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