Micrographia

About this item

Micrographia: or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses was printed in London in 1665 by John Martyn and James Allestry for the Royal Society, where Robert Hooke held the post of Curator of Experiments. It is a folio volume of observations made with a compound microscope built for him by the instrument maker Christopher Cock, illustrated with engraved plates that Hooke drew himself.

The observations range across whatever Hooke could get under the lens: the point of a needle, the edge of a razor, printed full stops, fabric, moss, mold, sand, urine crystals, the eye of a fly, the sting of a bee. The best known are the large folding plates of a flea and a louse, which open out to several times the size of the page. The book also contains the passage in which Hooke, examining a thin shaving of cork, describes it as made up of “pores, or cells” — the first use of the word in this sense, taken from the Latin cella, a small room.

It is worth being precise about what that passage does and does not claim. Hooke was describing empty compartments in dead plant tissue and noting their resemblance to rows of monastic cells. He was not proposing that living things are built from cells; that came in the late 1830s with Schleiden and Schwann, and in 1855 with Virchow. Hooke named the structure. The theory arrived roughly two centuries later.

Why it is in the collection

Because the plates are the earliest clear case of a scientific image that is more than a transcription. Hooke examined each specimen repeatedly, under different lighting and from different angles, and drew a composite reconstruction rather than any single view — a practice he describes openly in the preface. He then spent that preface arguing for the reliability of instrument-aided senses and documenting his apparatus, so that readers who could not repeat the observation would have grounds to believe the picture.

That combination — a novel instrument, an unrepeatable observation, an image that exceeds what the instrument literally shows, and a published account of method offered as warrant — is the structure of a great deal of modern scientific imaging. It is why we treat this as a foundational item rather than a curiosity.