Works by Ernst Haeckel

Ernst Haeckel taught zoology at Jena from 1862 to 1909, and his Kunstformen der Natur fills colour plates with jellyfish, mosses and hummingbirds packed edge to edge.

As a young zoologist Haeckel worked on radiolarians, sponges and segmented worms, and on one Mediterranean trip he named close to 700 new species of radiolarians. What held him most was evolution and the way living things arrive at ordered form, and that interest ended in the plates of Kunstformen der Natur, a title that means roughly art forms of nature. Those plates often give a whole page to one group of creatures. In Tafel 28, of disc jellyfish, a gold medusa seen face-on spreads frilled arms on every side, with smaller views in the four corners. The hummingbirds of Tafel 99 hang among ferns, orange tails and crests set against green, and a nest of eggs sits to the left.

Tafel 8 is headed Desmonema, the genus of one of the jellyfish he dedicated to his first wife, Anna Sethe, who died in 1864. The plates below date from 1862 to 1904 and all come from his natural-history books. A plate of disc jellyfish from his 1879 monograph on medusae shows one from the side, one from above as a disc of orange and yellow rays, and one from below, its frilled mouth arms trailing across the page.

Sources: Wikipedia, Biodiversity Heritage Library, contributed by University Library, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, Biodiversity Heritage Library, contributed by Smithsonian Libraries and Archives, Biodiversity Heritage Library, contributed by Harvard University, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Ernst Mayr Library.