II.5 "an Animal in Quires"

Metaphors of exploration fit Hooke's Micrographia particularly well because, while his personal observations may have "discovered" new territory, his only mechanism for sharing these discoveries with others is the book. As Cohen points outAdam Max Cohen, Technology and the Early Modern Self (New York: Palgrave, 2006): 184., producing the detailed engravings required a kind of double vision, either rapidly shifting one's eyes from lens to paper (which is probably how Hooke's images were drawn) or focusing one eye on the lens and the other on paper. Either way, "the process relied on imperfect mental and mechanical translation." The end result is not a tracing of, for instance, a period -- impossible, since the eyepiece itself only displayed it as three-inches in conjunction with Hooke's observing eye -- but a map, "open and connectable in all of its dimensions," "detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification."