Boing Boing: Nature illustrations of Ernst Haeckel

Tuesday, January 11, 2005

Nature illustrations of Ernst Haeckel

I had dinner with Bruce Stewart and Shawn Connally at their home tonight. Bruce is O'Reilly's editorial director and Shawn is Make's managing editor. I noticed a couple of amazing framed prints on the wall in their library, and Bruce told me he took them from a book by Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), a German biologist who drew fantastic illustrations of animals, plants, and micro-organisms.

Apparently, Haeckel sort of made up certain details in his illustrations to bolster his wacky theories about evolution (he pushed the idea that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," that is, as na unborn animal develops in the egg or womb, it goes through all the evolutionary stages that its ancestors went through). The book Bruce showed me is called Art Forms in Nature, first published in 1904. I was knocked out by the beautiful drawings of sea creatures and other weird animals, and the way Haeckel arranged several life forms on the page is wonderful. Here's a page with a bunch of Haeckel drawings (There's also a link on the page to a 261 MB PDF file, which I assume contains a bunch of his work.) Thanks for letting me know about this incredible artist, Bruce!
Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:07:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

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