JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2436

I must say that I rarely see a question mark in scientific illustration–there may be an enumeration at some point with a footnoted question or question mark, but very rarely in the illustration itself. (I cannot recall ever seeing a question mark on a printed map, by the way, even though for centuries there were plenty of blank spaces that were filled in with wind roses or compass roses or text or a cartouche or a decorative border of some sort–that, and flora/fauna both real and imagined, would serve to take up the insulting white space of unknown geography. But not question marks. No?)

And so here it is next to the spectra of a meteor, appearing as the illustrated plate in Alexander Stewart Herschel’s paper on meteoric spectra published in The Intellectual Observer for October, 1866. (A.S. Herschel [d. 1907] was part of the famous family of astronomers, with John his father and William his grandfather; he scoped out his own specialty in meteoric spectroscopy.)

And another detail from this beautiful illustration, this having nothing to do with question marks–it simply has a pre-modern non-representational art quality to it: 

[Source: Biodiversity Library, http://biodiversitylibrary.org/item/122029#page/185/mode/1up]

And the full plate:

And first page of text (you can follow the link above for the rest of the article):