Tab. VIII · N° 4
Vipera berus
Common European adder
Reaches farther north than any other venomous snake — past the Arctic Circle in Scandinavia. It bears live young rather than laying eggs.
Thesaurus
Rerum Naturalium
A scrolling cabinet of curiosities, after the engraved plates of Albertus Seba, apothecary of Amsterdam. Some hundred and seventy specimens — serpent, lizard, bird, bat, moth, beetle, crab, fish, squid, shell and coral — each printed in line, then washed in its colourist’s hand.
Tab. LXXXI Corallus caninus, the emerald tree boa. Born brick-red or orange, it turns green within its first year — Seba’s colourist drew the youngster.
Descend into the cabinet
Praefatio
Albertus Seba kept a pharmacy near the Amsterdam harbour and paid ships’ surgeons and sailors, returning from the East and West Indies, for whatever strange things they carried home. The first cabinet he assembled was bought by Tsar Peter the Great in 1717. Seba simply began again.
In 1731 he commissioned artists to engrave every object, and from 1734 the plates appeared as the Locupletissimi Rerum Naturalium Thesauri — four folio volumes, the last finished nearly thirty years after his death. Each plate was printed in black line from the copper, and in the finest copies coloured by hand, sheet by sheet. The specimens were arranged the way a cabinet was: for wonder first, order second. Snakes knot into figure-eights. Shells carry painted nymphs. Corals are pressed flat like herbarium sheets.
What follows is a walk through that cabinet, drawer by drawer: from the dry land of snakes and lizards, up into the air with birds, bats and moths, and down through the crabs and fish to the sea floor. Every specimen here was cut from a photograph of the plates and set moving the way its living counterpart does.
Tab. VIII · N° 3 Soricidae — a shrew. It must eat every few hours; some species take in more than their own weight each day.
Tab. VIII · N° 6 Squamata. Lizards and snakes share one order — by descent, a snake is a lizard that gave up its legs.
I
Caput primum
Serpentes
Classis Reptilia · Ordo Squamata
Seba owned more snakes than anything else, most of them in jars of spirit where the colours faded and the bodies stiffened. His engravers straightened nothing. They coiled each serpent into loops and knots that fill the page — a convention of the cabinet, not of the wild. Many of these animals still resist identification today.
Tab. VIII · N° 1 – 2
Serpens & Muridae
A snake, and its mouse
Seba liked to set predator and prey on one plate. The mouse sits inside a loop of its hunter.
Tab. LXI · N° 1
Serpens caerulea
The azure serpent
True blue is almost never a pigment in reptiles. It is structural — light scattered by the architecture of the skin.
Serpentes · N° 1
Serpens gracilis
A slender snake
Snakes have no eyelids. A clear scale, the brille, shields each eye and comes away whole when the skin is shed.
Serpentes · N° 2 – 3
Nodus serpentium
A knot of three
Engravers wove specimens through one another to fit more onto an expensive copper plate.
Serpentes · N° 4
Serpens stellata
The star-spotted snake
A snake’s spine can run to three or four hundred vertebrae, nearly every one of them carrying a pair of ribs.
Tab. XXXIV · N° 1 – 7
Serpentes & Ericaceae
Banded snakes among heather
Sprigs of heath share the plate. Seba composed his pages like still lifes, not diagrams.
Tab. VIII · N° 5
Serpens rubra
The red snake
The forked tongue collects scent from the air and delivers it to the vomeronasal organ in the roof of the mouth.
Tab. LXI · N° 2
Serpens margaritacea
The pearled snake
Behind it, N° 3 – 7: chitons, whose teeth are capped with magnetite, among the hardest materials any animal makes.
Tab. XCI · Fig. 5
Serpens octonaria
The figure-eight
The pose is pure cabinet. A living snake rests in loose coils; this knot was arranged for the page.
Tab. LXX · Fig. 12
Vipera
A viper, among scorpions
A viper’s fangs are hinged. They fold flat against the roof of the mouth and swing forward to strike.
Polyplacophora Eight overlapping plates.
II
Caput secundum
Sauria
Lizards · Subordo Lacertilia
The snakes’ four-legged kin. Seba drew them from above like pressed leaves and from the side like portraits — and, once, from the inside out.
Tab. XCI · Fig. 1 – 4 Keep scrolling. They run.
A running lizard bends its spine from side to side, the same wave a fish uses to swim — the legs ride on it. The striped blue lizards of Fig. 3 – 4 resemble the whiptails of the Americas, some of which are all-female species that reproduce without males.
Tab. LXXXII · Chamaeleo chamaeleon
Chamaeleo
A chameleon changes colour by retuning a lattice of tiny crystals in its skin, altering which wavelengths bounce back. It is less camouflage than conversation — mood, temperature and rivalry. Hover one.
III
Caput tertium
Aves
Tab. LXIV – LXVI · Birds, from the trade in skins
Birds reached Amsterdam as dried skins, often without feet or with borrowed feathers, and Seba’s artists reassembled them. Birds of paradise were shipped legless so often that Europeans believed they never landed — one was named apoda, “footless.”
IV
Caput quartum
Chiroptera
Hand-winged · Tab. LVIII
A bat’s wing is a hand: four enormously long fingers with skin stretched between them. Bats are the only mammals capable of true, powered flight.
Fig. 1 · Vampyrum spectrum
The spectral bat
The largest bat in the Americas, with a wingspan near a metre. Despite the name it drinks no blood: it hunts birds, rodents and other bats.
Fig. 2 – 3 · Cynocephalus volans
The colugo
Called a flying lemur, it is neither. It glides — over a hundred metres between trees — on a membrane that runs from its neck to its fingertips to the tip of its tail. Its closest living relatives are the primates.
V
Caput quintum
Lepidoptera
Scale-winged · Ordo Lepidoptera
A moth’s wing is a membrane shingled with tens of thousands of microscopic scales, each a single colour. Keep scrolling and they come to the drawer.
Tab. XXI – XXIILepidoptera, pinned00 / 12
N° 2 – 6 Arsenura silkmoths, South America. Adult saturniids have no working mouthparts. They never eat, and live a week or so on what the caterpillar stored.
N° 12 – 15 Limenitis populi, the poplar admiral, as Seba’s plate is identified. It almost never visits flowers — males drink from mud, dung and carrion.
VI
Caput sextum
Insecta
Tab. LXX · LXXXV · Cicadas, cockroaches, beetles — and scorpions
One plate, three orders. Seba sorted by resemblance, and the likeness of wing to wing was enough to hang a cicada beside a cockroach.
N° 1 – 12 · Auchenorrhyncha Male cicadas sing by buckling a pair of ribbed membranes, the tymbals, hundreds of times a second; a hollow abdomen amplifies the click into a drone. Cicada orni, N° 5 – 6, is the chorus of a Provençal summer.
N° 21 – 22 · Buprestidae Jewel beetles. Their metallic sheen isn’t pigment: stacked layers in the cuticle interfere with light, the way a film of oil turns a puddle into a rainbow. Tilt them.
Tab. LXX · Arachnida Scorpions are not insects: eight legs, no antennae, and a body in two parts. Under ultraviolet light their outer skeleton glows blue-green — no one is quite sure why.
VII
Caput septimum
Crustacea
Tab. XVII – XXII · Armoured things
Animals that wear their skeleton outside and must climb out of it to grow. Every moult leaves a perfect, empty copy behind.
Tab. XXII · N° 1 · Lithodidae A king crab, walking the only way crabs comfortably do — sideways, so its jointed legs never trip each other. King crabs descend from hermit-crab ancestors; the female’s abdomen is still lopsided.
Tab. XXI · N° 2 · Birgus latro
The coconut crab
The largest arthropod that lives on land, weighing up to four kilograms, with a grip strong enough to crack a coconut. It is a hermit crab that outgrew its borrowed shells. Seba shows the underside, the legs washed in blue.
Tab. XVII · N° 1a – b · Xiphosura
Not a crab
Horseshoe crabs are closer to spiders and scorpions. Their lineage is over four hundred million years old, and their blue, copper-based blood is still drawn today to test medicines for bacterial contamination.
VIII
Caput octavum
Pisces
Tab. XXIII – XXVIII · Fish
Seba’s fish came dried and flattened or floating in spirit, so their colours are guesses and their fins sometimes invented. The strangest ones were real.
Tab. XXIV · XXVIII The shoal passes as you scroll
Lionfish Its fin spines carry venom. Native to the Indo-Pacific, it has spread through the western Atlantic and Caribbean since the 1980s.
Scorpionfish An ambush predator camouflaged as weed-covered rock; it swallows prey in a single, sudden gulp.
Toadfish Males hum and grunt to attract mates by drumming muscles against their swim bladder.
Boxfish & cowfish Their bodies are sealed in a rigid box of fused bony plates; only fins and tail can move.
Flying gurnard It does not fly. It fans out those great pectoral fins to startle predators and walks the seabed on its pelvic fins.
Tab. XXIII · Diodontidae & Tetraodontidae
Inflate
Alarmed, a pufferfish gulps water until it swells to a ball too big to swallow; in porcupinefish the spines stand up as it fills. Many also carry tetrodotoxin, one of the most potent poisons in nature. Hover to alarm them.
IX
Caput nonum
Cephalopoda
Head-footed · Classis Cephalopoda
Animals whose feet grow from their heads. Three hearts, blue blood carried on copper, and skin that changes colour faster than a blush — yet most of them are thought to be colour-blind.
Tab. III · N° 1 – 2
Sepia
Sepia officinalis, the common cuttlefish, shown from above and below. Artists once ground its ink sac into a warm brown wash, and the colour kept the animal’s name. Every brown line printed on this page is, in name, a cuttlefish.
X
Caput decimum
Conchylia
Shells, and the things that make them
Shells were the prize of every Dutch cabinet — traded, auctioned, forged, and sometimes carved. Seba collected all of it: the animal’s work and the craftsman’s.
Tab. LXXXIV · N° 4 – 6
Argonauta
The paper nautilus
Not a true shell. The female octopus secretes this papery case from two broad arms and broods her eggs inside it. The male is a fraction of her size and makes no case at all.
Tab. LXXXIV · N° 1 – 3 Nautilus pompilius, stripped to its nacre and engraved with nymphs and scrollwork by Dutch craftsmen. The living animal regulates its buoyancy through a tube, the siphuncle, that threads every chamber of the spiral.
XI
Caput undecimum
Corallia
Phylum Cnidaria
In Seba’s day coral was filed with the plants — or the stones. Only in the 1720s did the physician Jean-André Peyssonnel argue that its “flowers” were animals, and he was mocked for it. Each branch here is a colony of thousands.