While searching for scientific illustrations on Tumblr I noticed many were credited to the Biodiversity Heritage Library. I went there and discovered it is a website where research libraries from all over the world scan in books so that others may see and learn from them. Most of these books are very rare and many have wonderful illustrations.
The illustrations that follow are from Kunstformen der Natur (German for Art Forms of Nature). This book was published in 1904 and was illustrated by Ernst Haeckel, a German biologist who had a long, interesting, and prolific career as an artist and scientist. Here are just a few of the over 100 scientific illustrations in the book, that I chose especially for their particular visual and artistic appeal. The last one is my favorite (for now).
Thanks for sharing. What is it with those Germans and their devotion minutiae? (I can speak coming from that lineage). Glad to see that there are people dedicated to saving the world’s illustrations when so many are intent on purging all that is old. ~Dorr
Thanks Dorr! My father’s name was Knoblauch, meaning garlic in German, and he was an engineer of sorts, flying planes, rebuilding things, and always calculating. In his later years he took a class on Byzantine icon painting, and as you can imagine, he was top of the class!-Amy