Collection

Records of material that changed how something could be seen. We do not hold originals. Each record describes an item, credits the institution that holds and digitized it, and states the rights position on the underlying work as accurately as we can establish it.

How to read these records

Every record carries an OSM reference, which is our own internal number and not a shelfmark at the holding institution. The rights field describes the original work; individual digital reproductions may carry separate terms from the institution that made them. Three of the six items below are not fully public domain, and the records say so.

Microscopy · 1665

Micrographia

Robert Hooke’s folio of microscopical observations, the source of the word “cell” and the first book to make the invisible into a visual argument.

Rights: Public domain

Photography · 1887

Animal Locomotion

781 collotype plates of serial photography by Eadweard Muybridge, which corrected how motion had been drawn for millennia.

Rights: Public domain

Natural history · 1705

Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium

Maria Sibylla Merian’s Surinam plates, showing insects on their host plants across the whole life cycle.

Rights: Public domain

Neuroscience · 1888–1934

Drawings of the nervous system

Around 2,900 ink and pencil drawings by Santiago Ramón y Cajal that established the neuron as a discrete cell.

Rights: Mixed — check per item

Cartography · 1957

North Atlantic physiographic diagram

The drawing by Marie Tharp and Bruce Heezen that made the Mid-Atlantic rift valley visible.

Rights: In copyright — descriptive record

Instruments · c. 150–100 BCE

The Antikythera mechanism

A geared bronze calculator for astronomical and eclipse cycles, recovered from a wreck off Antikythera in 1901.

Rights: Object out of copyright; images restricted

What we add, and what we do not

We add items where the visual or material form is doing intellectual work — where the picture, map, plate or object is not illustrating a finding but constituting it. That is a narrow criterion and it excludes a great deal of otherwise significant material.

We do not add items we cannot verify against a primary source or a named institutional holding. We do not publish reproductions of material still in copyright. Where an item is restricted, we publish a descriptive record and point to the rights holder, as with the Tharp and Heezen diagram.

Read our editorial standards for how records are compiled, checked and corrected.