Illustrating the Invisible
By Stephen A. Harris
Botanical artists mixed creativity and science to depict microscopic structures.
This Article From Issue
November-December 2024
Volume 112, Number 6
Page 346
In his 1767 dissertation, Johannes Roos, a student of the Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus, likened the natural world to a vast, multivaulted museum. The largest rooms were public, open to all, but innumerable tiny rooms were locked, accessible only to specialists with the skill, and luck, to discover the keys. The microscope was Roos’s key to the smallest museum rooms—the mundus invisibilis (invisible world).
Courtesy of the Sherardian Library of Plant Taxonomy, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.
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