Three hundred and seventy-four years ago on 2 April 1647, a remarkable woman was born: the artist and naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian. In the 17^th and 18^th century world of male-dominated science, Merian had to fight for her place in the natural sciences. Against all odds, she became a trailblazer, especially in developmental biology.

Portrait of Maria Sybilla Merian by Jacob Marrell, 1679.  From the collection of: Kunstmuseum Basel.

Merian’s legacy was recently explored during a 4-week student-project at the library of the Museum für Naturkunde (MfN) in Berlin. The project was part of a master’s program for the University of Applied Science in Leipzig to enlarge the student’s experience in the historical holding field and give a glimpse into the planning and conducting of a project. The aim of the project itself was and is the digitization of two different editions of Merian’s work, Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium, as well as a restorative and provenance research summary about the volumes. Both editions show Merian’s talent in painting and observing insects and plants.

Merian’s fascination with flowers and painting had its origin with her stepfather Jacob Marrel, a known flower painter of the time, who took her under his wing. Despite her mother’s wish, who considered painting too “masculine,” Merian learned how to draw and engrave from Marrel and by the age of eleven, she was able to engrave on copper independently (Kutschera 2017: 28). At the age of twelve, she developed a heightened interest in exploring the nature around her and was especially fascinated by the metamorphosis of silk worms. Merian conducted her own studies, feeding the silkworm larvae and observing their transformation. Thus, her collection of different caterpillar species started to grow.

Examples of flowers and insects. Found in: Merian, Maria Sybilla. De Europischen insecten, v.3. 1730. Contributed in BHL from Smithsonian Libraries and Archives.

In 1665, shortly after her 18th birthday, Merian married Johann Andreas Graff (1636-1701)—a marriage that ended in divorce nearly 30 years later in 1692. Merian published her first work, the flower book Neues Blumenbuch, in 1675. It contained examples for the students of her painting and embroidery classes. She did not lose her interest in the metamorphosis of species, however, and published her first book about caterpillars in 1679 under the name Der Raupen Wunderbare Verwandelung und Sonderbare Blumennahrung (engl. “The Wondrous Transformation of Caterpillars and their Remarkable Diet of Flowers”). The “Anderer Theil” (engl. “Other volume”) followed in 1683.

In 1685, Merian moved with her two young daughters to a community of Labadists in Friesland. There, the exotic butterflies from Suriname in the collection of the castle Waltastate served as a template for new paintings and sparked her interest towards this exotic country. It was also the place she observed and recorded the metamorphosis of the frog in 1686 for the very first time, 13 years before Antonie van Leeuwenhoek documented it in a letter to the Royal Society (Nagendra 2016: 122). However, the small family did not stay in Friesland for long and moved to Amsterdam in 1690. With the help of other naturalists and the caterpillars they brought with them, the three women established themselves as artists.

Through the connections Merian made in Holland, she met travellers that came back from the Dutch colony Suriname with collections full of colourful insects. Although these were pretty to look at, the collections lacked the information about the insects’ developments.

“In Holland, I saw with wonderment the beautiful creatures brought back from the East and West Indies, especially when I had the honour to be able to see the splendid collection belonging to […] Dr Nicolaas Witsen […] and many others, in which I found these and countless other insects, but without their origins and subsequent development, in other words, how they develop from caterpillars into chrysalises and so on. All this stimulated me to undertake a long and costly journey to Suriname […] in order to pursue my investigations further.” (Merian & O’Brien-Twohig 2012: 2)

Merian’s decision to travel to Suriname, a country known for the death of many travelers due to tropical diseases at the time, as a divorced 52-year-old woman was quite scandalous. On top of that, Merian managed to finance herself independently by selling her paintings beforehand.

In 1699, Merian and her youngest daughter Dorothea Maria boarded a ship to Suriname. They arrived in Paramaribo and quickly learned that the Dutch colonists were not interested in helping them in their mission to locate and study the foreign insects. Instead, Merian relied on the assistance and knowledge of the Indigenous and African people enslaved on the Dutch sugar plantations.

Over the next two years, Merian and her daughter spent time exploring the jungle, canoeing rivers and painting every plant and insect they could find. Everything that they collected, from the information to the first artworks, went into Merian’s journal. Unfortunately, the pair returned home in 1701, earlier than expected, when Merian became ill, possibly with malaria. As a result, her stay on a plantation near the riverside of Paramaribo was cut short by three years.

Merian presented the results from her trip in the Metamorphosis insectorum surinamensium, first published in 1705. In it, 60 plates show the variety of the vibrant colours of the rainforest, each accompanied with information about their practical use, medical remedies, or general studies about the development of the insects and plants. A lot of her knowledge about the usage came from the enslaved people of the Suriname plantations. It is unclear whether Merian herself bought the enslaved people with whom she worked or if they were a gift when she first arrived (Davis 1996: 210).

Merian herself wrote on plate 36 about the plant Costus arabicus:

“I had my Indian dig [Costus arabicus] up by the root and carry it home and plant it in my garden” as well as that “because the forest is so densely grown with thistles and thorns, I had to send my slaves ahead of me with axes to hack out an opening for me.”

Therefore, while she writes about the help she received from enslaved people, unlike many other explorers and naturalists of her time, she still did not credit them by names (Baumhammer & Kennedy 2017: 213). In her publication, they remain an anonymous source of information.

Costus arabicus, a Banana Stem Borer Moth, and an unidentified butterfly. Found in: Merian, Maria Sybilla. Metamorphosis insectorum surinamensium. 1705. Contributed in BHL from Smithsonian Libraries and Archives.

In a later part of the book, there is a hard breach between the beautiful painting of the Peacock flower and Merian’s description of the usage of said flower. She writes that enslaved women told her about the horrible treatment from the Dutch and their use of the seeds to cause abortions and save their children from the same enslaved fate.

The focus of Merian’s criticism was mainly on the Dutch farming practices and not on the brutal treatment of the enslaved people. She could not understand how the Dutch ignored the richness and diversity of the flora around them and only planted sugar. Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert suggests that Merian was interested only in sharing scientific findings from her time in Suriname. “Full of groundbreaking information to communicate to a world avid for scientific knowledge, she was not gifted with a facile pen for anything other than scientific fact” (Paravisini-Gebert 2012: 12). While this might explain her lack of a more pronounced criticism of slavery, it does not condemn the fact that she took an enslaved woman with her back to Amsterdam as indicated by the passenger list for the sailing back home. This woman was most likely the person Merian referenced as “my Indian” from the text about Costus arabicus (Davis 1996: 212; Polcha 2019).

There is no mention in the sources about Merian’s behaviour towards the enslaved people on whom she relied, but Merian did participate in the racial hierarchies of trans-national colonialism. While she may have broken gender rules and created brilliant works of art, Merian ultimately profited from the suffering of others.

Merian’s reliance on and usage of the information and help she received from enslaved people must not be ignored, as it opens the discussion about how slavery affected her work and how she benefited from it. Merian would likely not have had access to most of the plants and insects described in her book without the help from enslaved African and Indigenous people, especially since the Dutch colonists did not support her studies. Would there have been a Metamorphosis without Merian using and exploiting the established oppression?

Ultimately, Metamorphosis did not sell as well as previously hoped and Merian lived in modesty. Her plans to publish translations of the book could not succeed due to the expense. She died poor on 13 January 1717, probably the same day Czar Peter the Great bought her remaining paintings (Nagrenda 2016: 118; Kutschera 2017: 30; Pieters & Winthagen 1999: 6).

The peacock flower (Caesalpinia pulcherrima) with its seeds and the life cycle of the Caroline Sphinx Moth (Manduca sexta). Found in: Merian, Maria Sybilla. Metamorphosis insectorum surinamensium. 1705. Contributed in BHL from Smithsonian Libraries and Archives.

The beforehand mentioned project at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin revolved around the Dissertation sur la generation et les transformations des insectes de Surinam (published in 1726) and the three volumes of Histoire générale des insectes de Surinam et de toute l’Europe (published in 1771). These editions used the copper plates from the original Metamorphosis print. Although they lack the vivid colours of their original counterpart, the black and white engravings still show the broad diversity of the Suriname (and European) insects and plants. Currently the library awaits the arrival of a new book scanner to digitize these four books, as they were too large for the scanner currently in use. They should be available in BHL by the end of the year (2021).

The Dissertation contains twelve more plates, two of which Merian did not make herself. These two plates and their explanation were full of errors. Due to this and wrongly coloured plates in later editions, Merian was harshly criticized despite showing and explaining nearly everything right in her own coloured and published edition (Pieters & Winthagen 1999: 10; Nagrenda 2016: 121). However, “the many racist, sexist, plain nasty (and ignorant) 19th century critiques of her work in Surinam only serve to highlight the remarkable and path-breaking nature of her work in the 17th century” (Nagendra 2016: 121).

The three volumes of Histoire générale des insectes de Surinam et de toute l’Europe furthermore included the European insects as well, using original drawings from Merian, too. The Museum’s copies were a donation by the Gesellschaft naturforschender Freunde zu Berlin (G.n.F., engl. “Berlin Society of Friends of Natural Science”) when they closed their library in 1907. It is unknown who bought them for the G.n.F. but they were acquired between 1793 and 1828. Handwritten annotations show that the same person used the books. Furthermore, the copy at the Museum shows one of the incorrect plates is upside down, which ironically highlights the errors.

Comparison of the incorrect copy of Histoire générale des insectes de Surinam et de toute l’Europe in the collection of the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin. Photo Credit: Antonia Trojok.

Alongside these four books, another was found and digitized from the MfN collection: a German edition of a volume from Historiae naturalis by John Johnston, for which Maria Sibylla Merian’s older half-brothers, Matthäus and Caspar Merian, made the copper plates. You can find their names engraved on two plates in the books. The siblings learned alongside each other during their childhood as Jacob Marrel’s students. This title testifies to the artistic talent that ran in the family, given the detail included even for those animals of purely fantastical origins.

Plate of fantastical creatures. Found in: Decker, Johannes. Naturgeschichte aus den besten Schriftstellern : mit Merianischen und neuen Kupfern. 1772. Digitized in BHL by Museum für Naturkunde Berlin.

In conclusion, the editions in the Museum für Naturkunde and many other instances show that Maria Sibylla Merian’s legacy for natural science still lives on. Merian was also the first European to do a voyage for a solely scientific purpose (Valiant 1993: 470) and recorded the life cycle of a frog. The Father of Taxonomy, Carl Linnaeus, as well as many more scientists cited her work throughout the years. However, we cannot highlight her legacy without also confronting her use of enslaved labour and acknowledging and respecting the impact that enslaved and Indigenous people in Suriname had on her work. Without them, Merian probably would not have shown the diversity of the rainforest for the first time.

With Merian’s legacy digitized, even more researchers and nature lovers can now enjoy her work in the future. Hopefully, these digitized copies will also inspire continued research into the extent and impact of the enslaved African and Indigenous people who contributed to this ground-breaking work.

You can read the first edition (in Dutch) of Metamorphosis insectorum surinamensium (1705)—freely available in BHL thanks to Smithsonian Libraries and Archives. Or check out Merian’s drawings from the first edition on the BHL Flickr page.

References

Davis, Natalie Zemon. 1996. Drei Frauenleben – Glikl – Marie de l’Incarnation – Maria Sibylla Merian. Berlin, Wagenbach.

Baumgarten, Megan & Kennedy Claire. 2017. Merian and the Pineapple: Visual Representation of the Seneses, in: Hacke, D. & Musselwhite, P. (eds.), Empire of the senses: Sensory practices of colonialism in early America, Boston, Brill, 190–222. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789004340640.

Kutschera, Ulrich. 2017. Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717) – Pionieren der Entwicklungsbiologie und Ökologie, Biologie in unserer Zeit 47(1), 28–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/biuz.201710610

Nagendra, Harini. 2016. Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717), Resonance 21(2), 115–124. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12045-016-0305-9

Merian, Maria Sibylla & O’Brien-Twohig, Sarah. 2012. from Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (Or, Transformations of Surinamese Insects ), Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas 45(1), 21–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08905762.2012.670451

Pieters, Florence. & Winthagen, Diny. 1999. Maria Sibylla Merian, naturalist and artist (1647-1717): A commemoration on the occasion of the 350th anniversary of her birth, Archives of natural history 26(1), 1–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/anh.1999.26.1.1

Polcha, Elizabeth. 2019. Breeding Insects and Reproducing white Supremacy in Maria Sibylla Merian’s Ecology of Dispossession. https://www.ladyscience.com/breeding-insects-and-reproducing-white-supremacy/no57

Valiant, Sharon. 1993. Maria Sibylla Merian: Recovering an Eighteenth-Century Legend, Eighteenth-Century Studies 26(3), 467–479. https://doi.org/10.2307/2739414

In 1780, French naturalist François Le Vaillant traveled to the Cape of Good Hope and subsequently spent several years studying the region’s biodiversity. During his three journeys—the first around Cape Town and Saldanha Bay (April to August 1781), the second eastwards from the Cape (December 1781 to May 1783), and the third to the Orange River and into Great Namaqualand (June 1783 to c. May 1784)—Le Vaillant amassed a collection of thousands of specimens. Upon returning to Europe, he published accounts of his travels within Voyage dans l’intérieur de l’Afrique (1790, 2 vols.) and Second voyage dans l’intérieur de l’Afrique (1796, 3 vols.)—both of which were best sellers and were translated into several languages.

Within these narratives, Le Vaillant writes repeatedly of his Khoikhoi guide, whom he called Klaas (but whose name in Klaas’s own Khoe language seems to be unrecorded). Le Vaillant’s respect and affection for Klaas is evident. In the first volume of his Voyage dans l’intérieur de l’Afrique, Le Vaillant writes:

“…le bon Klaas fut déclaré mon égal, mon frère, le confident de tous mes plaisirs, de mes disgrâces, de toutes mes pensées ; il a plus d’une fois calmé mes ennuis, & ranimé mon courage abattu.” [“…the good Klaas is declared my equal, my brother, the confidant of all my pleasures, of my disgraces, of all my thoughts; he has more than once calmed my troubles, & revived my shattered courage.”]

Klaas, of whom Le Vaillant wrote “by long practice [he] had become a naturalist”, also collected specimens for the French naturalist, which Le Vaillant later described within publications such as Histoire naturelle des oiseaux d’Afrique (1796–1808, 6 vols.). One such specimen was that of Klaas’s cuckoo, a species native to the wooded regions of sub-Saharan Africa. According to Le Vaillant, Klaas collected the specimen “près de la rivière Platte” (“near the Platte river”). It was the only individual of this species that the company encountered during their expedition.

When Le Vaillant published his account of the species within Histoire naturelle des oiseaux d’Afrique (v. 5, 1806), he named it “Le Coucou de Klaas” in honor of “mon ami Klaas”, writing:

“Puissent les naturalistes conserver à l’espèce que je vais décrire, le nom que je lui donne, et consacre ainsi les services que tu m’as rendus: ils me prouveront par là que mes travaux ont eu quelque prix à leurs yeux.” [“May naturalists preserve for the species I am going to describe, the name I give it, and thus consecrate the services you have rendered me: they will prove to me by this that my work has had some value in their eyes.”]

Klaas’s cuckoo (Chrysococcyx klaas). Engraving by William Lizars after William Swainson from Sir William Jardine’s Naturalist’s Library: Ornithology (v. 12, 1853 edition). Contributed in BHL from the Musée cantonal de zoologie, Lausanne.

While Le Vaillant, who opposed the Linnaean classification system, provided only French names to the species he described, future naturalists did fortunately honor Le Vaillant’s commemoration of Klaas. Some ten years after Le Vaillant’s description was published, English zoologist James Francis Stephens made a formal redescription of the species, designating it Cuculus klaas (now Chrysococcyx klaas).

Eponymous scientific naming, or the practice of naming a species after an individual, is the subject of Dr. Stephen B. Heard’s book, Charles Darwin’s Barnacle and David Bowie’s Spider (2020). Klaas’s cuckoo is the earliest example of a species being named after an Indigenous person that Heard has been able to trace. While researching the name for his book, Heard relied on the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) to access Le Vaillant’s description of Klaas’s cuckoo and uncover more about the story behind the name.

“BHL is an incredibly rich resource,” lauds Heard. “These older names are often frustrating to puzzle out. In general, there’s no single index of name etymologies—you have to look for the paper that originally described the species and hope the name is explained. When I’m working on books or blog posts where I can explore my interests in the history of science, I use BHL every day.”

Dr. Stephen B. Heard, pictured in the Wesman Islands of Iceland. Photo by: Kristie S. Heard.

Heard, an evolutionary ecologist, is a Professor of Biology at the University of New Brunswick in Canada. His “everyday” research concerns the ecology and evolution of plant-insect interactions, for which he relies on modern literature. However, some of his recent projects have taken a more historical turn—a turn that led him to BHL.

“My first book, The Scientist’s Guide to Writing, explores some of the history and social context of scientific writing,” shares Heard. “In trying to explain the evolution of what’s now a quite standardized writing form (the scientific paper), I dipped into writing as far back as the 1660s. BHL is a wonderful place to find that old literature.”

Heard found himself relying on BHL once again during his research on eponymous names for Charles Darwin’s Barnacle and David Bowie’s Spider.

“As I began work on Charles Darwin’s Barnacle and David Bowie’s Spider, I discovered that an enormous amount of taxonomic literature, in particular, is available online via BHL—and not just the obvious major journals,” says Heard. “The collection includes books, obscure memoirs of regional natural history societies, you name it. Most of that older and more obscure literature is not available through my university library, so BHL is a critical resource for me.”

For Heard, one of the best things about eponymous scientific names is the insight they provide on the personality and humanity of scientists. Take, for example, French ornithologist Charles Lucien Bonaparte (nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte), who named over 200 bird species and over 250 bird genera. Heard was particularly struck by a paradox in two of Bonaparte’s namings: the bird of paradise Diphyllodes respublica and the imperial pigeon Ptilocolpa carola.

Bird of paradise (Diphyllodes respublica). Illustration by John Gould and William Matthew Hart from Gould’s The birds of New Guinea and the adjacent Papuan islands, v. 1 (1875-1888). Contributed in BHL from Smithsonian Libraries.

“Bonaparte named the bird of paradise as a statement of his republican ideals (perhaps a bit risky for a nephew of Napoleon), but he named the pigeon for his ‘daughter the countess Primoli, Charlotte, herself worthy of her illustrious name,’” explains Heard. “The inconsistency between Bonaparte’s republicanism and his mention of his daughter’s title and ‘illustrious name’ is fascinating—a good illustration of how scientific practice isn’t immune to the foibles and humanity of scientists themselves. As I worked on Charles Darwin’s Barnacle and David Bowie’s Spider, and spent more and more time with the writing of those who describe and (eponymously) name species, I was more and more struck by the creativity and humanity behind the act.”

By providing free and open access to scientific literature, BHL is not only empowering modern taxonomic research, but also allowing researchers like Dr. Heard to learn more about the history of taxonomy and the people and stories behind the names. BHL’s impact on science has been recognized through modern-day eponymous naming. In 2015, a new land snail species from Laos—Vargapupa biheli Páll-Gergely, 2015—was named in honor of BHL. As author Dr. Barna Páll-Gergely wrote in the paper publishing the name:

“The new species is named after the Biodiversity Heritage Library (www.biodiversitylibrary.org) to thank the multitude of rare literature made available to us. The name ‘biheli’ is an acronym derived from the name BIodiversity HEritage Library.”

Vargapupa biheli Páll-Gergely, 2015, named in honor of BHL. Photo by: Barna Páll-Gergely.

In 2019, a new species of fossil robber fly—Kishenehnoasilus bhl Dikow, 2019—was named in honor of BHL. On selecting this name, author Dr. Torsten Dikow shared:

“Taxonomic research involves not only the study of specimens, but also the review of often old literature. Having digital access to publications enhanced with tools such as scientific name recognition makes my research so much more efficient. The Biodiversity Heritage Library provides a lens into the literature published a long time ago. The same is true for this new species of robber fly, as it helps us to understand and document the past of biodiversity.”

Kishenehnoasilus bhl Dikow, 2019, named in honor of BHL. Photo by: Dale Greenwalt.

Whether it be as a vehicle to teach us more about an individual recognized in a species name, a window into the personalities and lives of the scientists naming species, or an opportunity to highlight the impact of policies like open access on global research, a species name is often a story waiting to be told—stories that BHL and its open access collections can help tell.

Title page. On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. Contributed in BHL from Harvard University Botany Libraries.

Charles Darwin is a household name. One of the most famous naturalists to ever live, he is known around the world for his publication On the Origin of Species and contributions to evolutionary theory.

The work of contemporary scientists informed the development of Darwin’s evolutionary concepts. By applying, and sometimes countering, the theories of others, he constructed one of our most important scientific foundations. He documented this intellectual progression in the margins of the books in his library. This historically significant collection is available online in the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Charles Darwin’s Library is a digital edition and virtual reconstruction of the surviving books owned by Charles Darwin. Produced as a collaboration between BHL, Cambridge University Library, the Library & Archives of the Natural History Museum in London, and the Darwin Manuscripts Project, the collection draws on original copies and surrogates from other libraries and includes over 500 of the 1,480 books in Darwin’s library. Notably, these books are complemented with fully-indexed transcriptions of Darwin’s annotations.

Charles Darwin’s Library is particularly meaningful to Dr. B. Ricardo Brown, Professor of Social Science and Cultural Studies at the Pratt Institute. Brown has devoted years of research to Darwin and the impact of his evolutionary theories on debates around monogenetic vs. polygenetic human origins. Brown’s 2010 book, Until Darwin: Science, Human Variety and the Origin of Race, explores the complex web of factors that influenced these debates from the 17th-19th centuries and the impact of the publication of On the Origin of Species on this scientific discourse.

Brown spent nearly 10 years researching this book. Today, BHL’s open access collections offer researchers considerable time-savings.

“I am sure that if I had the kind of access to texts that BHL now provides researchers, I could have reduced the research time for Until Darwin in half,” muses Brown.

Dr. B. Ricardo Brown, Professor of Social Science and Cultural Studies at the Pratt Institute. Photo Courtesy of B. Ricardo Brown.

With academic backgrounds in environmental studies, sociology, and critical theory, Brown’s research explores the history of science, investigating the relationship between society and nature and the “genealogies of systems of knowledge” through which we make sense of these relationships. His current project looks at sociology and ecology as “sciences of life” whose formation was made possible by the dissolution — marked by Darwin’s Origin — of political economy and natural history.

“Without BHL, such a project would be much more limited, if not impossible,” affirms Brown. “The Library’s impact has been immense.”

Brown refers to BHL at least several times a week. A great benefit of the Library is that it has facilitated unexpected discoveries that expand the scope of relevant literature for his research projects.

“BHL makes it possible to browse through the library and (virtually) pick-up an unfamiliar work or author and discover something that is relevant or just interesting — which you might not have come across without BHL,” explains Brown. “There is much to be said for the pleasures of simply exploring the archive.”

Beyond serving as a vast archive of texts, artifacts, and scientific ideologies, BHL also facilitates Brown’s interest in ecology and environmental studies by allowing him to compare his own field observations to those of past naturalists.

“I found that it is quite useful to do some field observations and hikes when immersed in the study of Darwin and the Natural History of his time,” says Brown. “One gets a better insight into Darwin’s methodology, which depended on his own observations and those of trusted naturalists and correspondents.”

Take, for example, Darwin’s observations on slave-making ants.

“Darwin constantly tacks back and forth between his own observations and those of the recognized authority on the slave-making ‘instinct’ in ants, Pierre Huber,” explains Brown. “This series of observations led Darwin to conclude that the ‘instinct for slavery’, in ants as well as human societies, was in no way ‘miraculous’ or evidence of a fixed or natural hierarchy.”

Plate 2. Recherches sur les moeurs des fourmis indigènes by Pierre Huber. Part of the Charles Darwin’s Library collection. Contributed in BHL from Cambridge University Library.

Brown also finds BHL to be a useful educational resource for his courses.

“BHL provides a means for students in my courses to access and download PDFs of texts that only a few years ago would have been known to them only through secondhand descriptions, summaries….or long lectures,” affirms Brown. “ As Pratt is primarily a school of art, design, and architecture, students appreciate the aesthetic skills of early naturalists that they experience through BHL’s high resolution images. Works such as Cuvier’s Tableau élémentaire de l’histoire naturelle des animaux or Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur provide a wonderful avenue for understanding the social relations of art, aesthetics, and science.“

With much of his research focused on the investigation of science and society’s influence on each other, he’d love to see BHL incorporate functionality allowing readers to explore the social and cultural contexts of the texts in the Library.

“By its inclusion in the collection, each text potentially takes on a certain legitimacy,” considers Brown. “This means that texts such as Morton’s Crania Americana or Pouchet’s The Plurality of the Human Race might, despite or perhaps even because of their age, be misread as somehow giving voice to views that remain contested. And because much of the history of science is the history of errors, this issue takes on a particular importance when authoritarian movements are constantly seeking to co-opt a wide variety of knowledges — for example, Classical and Medieval Studies, Darwinism, Ecology and Environmental Studies — to the service of supremacy.”

Pl. 71. Crania americana by Samuel George Morton. Contributed in BHL from Smithsonian Libraries.

As we explore opportunities to link our content with other resources, collections, and databases in future iterations of BHL, including through linked data applications, strategies to provide this context will hopefully become increasingly feasible.

While many aspects of BHL’s collections and services have been important to Brown’s research, his favorite feature of the Library is that it is free and open to the public.

“BHL makes the history of science available to everyone,” praises Brown. “It would seem to have significant potential to enrich citizen science projects, as well as public discourse on climate change, extinction, the authority of science, the domination of Nature, and much more.”

We’re proud to know that, by making our collections globally accessible to anyone with an Internet connection, BHL is helping to advance a wide range of research and inspire discovery of the natural world.

Each year, audiences around the world are gripped with “shark mania”. Since its premier in 1988, the annual Shark Week celebrations have resulted in countless hours of programming devoted to all things sharks.

During Shark Week 2017, Vox posted a story with a video explaining why you don’t see Great White Sharks in aquariums. At the end (beginning 5:17), video co-creator Joss Fong highlighted the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) as a “great resource” for historic literature on biodiversity — and gave a shout-out to BHL’s Flickr collection: “Sharks, Skates & Rays!”. The collection includes illustrations dating back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Illustration from the Sharks, Skates & Rays! Flickr collection. Scilla, Agostino. De corporibus marinis lapidescentibus quæ defossa reperiuntur. 1752. Contributed in BHL from the United States Geological Survey Libraries Program.

Danielle Alesi, a PhD candidate at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), stumbled upon the video one night last summer while taking a break from studying for her comprehensive exams. She was introduced to BHL for the first time.

That serendipitous discovery had a profound impact on her research, which focuses on early modern European and Atlantic world history with an interest in animal studies.

“I was overcome by excitement, realizing that much of the research I required for my dissertation was digitized on the site,” recalls Alesi. “The moment still stands out as one of my ‘breakthrough’ moments early in the dissertation writing process.”

Danielle Alesi, PhD candidate at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL).

Alesi is currently entering the fourth year of her PhD program at UNL. Her dissertation explores the interactions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European travelers with the people and animals of the Americas. BHL has been a valuable source of information on these encounters.

“BHL is an amazing resource that scholars from many fields are lucky to have available to us,” praises Alesi. “It allows me to access many of the travel narratives and early accounts of animals native to the Americas that I am using in my research. Since I am located in Nebraska and generally have a full teaching schedule, this is an excellent resource that allows me to see many of my sources without having to travel to a library that holds them.”

Alesi generally uses BHL weekly, downloading PDFs of these early narratives to print and translate as needed. The availability of multiple editions of titles in BHL is particularly useful, allowing Alesi to compare changes to the texts over time.

“I love that I can search for authors or texts, see multiple editions, and download a full scan of a book that includes paratexts and marginalia, which is better than other digital library services,” lauds Alesi. “BHL allows me to do much of my research at home without having to travel to various libraries throughout the country or the world.”

Currently, Alesi’s favorite book in BHL is Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo’s La Historia General Y Natural De Las Indias (1535, complete work published posthumously 1851–55). Within it, Spanish captain Oviedo provides a wealth of valuable descriptions of the animals and natural environments that he encountered on his travels.

“Oviedo spends much of his narrative describing the new animals and trying to compare them to, or reconcile them with, animals Europeans would already recognize,” explains Alesi. “This text also influenced many of the writers in Europe that wanted to publish on the ‘New World’ but had not gone there themselves.”

Title page of 1535 edition. Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, Gonzalo. Historia general de las Indias. Contributed in BHL from Missouri Botanical Garden, Peter H. Raven Library.

Whether it be sixteenth century travel narratives by Spanish explorers or early depictions of “sea dogs” (i.e. sharks), BHL is a treasure trove of historic (and modern!) biodiversity literature for a wide array of researchers, from scientists to historians, educators, archivists, and beyond.

Of course, the real moral of this story is, don’t be afraid to take a break for sharks. You never know where it might lead you.

Hammerhead shark. Belon, Pierre. L’histoire naturelle des estranges poissons marins. 1551. Contributed in BHL from University of Toronto – Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library.

Catlow, Agnes. Drops of Water; their Marvellous and Beautiful Inhabitants Displayed by the Microscope. 1851. Contributed in BHL by University of Toronto – Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library.

In the mid-nineteenth century, microscopy became immensely popular with European and American naturalists. As microscopes became more affordable, microscopy societies were established, and numerous microscopy journals were launched and widely distributed. Many microscopy publications were richly illustrated, trying to recreate the “world of wonder and beauty” seen through the microscope (Gosse, 1860, p. v). In his widely read Evenings at the Microscope (1859), the English naturalist Philip Henry Gosse showed his readers “the path to the myriad wonders of creation” displayed by the microscope (p. 3). Moreover, microscopy journals, inviting their readers to contribute inquiries and observations, often made it possible for geographically dispersed microscopists to work together.

Hudson, Charles Thomas. “On Triarthra longiseta” in The Monthly Microscopical Journal. Vol. 1. 1869. Contributed in BHL by Smithsonian Libraries.

Since international copyright laws were only enforced after the signing of the Berne Convention in 1886 and the passing of the American Chace Act in 1891, mid-nineteenth-century publications frequently reused material published elsewhere. Illustrations and texts would be copied and reprinted, thus targeting several readerships at different places at the same time. Edward Pennock, editor of the Philadelphian Microscopical Bulletin and Science News, claimed that he could “write much better articles with the scissors than with the pen” (Pennock, 1890, p. 7). Pennock not only copied but also recombined articles to better accommodate the interests of his readers.

Citizen Scientists Invited to Explore the History of Microscopy

To this day, so many nineteenth-century publications on microscopy remain that they can hardly be analyzed by just a handful of historians. Therefore, the MUSTS research group at Maastricht University launched Worlds of Wonder, an online crowdsourcing project, on the Zooniverse citizen science platform. Worlds of Wonder is part of a PhD project funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, and it was inspired by Science Gossip, another crowdsourcing initiative asking citizen scientists to classify illustrations. The MUSTS researchers behind Worlds of Wonder, Lea Beiermann, Cyrus Mody and Raf De Bont, ask citizen scientists to help them classify nineteenth-century microscopy illustrations, assign keywords to the illustrations to make them searchable, and identify the people who made them.

E. T. D. “Graphic Microscopy” in Hardwicke’s Science Gossip. Vol. 20. 1884. Contributed in BHL by MBLWHOI Library.

Worlds of Wonder aims to better understand the formation of a community of European and American microscopists by investigating the publications that connected them. How did microscopists and illustrators collaborate to produce illustrations? Who could contribute illustrations to microscopy publications? Where did microscopy illustrations travel and how did they change along the way? It seems that the circulation and reproduction of illustrations was a crucial factor in connecting nineteenth-century microscopists, who formed a strikingly diverse scientific community including physicians, biologists, engineers, natural historians, school teachers and zoologists with a shared interest in microscopy. Adapting and recombining published texts and illustrations may have made it easier for editors to tailor their publications to different groups of microscopists. In order to trace reproductions of microscopy illustrations, Worlds of Wonder draws on a wealth of digitized microscopy publications hosted by the BHL.

Although copyright laws were not strictly enforced in the mid-nineteenth century, issues of ownership and the authenticity of reproduced materials were strongly debated. Considering that today many online platforms continue to recombine and distribute texts and illustrations published elsewhere, Worlds of Wonder may also help us get a better idea of the effects of using these platforms in science communication.

You can join the crowdsourcing project on Zooniverse or learn more about the history of microscopy on the Worlds of Wonder blog.

References

Gosse, Philip Henry. 1860. Evenings at the Microscope; or Researches Among the Minuter Organs and Forms of Animal Life. New York: D. Appleton.

Pennock, Edward. 1890. Minutiae. The Microscopical Bulletin and Science Ne, 7(1), 7.