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
