on the art eliminating pages are are lmao %uh ok