II.4 "an Animal in Quires"

In a reading of early modern scientific writings through the framework of travel narratives, Mary Campbell identifies a connection between Hooke's Micrographia the sixteenth-century Cosmographias of Waldseemüller, Münster and Thevet, "because in fact it is one, or the microscopic beginnings of one." As she writesMary Baine Campbell, Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999): 190., "here was a whole physical dimension to absorb, through the categories of place and creaturely inhabitant that structured cosmography and the nascent enterprise of mercantile ethnography." Thus while the early maps of Waldseemüller zoom out to see the world at large, using the page as an Archimedean point, Hooke's images zoom in to a world as-yet unseen, lifting the earth from the end of a microscope.