II.2 "an Animal in Quires"

Hooke's contemporary and Royal Society fellow Samuel Pepys excitedly purchased the first edition of Micrographia, then stayed up until two in the morning to read it, describing it in his shorthand diary as "the most ingenious book that ever I read in my life." It warrants such praise. Filled with magnified plates of insects, cork, silk, even ice crystals, it quite literally magnifies John Wilkins' static taxonomies, rendering the order of the natural world not as flattened text but dynamic visual imagery linked by loose prose, or "Observations." In short, if John Wilkins imagines a world made print, Robert Hooke produces a world out of proportion -- a multiplicity of zoomed-in fragments folded together.