Marine Life

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Written observations of marine life begin with Aristotle, who was surrounded by the sea, and was familiar with the fish and invertebrates harvested by coastal communities in the Aegean. He wrote extensively on the anatomy and behavior of marine life, studying and recording the relationships between species, (predator/prey or symbiotic), their competition for resources, and their diseases, development, and reproduction. He noted the differences between salt and freshwater species, and divided marine animals by their reproductive traits, such as live birth vs. eggs, or viviparous vs. oviparous.

Guillaume Rondelet (1507-1566)

Guillaume Rondelet began his career in medicine. He became fascinated with the relatively new practice of dissection while a student and went on to establish the first theatre of anatomy in France, at the University of Montpelier. After a series of poor personal and financial choices, he closed his medical practice, but managed to attract a wealthy patron named Cardinal Francois de Tournon.

Rondelet was hired as Tournon's personal physician and traveled through France, Belgium, and Italy with his entourage. Along the way he met several naturalists, including Ulisse Aldrovandi, and pursued his primary interest- the study of fish and marine life. He was able to access many specimens brought to him by fisherman and used his dissection skills to study them.

He described almost 250 aquatic species of fish, mammals, and invertebrates in his "Book of Marine Fish." He was primarily interested in the function of their organs and compared the swim bladders of marine and freshwater species. He also recorded anatomical similarities between humans, pigs, and dolphins.

Though the majority of the descriptions are accurate and based on first-hand observation, he also included legendary sea creatures. His book was the primary source of information for ichtyologists for nearly two hundred years. Aside from the imaginary creatures, his illustrations are still considered reliable and accurate to this day.

woodcuts from Rondelet's book: monkfish, bishop fish, leonine monster, stingray

woodcuts from Rondelet's book:

above left: monkfish

below left: stingray

middle: bishop fish

right: leonine monster

Rondelet included an image of the “Bishop's Fish,” a specimen supposedly found in the sea between Denmark and Sweden in the 1540s. The creature was said to have a projection similar to a bishop’s miter on its head and a face like a human’s, with limbs resembling claws in place of pectoral fins, and tailfins resembling legs. The legendary marine creature is thought to have been inspired by the sighting of a giant squid.

Rondelet’s illustration of the "Bishop's Fish" was based on an image that he had seen in Rome of a sea-monster and the rumor that that the creature had been carried to the king of Poland, where it expressed its desire to return to the water and was then set free. Various iterations of the Bishop’s Fish appeared in multiple books and prints afterwards.

Pierre Belon

(1517-1564)

Pierre Belon had multiple interests. He was a naturalist, writer, and diplomat. His writing covered birds, fish, plants, anatomy, architecture, and Egyptology. Like Rondelet, his curiosity and research was supported by the patronage of the Cardinal Francois de Tournan.

Belon is best known for his contributions to comparative anatomy, but he was very interested in marine life. He wrote several books on fish, a book on fir and pine trees, one on comparative anatomy, and another on the funerary customs of antiquity. His study of a porpoise embryo is credited with inspiring embryology as an independent branch of study.

Pierre Belon's "Hippopatomus," drawn from an Egyptian statue

He studied in Germany under the botanist Valerius Cordus, who encouraged his students to make their own observations, rather than relying on the work of their predecessors. Belon returned to Paris after his studies and met the Cardinal, who would arrange for Belon to travel on diplomatic missions to the Middle East to establish friendly relations. These missions provided Belon the opportunity to collect and study specimens along the way.

Belon's first mission was to visit the court of the Ottoman Sultan in Constantinople with a group of thirty French diplomats. He would travel throughout Greece, Asia Minor, Palestine, Arabia, Egypt, and Italy for about three years, recording his observations of the people and their customs and of the flora and fauna. His travel narrative was published with the title Les observations de plusiers singularités et choses mémorables trouvées en Grèce, Judée, Egypte in 1553.

With the help of local fishermen, Belon was able to collect many specimens in his travels through the Mediterranean. He had the dissection skills needed to study their anatomy and made some important observations about dolphins. He would publish his findings in his first book, the Natural History of Strange Marine Fish (L'Histoire Naturelle des Etranges Poissons Marins) that focused mostly on cetaceans. Through his many dissections, he discovered their similarities to humans in the mammary glands, air-breathing lungs, placenta, and four-chambered hearts.

His next book, De aquatilibus, included descriptions and illustrations of 110 fish, followed by The Nature and Diversity of Fish’, published in 1551, which included in the end around 450 creatures living in water, including hippos, crocodiles, and water rats. Very few of the images and descriptions were of fish in the modern sense.

He tried to remain objective in his descriptions, omitting religious or moralizing language. However, because he was so interested in classical literature, he included some of the imaginary creatures depicted in their writing.

Several artists contributed illustrations to Belon's books, though only one was credited (Pierre Goudet, aka Pierre Gourdel)

Conrad Gessner (1516-1565)

Gessner was enormously ambitious and a prolific writer and is considered the father of modern zoology. He wrote or edited around 70 books.

He was a physician and professor of medicine and of Greek.

His 5 volume compendium, Historiae Animalium, is considered the first comprehensive scientific treatment of animals since the fall of the Roman empire and was published between 1551-1587.

He studied descriptions of nature from Greek, Roman, and Hebrew sources. He also gathered descriptions and depictions of birds, mammals, fish, plants, and more from a network of scholars throughout Europe and then spent years trying to cross-check the text and images to confirm the information. He observed as many species as possible and created images when illustrations were not available.

Fantastic creatures from Conrad Gessner's book

rt: Sea Devil, 1563, based on combined skeleton and mummies.

Gesner drew upon the work of Rondelet and Belon and cited their work in his book, Historia piscium, published in 1558. Many of the illustrations are copied from Rondelet's book. He added another 300 descriptions of marine life to those that had been recorded. He included details of each species physical appearance, habits, habitat, and regional names, so that they could be identified by naturalists around Europe. He also included their uses in medicine, their places in literature, art, and religion, and their symbolic roles.

Conchomania...

the shell craze

Shells have been valued for their beauty for millennia. At least as early as the Middle Stone Age they were used for jewelry and cowrie shells have been used as money in Asia and Africa. Cicero proposed collecting shells as a means of finding serenity in the midst of political turmoil in the 1st century BCE. Ancient Roman grottoes are decorated with shells.

It is not surprising, then, that collectors of curiosities would be interest in them. The Dutch East India and then West India companies brough them back from Indonesia, the Moluccas, the Cape of Good Hope, and the Antilles.

By the end of the 17th century, they fetched the highest prices of any natural object and were sold at auctions in Paris and in the Low Countries.

Balthasar van der Ast, Still Life with Shells, 1640

left: Thomas de Critz, John Tradescant the Younger with Roger Friend and a Collection of Exotic Shells, c. 1653

rt: Cornelis de Man, The Curiosity Seller, 1660s

bottom: Filippo Buonnani

Nautilus cup, by Jacob Claesz de Grebber, 1628

Shells were an essential part of a wealthy collector's cabinet. The price of shells exceeded their weight in gold and collectors had special drawers built for display, that included individual compartments lined in silk and satin to contrast with their natural colors. Renaissance architects took inspiration from the ancient Greeks and lined grottoes with them. Several books were written on the proper way to polish and display them.

However, they were not prized and displayed as they were found in nature. They were first rid of their inhabitants, scrubbed, and polished. They were often painted with lacquer or egg whites to heighten the color and protect the sheen and sometimes even painted.

Shells were often etched with pastoral or mythological scenes or cut into small pieces and used in inlay decorations on furniture. They were also commonly decorated with precious metals to turn into vessels or "joke cups," which were meant to inspire joy and awe from the guests at lavish banquets. Some considered the variations of colors, patterns, and shapes as a means of understanding divine creation and others appreciated them for their sensual or sexual implications.

left: De reliquis animalibus, by Conrad Gesner

rt: Neptune and Amphitrite, by Jacob de Gheyn II

Georg Rumphius (1628-1702)

Gathering the shells was no easy task, as those found on the beach were usually broken. Desirable shells were found in locations that were often hard to reach- perhaps far from shore or deep underwater. Georg Rumphius, the Dutch trader stationed on Ambon island, described the difficulties of attaining the shells. The beaches were full of sharp rocks and shards. The marshes contained crocodiles or spiny sea urchins. Collection often had to be done at a certain time of year, often during a period of a couple of months, and often had to be done at night under a full or new moon.

This work was not done by the European traders who wanted the shells, but by enslaved people.

Conchology developed into an independent field of research in the late 17th century, led by the work of Georg Rumphius. He was a Dutch naturalist who worked for the Dutch East India company and was stationed on Ambon Island in the Moluccas (now Indonesia). This was the perfect setting to pursue his interest in natural history, and especially seashells. He wrote a book called D'Amboinische rareitkamer that described the natural history of the Moluccas. He studied the animals that lived inside the shells and the role that the shells played in the lives of the natives.

The publishing of his books were postponed by a series of tragedies. He lost his sight at age 42. A couple of years later, his wife and daughter died in an earthquake. Then his drawings and manuscripts were lost in transit to the publisher in Holland when the French army sank the boat that they were on.

He rewrote his books on the natural history of Ambon and sent them again to the publisher, but they remained unpublished until a friend revived the project and hired Maria Sybilla Merian to produce the seashell illustrations. Note the reference again to Durer’s staghorn beetle, which we’ve seen appear in multiple paintings and prints

Finally, two folios of his work were published: one that focused on animals and particularly shells and crustaceans, called D’Amboinsche rariteitkamer (1705), and another on plants, Herbarium Amboinense (1741).

*The frontispiece for Rumphius' book D'Amoinische rareitkamer shows the black-bodied collectors outside the entrance with Europeans at the table going over the collection

shells by George Rumphius and detail (stag beetle) of painting showing Durer's influence

Filippo Buonnani

(1638-1723)

Buonnani was a Jesuit scholar who studied under the German naturalist, Athanasius Kircher, at the Collegio Romano. While a student, Buonnani learned to grind lenses and built his own microscope to use in his studies. He also learned the skill of engraving.

When Kircher resigned from his position of mathematics professor at the Collegio, Buonnani was selected to fill his vacancy. After Kircher's death, Buonnani was asked to produce a catalog of Kircher's large collection of naturalia. This included creating many of the illustrations and writing the descriptions. Buonnani defended Aristotle's views on spontaneous generation and questioned the validity of Francesco Redi's observations of flies under the microscope.

He borrowed heavily from popular images of naturalia. Arcimboldo's influence is obvious in his shell configurations. The catalog was published with the Latinized title of Musaeum Kircherianum, published in 1709.

Buonnani then wrote a practical guide to shell collecting, called Recreatione dell'occhio e della mente (Recreation of the Eye and Mind). He coined the term bivalve and accurately described the morphology of shells, but did not take into account that the printing process would produce mirror images, and so the spirals on the shells are depicted in reverse. However, his book is considered the foundational text of conchology.

He also wrote a study of lacquer, which was used to heighten and preserve the color of shells, which is still relevant.

Wenceslaus Hollar

(1607-1677)

Hollar was a prolific illustrator who worked for multiple artists and publishers in Europe. He was Czech, but moved around Europe (Belgium, Germany, and England) in his efforts to dodge the 30 years war and English Civil War.

He left the study of law to practice art and found an apprenticeship with an engraver. Copying the works of Durer and da Vinci was an important part of his training. He was hired as a draftsman by the Earl of Arundel to illustrate his collection of curiosities but was able to keep producing work for others. His seashell drawings are accurate and gorgeous. They were never published and it is not known if they were commissioned. It is possible that they were commissioned by a wealthy Dutch cloth merchant, named Jan Volkertsz, to catalog his shell collection.

Adriaen Coorte (dates unknown, active between 1683-1707)

paintings are by Adriaen Coorte

(dates unknown, active between 1683-1707)

Little is known of Coorte, as the city’s records were lost in a fire. However, we know that he was an apprentice of Melchior Hondecoeter, whose work we saw in the ornithology section. Coorte was active between 1683-1707 and a member of the Guild of St. Luke. He began as a painter of birds and flowers but later focused his attention on vanitas still-lifes and then seashells.

He lived in Middleburg, Zeeland (now the Netherlands), which was a prosperous trading center, partly because of the presence of the Dutch East and West India companies. His work reflects the period's love of seashells.

His work is unusual because he painted on paper, which was then mounted on panels. This may have been because it offered a smooth surface free of the irregularities found in wood panels. He worked in a series of glazes and the dense dark backgrounds of his paintings highlight the color and sheen of the shells and create an aura of mystery and drama.

Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d’Argenville (1680- 1765)

D’Argenville divided shells by habitat (fluvial, marine, or terrestrial) and described a system for laypeople to identify shells by calls, family, genus, and species, using these steps:

Identify the number of parts- 1, 2, or more, kak univalve, bivalve, or multivalve.
Consider the overall shape: is it convoluted or straight; conical or spherical. Note also the shape of the aperture- is it circular, oblong, flanged, or plain.
Look for small differences within a family, such as a rounded or pointed apex.

His book provided illustrations to guide the reader through the taxonomic process and was part of a growing movement to educate the public on classifying and ordering their collections. The expense of his book was partly covered by collectors who had specimens from their collections illustrated and included with a dedication to them.

D’Argenville and his father produced the drawings which were used for the engravings by Aveline and then hand colored by professionals who specialized in shells and fish.

D’Argenville had a doctorate degree in law and studied literature, drawing, painting, engraving, art history, and gardening. He purchased a position as secretary to the King, which gave him an honorary title and noble status, then paid his way up the ranks under Louis XV. It was not uncommon at this time to buy one's way into the King's service. While working for the king, d'Argenville amassed a huge collection of paintings, drawings, prints, and an enormous quantity of shells.

He made frequent visits to Holland to purchase rare shells and other natural objects for resale and organized auctions of these collectibles in Paris. He was a key player in the shell collecting frenzy that spread south from the Low Countries.

He published the first book to focus entirely on shells, called Conchology, in 1742. It was enormously successfull with the shell-obsessed public. It included descriptions of the shapes, colors, patterns, and places of origins, as well as practical instructions on cleaning, preserving, and coating with egg-whites for maximum shine. He also outlined methods for arranging by scientific classification or displaying purely for aesthetic purposes, though he included an admonition to anyone who would consider painting the shells with colored enamels and buffing them to make them appear natural, which was a common practice at the time.

D'Argenville understood the importance of the direction of the spirals or openings to identify conchs by species, and knew that the printing process created images in reverse. He used a mirror to draw the shells in reverse so that they would be printed in the right direction.

Martin Lister (1639-1712)

Lister was a British naturalist and member of the Royal Society of London who focused on spiders and shells. He published the first book on arachnids and then a two volume encyclopedia on shells, called the Historiae Conchyliorum, in 1685 and 1692. He divided them into four groups based on these traits:

Monochromatic
Black streaked
Transversely waved
Winged or banded

He was not satisfied with the skills of contemporary illustrators and so taught his teen-aged daughters Susanna and Anne how to illustrate the specimens he studied, and they produced over 1,000 copper plate engravings of shells and mollusks collected from around the world.

Anne dissected mollusks and used the microscope to draw their anatomy. Both sisters contributed to the Royal Society of London's journal, Philosophical Transactions.

Captain Cook's voyage

The naturalists and crew on Cook's expeditions were well aware of the market demand for seashells and gathered them for resale.

Illustrations of these shells were compiled in the Neues systematisches Conchylien-Cabinet, published in 1768-1829. This 11 volume series was started by Friedrich Wilhelm Martini and continued by Johann Hieronymus Chemnitz after Martini's death in 1778. The 1795 volume features a large number of Cook's specimens and was illustrated by several artists.

Giuseppe Saverio Poli

(1746-1825)

Giuseppe Poli contributed an important study of molluscs to the field of marine biology, but may not have received the attention it deserved because ties between the French and Italian naturalists were severed after the Napoleonic wars.

Poli studied medicine, but abandoned his brief medical career to teach history and geography at a military academy. He was appointed commander and sent to several European centers of learning on behalf of the academy to acquire scientific instruments for the physics department. He met Captain Cook and Joseph Banks in London, and received from them several specimens from the Pacific Islands. During these travels, he also met a Scottish naturalist named William Hunter, who encouraged him to study the molluscs of the Mediterranean.

Poli contributed essays to a large work called Elements of Experimental Physics and published treatises on thunder, lightning, geology, and zoology. He then turned his attention to the molluscs. He studied their muscle contractions, circulation, reproduction, and development, and developed a system of classification based on their soft anatomical traits, rather than the shell-based system. He described their biochemistry and physiology in two volumes on molluscs, called Testacea utriusque Siciliane eorumque istoria et antome tabulis aeneis, or Molluscs of the Two Sicilys. He illustrated the book and shared the writing of the text with Stefano della Chiaie.

Louis Renard (1678-1746)

Renard was an engraver, publisher, and bookseller and author/illustrator of Fishes, crayfish and crabs, of various colors and extraordinary figures, which one finds around the Moluccas islands and on the coasts of the Austral lands. The book included descriptions, anecdotes, and culinary suggestions. Renard's engravings are based on the drawings of Samuel Fallours (an artistically gifted soldier in the Dutch East India Company ) , Baltazar Coyett, and Adrien Vander Stell, though he enhanced and brightened the colors because he found theirs too dull.

Renard claimed to be a British spy, but was actually openly employed by the British Crown to inspect vessels leaving Amsterdam for smuggled weapons to prevent an overthrow of the throne. Though Renard's fish appear far from natural, their shapes and coloring are accurate and only a tenth of the images are products of his imagination.

Marcus Elieser Block (1723-1799)

Marcus Elieser Bloch (artist- hand-colored etchings)

Bloch was born to a poor family and received little education, but with his knowledge of Hebrew and rabbinical literature was able to find a tutoring position in the home of a Jewish surgeon. Through this opportunity he learned to read German and Latin and began to study anatomy, which led to an interest in natural history. He became absorbed in research and wrote several papers on comparative anatomy and physiology.

He became interested in fish after finding a specimen that he could not identify through existing literature. He began to collect fish, found sources around the world to send him specimens, and built up a collection of nearly 1400. Many of them are in the Natural History Museum at Humboldt University in Berlin.

He also wrote a 12 volume encyclopedia on fishes, three of which were focused on those of Germany. He followed the systematic arrangements of Linneaus and Peter Artedi, though he modified the classifications based on the structure of the gills- specifically, the absence or presence of a 5th gill. He also added 19 new genera to the existing number and described 276 species that were previously unknown- mostly from remote parts of the ocean. His books were published between 1784 and 1788.

The greatest challenge in illustrating fish is that their colors fade so quickly after death, and so depicting them accurately in nearly impossible. Many of the engravings in Bloch's books were based on preserved specimens, but some are composite images based on studies by other artists.

Ludwig Schmidt produced many of the engravings for Bloch’s books.

Jean Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829)

lamarck

Lamarck became interested in natural history while stationed in Monaco with the French military. He retired from the army to pursue the study of nature and published three volumes on the flora of France, which earned him a membership in the Academy of Sciences.

He then became professor of zoology at the Natural History Museum, and studied invertebrates. Through the study of mollusks, he observed that a species can change over time and developed his theory of acquired characteristics, though this was not a new concept. (his ideas on evolution were not the same as Darwins)

In 1801, he published a large work on the classification of invertebrates, called Système des Animaux sans Vertèbres. He was the first to separate spiders and crustaceans from insects in classification, and also put separated barnacles and tunicates from the molluscs class.

Pierre Denys de Montfort

(1766-1820)

Montfort was a French naturalist specializing in invertebrates. He was particularly interested in confirming the existence of giant octopi, which would contribute to his downfall. Montfort wrote and illustrated several books on the natural history of mollusks and invertebrates, which were published as an addendum to the Compte du Buffon’s Natural History books.

Upon learning of a 25 foot tentacle said to be found in the mouth of a sperm whale, he pursued the question of the existence of gigantic octopi. It’s possible that sightings of the giant squid, which can reach a length of 50 feet, inspired the Nordic legends of a kraken, or sea monster, living between Norway and Greenland. When 10 British ships disappeared overnight in 1782, Montfort proposed that they’d been brought down by giant octopi. The British military knew the actual reason and he was publicly ridiculed to the point that his career as a naturalist came to an end.

Wilhelm Gottlieb Tilesius von Tilenau (1769-1857)

Wilhelm Gottlieb Tilesius von Tilenau

Von Tilenau was a German physician, naturalist, and explorer, and also skilled draftsman and engraver. He studied natural sciences and medicine and traveled with scientist JC Hoffmannsegg to Portugal to study zoology and local medicine practice.

He was invited to participate in a Russian circumnavigation of the globe with two other naturalists in 1803-1806. The main purpose of the voyage was to visit Russian possessions on the northwest coast of America and to open commercial relations with Japan. They stopped in the Canary Islands, Brazil, and Cape Horn, Macao, China and Japan, collecting specimens along the way. While in Russia, he reconstructed a woolly mammoth skeleton excavated from Siberian permafrost and was elected to become a member of the Russian Academy. He produced an illustrated account of the expedition and his botanical collections were made part of the Botanical Garden in St. Petersburg..

Upon return to Germany in 1814, he published multiple papers on fish, whales, and invertebrates, including one called Directory and classification of strange sea creatures and then turned his attention to the study of diseases, including cholera.

Lucy Way Sistare Say (1801-1886)

Sistare showed skills in drawing while in grade school in Philadelphia and so was guided toward illustrating nature by her teacher. She received some training from Audubon and from artist and naturalist Charles Lesueur, who was illustrating the book of American Entomology by Thomas Say. In 1826, an educational reformed named Robert Owen came to Philadelphia to recruit people to join a newly established utopian community in New Harmony, IN. Lucy joined her teacher and a few classmates in making the trip to Indiana. Thomas Say and a handful of naturalists were also making the trip. Lucy and Thomas met on the riverboat bound for New Harmony and married shortly after.

Say was working on his book, Conchology, and recognized her drawing skills. He asked her to produce the drawings. She produced nearly all of the drawings and did the majority of the hand-coloring of the engravings. Furthermore, when their engraver in Indiana died, she learned the craft in order to produce the illustrations for the remaining volumes.

fusus corneus

Phillip Henry Gosse (1810-1888)

chromolithographs

Gosse was interested in insects from an early age. His parents could not afford to send him to upper school, so he took a job as a clerk with a firm that dealt in the seal and fish trade. He had been taught to paint miniatures by his father, who painted them for a living, and began painting miniatures and watercolor studies of plants and insects in Newfoundland .

He was transferred to Newfoundland, and after several years, decided to make his way south. He stopped in Philadelphia and then went to Alabama to collect fossil shells to send back to the Academy of Natural Sciences there. While in Alabama he found work tutoring the children of a plantation owner, which gave him time to collect the fossil shells and study the local flora and fauna.

He returned to England, where he became especially interested in marine invertebrates and developed the indoor aquarium, inspired by the popular glassed-in terrariums that were so popular in Victorian England. He filled his tank with saltwater and filled it with anemones so that he could observe and illustrate them.

From this, he developed the first public aquarium for the London Zoo in 1852 and established the trend of keeping aquaria in the home and published a manual called Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea, in 1854..

He wrote 40 books and hundreds of articles about science for the general population, all influenced by his deeply held religious beliefs, and including an argument in favor of the biblical account of creation in response to new theories being put forth by Charles Darwin, Alfred Wallace, Charles Lyell, and others.

In 1860, he published Actinologia Britannica: A History of the British Sea-anemones and Corals, illustrated from observation of the anemones that he placed in these tanks.

William Saville-Kent (1845-1908)

Kent was mentored by comparative anatomist TH Huxley and began his career working for the British Museum as curator of coral but was bored in administration and wanted to conduct research. He received a grant from the Royal Society to oversee a dredging survey off the coast of Portugal. This led to his interest in aquaculture and to his recognition of the potential for experimental marine biology at the public aquaria being constructed around England in the 1870s.

Based on his work for the Great International Fisheries Exhibition in London in 1883, he was recruited by the Tasmanian government to restore depleted oyster beds. In the following decade, he produced a comprehensive survey of Australian fisheries that addressed biological, economic, and commercial aspects as well as fishery laws. He then worked for several Australian states to improve fishery practices and studied fish, corals, sponges, turtles, sea cucumbers, and a sea-mammal called a dugong. He was taken with the beauty and life of the Great Coral Reef and was concerned by the human-caused damage to the reef.

Upon his return to England, he worked for the Lever Bros company on experimenting with cultured pearls and produced both blister and spherical pearls with commercial value.

He photographed corals and tidal pools and the second book includes photographs and chromolithographs (lithographs printed in color) based on his drawings. His books include A Manual of the Infusoria (three volumes, London, 1880-82), The Great Barrier Reef (London, 1893) and The Naturalist in Australia (London, 1897).

the lithographs were produced by two artists, a Mr. Couchman and a Mr. Riddle, of which little is known.

Ernst Haeckle (1834-1919)

Haeckel was a German biologist and professor whose discoveries and writings supported Darwin’s recently published theory of evolution. He traveled with his professor, Johannes Muller, to the Heligoland archipelago off the coast of Germany in the North Sea to study marine life. He then traveled to Italy and continued drawing nature from observation. While in Italy, he began to examine the complex structures of radiolarians under the microscope and illustrate their intricate mineral skeletons and recognized the similar formations in crystals. He also traveled to Ceylon to study local flora and fauna.

Unfortunately, he was also a eugenicist- a proponent of selective reproduction that aimed to eliminate populations that eugenicists deemed undesirable, such as people with mental or physical handicaps, criminal backgrounds, or particular minorities through forced sterilization. The obvious problem with the concept of eugenics is that the party in power determines who has the right to reproduce.

Like many Europeans of the era, he used Darwin’s theory of natural selection to support racism. There began a philosophical movement that proposed that people of different races had different biological progressions by nature and that the white race possessed greater intellect. These faux-scientific ideas provided the basis for the eugenics movement in the US and Europe and were used by the Nazis to justify the genocide of Jews and of the sick and disabled.

He created a genealogical tree that connected all life forms and illustrated these in his book, General Morphology of Organisms, pub. In 1866-a year after Darwin’s theory of evolution was published. He stated that the diversity of living things follows a line of descent originating in a simple “primordial” form. He also named thousands of new species and coined several biology terms, including ecology, phylum, phylogeny, and Protista

His second book, Art Forms in Nature, focused mostly on microscopic organisms and demonstrated radial and stereo symmetry. It included jellyfish and sea urchins, as well as a few plants, mammals, and birds. His illustrations show the similarities between animal horns and snails.

His work was wildly popular during his lifetime and he quickly became one of the most popular illustrators in the nature genre. He influenced the artists of the Art Nouveau movement, who applied the use of symmetry and geometry to their botanical themes

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