IV.3 'a Plant, or rather several Plants'

In the Micrographia, the flea links up to the fly's head, the point to the punctum; each image is not a new world in itself, but maps newly out-of-proportion surfaces onto an existing order. Analogizing Hooke's use of a microscope to Galileo's telescope, Adam Max Cohen writesAdam Max Cohen, Technology and the Early Modern Self (New York: Palgrave, 2006): 178.: "if the telescope showed that the portions of the cosmos invisible to the naked eye were more familiar, more earth-like than previously believed, the microscope transformed early modern individuals' perspectives on the world around them by revealing that apparently mundane natural objects contained marvels, mysteries, and wonders." In Grew's Anatomy, though, each plate is itself a microcosm, a self-operating world that unfolds into multiple leaves, multiple stems, multiple flowers from a single organism. The strange multiplicity of the plant world becomes clear in Table 36, showing "Part of a Vine Branch cut transversly, and splitt half way downe the midle,"constructing an almost dizzying array of different perspectives.